Artist:     Fastball

Album:     The Help Machine

Label:     33 1/3

Release Date:     10.18.2019

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Confronting mortality and troubling existential questions, the inscrutably poignant title track to Fastball’s seventh album, The Help Machine, is a strange and glorious wonder. Softly thrumming and throbbing along, with sudden dramatic swells, washing cymbals and a pleading chorus, it trails off at one point repeating the words “spend my life just chasing money” as if resigned to a sentence of never-ending spiritual poverty.

That something so experimental could release such warm-blooded and unexpectedly strong emotions is truly remarkable. Its humanity washes over these proceedings. Wilco accomplished similar minor miracles with its album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that The Help Machine is in the same league. As the rousing, up-tempo country rock of “The Girl You Pretended to Be” steps lively with a catchy, sunny gait, episodes of moody immersion arrive with the rippling, languid mystery of “I Go South” and the slowly exploding wave of dark noir that is “Surprise Surprise.” They are siren calls to rocky, treacherous shores, just as the lush, twisting pop currents of an overcast “Friend or Foe” and the intoxicating rush of “All Gone Fuzzy” have an affecting and irresistible pull. They are all products of ingenious and sublime creativity.

Blessed with two ace songwriters in Miles Zuniga and Ton Scalzo, Fastball has been crafting indelible pop-rock earworms with uniquely accessible melodies and clever hooks since forming in the mid-1990s and then flowering commercially with the 1998 smash hit LP All the Pain That Money Can Buy. Only fate will decide if they have more enduring and massively successful singles like that record’s “The Way” and “Fire Escape” in them. “White Collar” could break through, with its bittersweet, desert-rock charm, sighing harmonies and rolling beds of organ and piano all cogs in The Help Machine, produced as a series of lovely, ambitious aural adventures by Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin.

It’s interesting that Scalzo allowed Bruce Hughes, formerly of Cracker and Poi Dog Pondering, to take over bass duties, leaving Scalzo free to engineer new and interesting guitar and keyboard designs on The Help Machine. That might explain why much of Fastball’s newest effort, the successor to 2017’s Step Into Light, sounds so fully realized and diverse, as evidenced by the positively sinful burlesque shuffle and swagger of “Redeemed” and the gentle Spanish massaging of the rapturous closer “Never Say Never.” Maybe it’s time to stop thinking of Fastball as a lovable power-pop underdog and appreciate their artistic sophistication.

-—Peter Lindblad