Adam Ostrar - The Worried Coat

Adam Ostrar is a parent, maybe just like you, that worries about the world his kid is inheriting. He’s anxious about the damaged and ravaged U.S.A. and so are the narrators on his most recent album, The Worried Coat. 

Originally released in 2019 as the last album out of the chute on a label that folded up shop, The Worried Coat effectively went out of print after tours that year with Jerry DeCicca and Simon Joyner. Keeled Scales is proud to re-introduce The Worried Coat by bringing it back into print on vinyl and digital streaming services on October 1, 2021. 

With earworm lyrics like “They give you what you want, but they take it back,” an album like this might be called a "dystopia." Ostrar weaves together disparate voices. There’s no good guys or bad guys, no red or blue. These are twelve narratives on otherness, self-identity, and our personal relationships with anxiety. How we often betray our best intentions through willful ignorance. 

Each of these characters wears a different hat: In “Alex the Cretin” you hear the evangelical snake-oil salesman high on Rundgren; “Bloody Waves” is the bossanova buoy of a refugee’s displacement; in “Kansas City,” we hear Kevin Ayers as Joe the Plumber looking backwards on his false nostalgia; “Stormed the Beach” is the sound of Cluster employed by Greenpeace; “Walk the Savages Home” is the gurgle of nativism and corruption; And in “Morning Said,” Ostrar drops his tuning down to D to play pre-Page riffs while speaking to our forgotten good intentions.

“Ostrar’s personal pantheon is inhabited by great guitarists and subtle pop architects, and he invokes the with a deft mixture of instant recognition and subtle revision…Manages to merge Nick Drake and Jim Croce so deftly that you can’t quite tell how he did it” was how Dusted Magazine described the record upon its initial release.  

This is Ostrar’s second solo album, the follow-up to 2017’s Brawls In the Briar. Before that, he led the late 90s/2000s shag-carpet art-punk of Manishevitz, an early Jagjaguwar band that toured with The Mountain Goats and Edith Frost and which Pitchfork described as “vital and provocative, lyrically and musically, and it reveals itself further with each subsequent listen.”

Recorded in part in Mexico City courtesy of cult band The Moles' unused studio time, and finished at a ranch in Arizona, Ostrar wrapped and warped his Gretsch Country Gentleman guitar around these nuggets of capitalistic despair, cretinism, gaslighting, nationalism, nativism, false heroism, and that good-time tug-of-war (psssst, this game is rigged) called Inherited Wealth vs. Inherited Debt. But he wasn’t alone in making this album. He brought along Michael Krassner (Boxhead Ensemble, Lofty Pillars), Wil Hendricks (Califone, Simon Joyner), and Stephen Patterson (Hamilton Leithauser, White Rabbits).

Adam currently teaches guitar via Zoom and waits for the right time to tour again.