Most ‘super-group side-projects’ only last for an album, and aren’t as good as the sum of their parts. Most concepts only last for a single record. Yet The Baseball Project, with not-one-but-two members of R.E.M. (Peter Buck & Mike Mills), plus man of many bands (including touring with R.E.M.) Scott McCaughey, The Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn, and drummer Linda Pitmon (also of R.E.M.-connected supergroup Filthy Friends), are now up to their fourth full-length about America’s pastime – dubbed Grand Salami Time!, of course.
Like with any concept album/band, and all of The Baseball Project’s output, it helps to be a baseball fan who knows the subjects that they’re singing about (see the album’s Wikipedia page for help). But also like all of The Baseball Project’s output, you don’t have to be a fan of the sport to enjoy the songs. Grand also has a diversity in indie-pop/rock sound that is indebted to the college radio of the eighties. There’s the killer rocker about erased Negro League great Josh Gibson, “Erasable Man”, but also the world-wise & -weary preceding ode to the “Journeyman”. Some of the subjects are obvious – it really took four albums for them to do a disco-beat number about the infamous “Disco Demolition”? Of course there’s a song about recent phenom Shohei Otani, “New Oh In Town”, and Salami ends with a tribute to the recently passed, greatest baseball announcer ever, Vin Scully, in the closing “The Voice of Baseball”. But nobody expected a sweet piece on the also recently passed José Fernández, “That’s Living”, or for a Rube Waddell name-check in “Screwball”.
As they round the bases, The Baseball Project have risen to unprecedented heights in their you-would-think narrow niche. But from this murder’s row of musicians, expect nothing less than Grand Salami Time!
