As a band steeped in the rose tint of the early 90's, the references to a collective history we all hold fondly are intrinsic to Frontier Ruckus' songcraft. The band embarked upon a trilogy of records surrounding these themes of place: the rust of a Midwestern suburbia anywhere and the edifice of those oft crumbling surroundings baked with the deeply passionate memories they evoke. The Orion Songbook (2008), Deadmalls & Nightfalls (2010), and Eternity of Dimming (2013) served as a trinity of sorts to the gravity of those View-Master cartridge visions. In listening one clicks thru song-slides of Matthew Milia's densely worded sermons, if you will, belted and cooed with a timbre that is full and fragile all at once, held together with netting from long-time friend David Jones' angular banjo throes, and fleshed out by a thick quasi-orchestra of brass, chord organ, and saw by Zachary Nichols. Long-time vocalist Anna Burch returns to touring with the band, providing a honey-sweet gelatin that firmly bases yet sets each song into a full-throated fire. Time has settled things, the fossils of those first records remain, but a new rolling house has been built upon it by the band, as if pulled from show to show, tour stop to tour stop. Milia and company aren't stopping. There's some place to be. Now 6 years on from their first full length, lauds from NPR, Paste, Rolling Stone, and Daytrotter in the rear-view, and remnants of tours to Europe and each corner of these United States scattered in fanny-packs and hollow-body guitar cases, Sitcom Afterlife, set to arrive November 11th, 2014, speaks with a more compact and frontal approach. In these new songs Frontier Ruckus isn't retreading those two-lane highways they've came on, but leaning forward - there's a structured forward motion to this collection, a sense of urgency toward the present, and a brevity that speaks of immediate passion - not disregarding that lived-in past but also not forlornly dragging it behind this shiny-new Airstream trailer that is Sitcom Afterlife. RIYL: Horse Feathers, Okkervil River, Wilco