Classic Rock
Pravda Records · 2 September 2026
“One Last Heist” runs 3:38 and sounds like the theme to a seventies cop show. Stace says that the first time he heard it on the radio the DJ called it a cross between a Michael Caine film theme and Steely Dan, and he’ll take it: the model was the CTI catalogue and the two volumes David Axelrod built out of Blake. What he picks out of the ending is Eddie Carlson’s bass.
The album was cut at Studio 1935, in Philadelphia’s Bok Building, with Carlson and drummer Stéphane San Juan playing in the same room. It’s a reaction against “Late Style” (2021), which the pandemic forced them to record apart when Stace and David Nagler had pictured something else. Nagler co-wrote all eleven songs and did the arrangements and the production.
The list of borrowed styles is long and it shows track by track. “Penelope” (4:45) has Stuart Bogie’s sax and a production that looks toward Gerry Rafferty. “Hanging Up The Sickle” (4:55) heads for Cuba, for mambo and cha-cha-cha. And “I Say Lots Of Things” (3:42) is a samba: Nagler started it Cuban and Stace pushed him toward Brazilian fusion, with Gustavo di Dalva on percussion. Joe Gore’s guitar turns up on four songs, and Stace tracked him down from a motel in San Diego, in the middle of a tour.
The pre-release copy sold an organ record. The organ doesn’t really show up until “Get It In Your Fingers”, the sixth of eleven, and it doesn’t stay long. The other problem is temperature: eleven songs, none over 5:38, all sung in the same warm mid-register at half throttle. So “Thoughts And Prayers”, the straight protest song, which the two of them left as a piano and synth ballad (they dropped the real strings because it felt like pleading for sympathy), ends up sounding as genial as the jokes.
Eleven songs, forty-six and a half minutes, Pravda Records, 2 September. The lyric to “Hello Dead Horse”, which closes the record in 2:36 with piano and whistling, was written thirty years ago and played live once with the Minus 5 in Seattle, to a different tune.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Enric Vilaplana