Birdie is the debut commercial album by Philadelphia based musical project Slaughter Beach, Dog. The album features Modern Baseball co-founder and co-front man Jake Ewald on vocals and lead guitar, Nick Harris on supporting vocals and rhythm guitar, Zack Robbins on drums, and Ewald’s former Modern Baseball bandmate Ian Farmer reprising his role as bassist.

Ewald and his bandmates began recording Birdie only months after Modern Baseball announced in early 2017 that due to emotional stress, the emo-folk pioneers would be going on an indefinite hiatus after 6 years.

Modern Baseball was founded by Jake Ewald and Brendan Lukens during their latter high school years in Brunswick, Maryland and served as a passion project for both of them. Now that the acoustic duo turned Philly punk scene legends have gone their separate ways, many fans wondered if Ewald would be able to evolve and adapt to the ever-changing east coast underground scene, and if he would continue to experiment and excel musically without Lukens at his side.

Birdie answers both of those questions with a resounding yes.

Birdie’s sonic direction is noticeably more restrained and more serene than much of Ewald’s previous work. The quietness and subtlety of Ewald’s guitar and vocal composition is a defining aspect of Birdie’s style, and is a stark departure from the grand, new-wave inspired anthems of catharsis that defined the final Modern Baseball album, Holy Ghost.

This change in Ewald’s compositional approach is best explained through a quote from an interview between him and Billboard, in which he stated “I think a big part of [the songwriting] was the way that I was actually writing songs, because I was living in my friend’s basement and I had just bought this really tiny acoustic guitar. Since I was trying to be quite a lot of the time — since I was writing songs in the basement — I focused way more on my singing, because I would have to sing so quietly.”

The production, however, can be inconsistent. The album was produced by Ian Farmer, a relative amateur in the field of mixing and mastering. As such, it remained to be seen how the production on Birdie would sound.

Fortunately, Farmer has proven himself to be a natural talent. Most of the album’s production feels airy, natural, and expansive, and warmly reflects the band’s instrumentation and arrangements. The tracks “Gold and Green”, “Buttercup”, and “Acolyte” come to mind as shining examples of Farmer’s production skills.

The drum performances are minimalist but very well recorded and stand out in the mix, Farmer’s own bass work sounds tight, warm, and independent, and all of the recordings are layered beautifully.

Unfortunately, Ewald’s lead guitar tone on the cut “Fish Fry” sounds overly compressed, and the hand strummed “thwacking” of the higher notes in the song can be headache inducing. Additionally, the track “Friend Song” is too noisy, underwhelming, and (again) overly compressed to fit with any other cut on the track list.

Lyrically, Ewald’s writing has evolved from the “love to hate you and hate to love you” letters that made up most of Modern Baseball lyrics, but not enough to be profound. The lyrics on Birdie can be best described as poems about photographs of people in Ewald’s life and the places they inhabit: an adolescent hideaway full of “porn and ICP CDs”, a bustling kitchen in a suburban home filled with relatives, a corner in downtown Phoenix occupied by “beat cops” and “beautiful women who work for the government.”

This approach is very aesthetically pretty and evokes a blissful sense of nostalgia, but Birdie’s deeper theme of balancing romantic relationships and family with constant touring and travelling are underwhelming; especially since every significant point Ewald makes about this topic on Birdie has already been said better on the Modern Baseball song “Mass” off of Holy Ghost.

Overall, Ewald fails to deliver on the singalong emo-folk anthems that Modern Baseball fans expected. In doing so, however, he has found his musical voice as a solo artist. Birdie is refreshing as it is distinct, and the amount of creative risks and heart that Slaughter Beach, Dog have put into their debut record makes it a must-listen for any emo revivalist fan.