Garcia Peoples Tighten the Jams on 'Dodging Dues,' This Year's First Must-Hear Record

With all hands on deck and Matt Sweeney behind the boards, the New Jersey group serves a seven course delight.

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When you’re a sextet rolling with three guitarists that are constantly walking the line between indie and the jam scene, things shouldn’t go as swimmingly as they do for New Jersey’s Garcia Peoples.

The band’s first outing as a six-piece came on 2020’s Nightcap at Wit’s End, their fourth record in their three-year recording history, with the addition of bassist Andy Cush and keyboardist Pat Gubler taking Garcia Peoples to hazy new heights. Their latest, Dodging Dues, sees the band tightening up the runtime and spreading the wealth with Cush and Gubler writing and singing their own pieces in addition to the band’s traditional songwriting lineup of guitarists Danny Arakaki, Tom Malach, and Derek Spaldo. The result is a phenomenal record that manages to cover immense ground in a little over thirty minutes.

Perhaps no one is more qualified to steer this jam cruise than the legendary Matt Sweeney, who allows each member to breathe through his refreshing production choices. Most known for his six-string work, Sweeney lead the indie math rock band Chavez in the nineties and has played with everyone from Johnny Cash to Run the Jewels. Still, his brief time in the supergroup Zwan makes him the perfect candidate to let Garcia Peoples properly rip. There were other issues with Zwan, but none had to with the triple-guitar attack of Billy Corgan, Dave Pajo of Slint (the band that Black Country, New Road wants to be), and Sweeney.

Dodging Dues opens this new era for Garcia Peoples with “False Company,” a stomping Crazy Horse mountain jam built around drummer Cesar Arakaki’s steady hi-hat work and deliciously placed percussion accents. The back half of Nightcap at Wit’s End worked like any great second set with one song bleeding into the following, and Dodging Dues uses the same technique for the record’s a-side. “Cold Dice” touches on the stresses of our times, a continuous lyrical theme on the record, but the multiple movements of guitar interplay keep things light like something akin to Cass McComb’s Tip of the Sphere.

Cush’s bass seamlessly slides into “Tough Freaks,” a UK psych-folk number that allows for a belting chorus, as the band shouts, “sick of dodging dues, stop wasting all your time, higher pays the tool, never in my life will I trust fools.” What might have been one long song on an earlier People’s release, the trilogy concludes with “Stray Cats,” which stylishly builds on the previous song’s musical guts.

“Here We Are” is the record’s centerpiece, a serene eight-minute run whose atmospherics benefit greatly from Dan Iead’s guest appearance on pedal steel guitar. The last few minutes find the band leaning back into their jam roots, and it is a wicked payoff. Iead sticks around for “Cassandra,” another psych-folk number plucked straight out of the sixties, complete with flutes. The band saves their most rocking number for last with “Fill Yor Cup,” an uptempo song that allows each member to deliver another memorable performance for the record.

With the pace that Garcia Peoples record at, the band is probably already three concepts down the road from this record, but with Dodging Dues, there’s a real sense of a new phase for the band. By allowing each player to carve out their own piece of the pie, the group has avoided a jumbled mess and instead delivered their most accessible album yet. Finally, it’s a bummer the touring world is so up in the air at the moment because a live setting is where Dodging Dues begs to exist.

Dodging Dues is available now on No Quarter Records.

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