Thomas Dollbaum: Birds of Paradise

There are moments in this album that make me very uncomfortable with myself and my feelings. And, yes, as an aging Gen-X dude I admit that our tough exteriors are just tough enough to cover that gooey center. Don’t you dare call us sentimental. But it is no secret that we are a generation for whom music can elicit emotions. Famously. Something about Dollbaum’s voice and whatever the heck bendy notes MJ Lenderman is playing on this album just hits me right in my masculinity. It doesn’t make me want to rage against the system of tear shit down, but it makes me wonder if a man’s voice and the timber of it can make me love. Love what? I don’t know. Just something lurking out there in the night.

It all starts for me on track two, “Dozen Roses.” A singer-songwriter from Florida of all places singing his version of alt-country / heartland rock meets indie rock. Which I realize is just where the easier listening side of my joy sits these days. Thank god folks like Thomas Dollbaum have jumped on that train, I guess. Don’t get me wrong, I still love me some off-kilter screaming and whatnot, but there’s just something about this rural slacker music that makes me almost yearn for a non-urban existence I’ve never actually lived. It’s half swampy river music and half lonesome desert tunes. An oddball mix considering his Floridian genesis and more recent connection to New Orleans. Not sure why, given that, there’s so much talk of coyotes and rabbits and scrub jays. And several direct references to the desert. It just somehow feels more Western in parts than Southern. I suppose I’m biased that way, originally being from the “West” myself, but his music is very Band of Horses coded, another band not necessarily from the West (Charleston, SC via Seattle) but feels at times very desert and Western US to me. Other than subject matter (talk of desert and the Great Salt Lake and whatnot), I can’t really say why, but it just is. It’s the great, open expanses the music embodies. The wilderness of it all.

But, yes, there are moments on this album that feel pretty traditional alt-whatever. Like track three, “Rabbits.” It kind of bops along in a manner that could be an Uncle Tupelo tune — or Son Volt, I suppose. But, honestly, I haven’t listened to a whole lot of either in a couple decades. That’s just to say that it sounds like what I imagine those bands that were on the cooler side of this genre music sounded like when the whole chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter of country and alt rock got themselves all tangled up and confused the hell out of those of us who considered a slide guitar and a little twang to be verboten. But then you roll into track four, “Coyote,” and I’m ready to pledge my life to this slightly darker version of that whole genre. And I admittedly love it. Goddamn, what has happened to me? The point is that Dollbaum paints a picture of a certain something. Lots of talk of animals and nighttime cross-state journeys. There may even be a song about Game of Thrones, but I may be seriously misinterpreting his whole “King’s Landing” thing. Suffice it to say that he has unlocked something in me and I can confidently say that this is one of my favorite records of 2026 so far. Trust me, nobody is more surprised than me.