When Corin Tucker, Peter Buck, Kurt Bloch, Scott McCaughey, and Bill Rieflin decided to make a record together, the result was never going to be ordinary. Five veterans with combined credits spanning Sleater-Kinney, R.E.M., The Fastbacks, Young Fresh Fellows, The Minus 5, and King Crimson, Invitation is the debut from a supergroup that plays like a genuine band rather than a collection of assembled parts, restless and playful and clearly having a great time. Across 12 songs the album works through a flurry of moods and styles with the ease of musicians who have spent decades learning to trust their instincts. Buck's love of Television surfaces in the intricate guitar knots and herky-jerky propulsion of "Windmill." "Second Life" blends '60s downer vibes and rootsy rumbling into something marvelous and unhurried. "Come Back Shelley" is pure swagger and glitz, a lost glam rock 45 that sounds like it was pressed in 1974 and buried in a crate until now. Tucker's voice remains one of the most distinctive and powerful in rock, and it anchors the whole collection with a presence that elevates every room it enters. The album is genre-agnostic in the best possible way, treating the full breadth of rock music's history as wet clay to be shaped however the song demands. Bubblegum pop, post-punk angularity, Southern roots rock, and glam showmanship all show up without announcement and disappear just as naturally. The result is a debut that sounds like a band that has been playing together for years, because in a sense, in all the ways that matter, they have been.
