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Was there ever any doubt they'd be back? That's the only question to consider when listening to Roadside Graves' Acne/Ears -- their first long-player in four years.

As aspirations go, every band would love for music-making to be a full-time endeavor. But as realities set in, most bands live parallel lives: There's the music, life as a band, the thing that for listeners might as well exist independently of anything real. And then there's everything else. Jobs and relationships and the trying… the trying to settle into the lives that the rest of us do. Eventually, something is compromised and one of those lives wins out. Most usually, it's the latter. For the Graves, moving past 15 years as a band -- not middle-aged by any means, but no longer young -- there are jobs and families and all the rest. They're teachers. They're married. They're dispersed across states and countries. If that's face value -- and taking things a that -- then the answer to that question could be… sure, there was some doubt. That would be the incorrect answer.

That's important for two reasons. More generally, this is a band with consistently great work that just isn't going away, the kind of band whose output will surely be discovered and rediscovered for years. More specifically, Acne/Ears is evidence of the fight that's kept them going. Not the fight for success or to "make it" as a full-time band. But the fight against the self -- against doubt, growing through and beyond experiences, the occasions where those parallels synapse with conflict.

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