Because behind the songs, it’s really a slender book of short stories—written by different writers, but all about the same fucked-up shithole of a town. In which a handful of broken people drift through bad jobs and worse relationships, shielding old bruises and avoiding eye contact while privately nursing the last couple ambitions nobody’s figured out how to beat finally out of them.
Merlin Mann, writing here about The Wrens, craftily decants the near-crippling heartbreak of my small town.