Total Disarray [Vinyl]

Quaker Wedding’s second LP Total Disarray is a pandemic record, but not in the ways you might expect. Sure, there are songs like “Russian Hill” about a desire to escape the band’s home of New York City. But the pandemic also led to bassist and songwriter Marco Reosti temporarily living in his hometown of Detroit during the summer of 2020. Spending time in Detroit exposed scars from a painful divorce that Reosti had thought had mostly healed. Songs like “Vintage Dress,” which opens the record with a guitar sound reminiscent of Jawbreaker’s Dear You, pick at those scars, leaving them bare for all the world to see. “Woodbridge” similarly came from being in Detroit, realizing how difficult it is to return to a city you left behind. As the summer ended Reosti returned to New York armed with a new batch of songs and began working on them with drummer Dan Edleman and guitarist Ryan Felton. After months of practice, the band started recording in the spring of 2021 with John Meredith, who also recorded the band’s first record, 2020’s In Transit. Ultimately, the finished product is a statement of how fragile our lives can be and how quickly it can all fall apart.