Stream Owen’s Emotion-Wracked Album ‘L’Ami du Peuple’

Owen
(Photo by Shervin Lainez)

“I got high with an art teacher of mine,” Mike Kinsella’s latest album as Owen, L’Ami du Peuple, begins. Due out July 2 via Polyvinyl, the Cap N’ Jazz, American Football, and Owls affiliate’s new record mixes the kind of disarming intimacy and art-stained craft on evidence in that opening line. Advance track “Bad Blood” is a crunching, lightly country-inflected confrontation with one’s family tree, capped by a searing guitar solo. The rest of the album further broadens Kinsella’s singer-songwriter with electronic tones, stomping drums, strings, and female vocals. By the end, he’s wondering aloud: “How long have I been sleeping? / I’m a dad and my dad’s dead.” Owen’s gentle musings are personal, but they’re not exclusionary; the album title, the name of a newspaper during the French Revolution, means “friend of the people.”

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