Too rough for country and too country for punk. Stylistically that’s not a first, even discounting cowpunk and adjacent cosplay. Country Teasers, Gibson Bros. and Jon Wayne dipped their beaks in similar waters, but their drink was something different – more kitsch at times and transgressive at others.
Workers Comp make songs, not a charade. You won’t necessarily find members donning a Stetson or Nudie wear, but of course, it’s a free country.
I’ve been enamored with the band since streaming its first cassette release, “One Horse Pony,” from 2022. For comparison’s sake, Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” would channel the ire of class struggle the following year with hamfisted remove, and continues to stir a large audience. But that song doesn’t hold a flick of the Bic to the workaday lament and humane power of Workers Comp’s “When I’m Here” or “High on the Job,” which bookend their debut.
Written by primary songwriter and current Baltimorean Joshua Gillis (a former Tennessean and original Detroiter) while he was employed as a janitor, the songs are graced with some of the best bumper sticker quips since Virginia’s greatest gift to verse (and choruses and bridges, too) David Berman, complete with a nod to his band Silver Jews on “When I’m Here”:
It feels like Music O’Clock
Whenever I pilot my mop
down a hallway at the bottom of the sky
and won’t nobody slip
when the jingle on my hip
rains a blue arrangement on the pain of passersby
“I would just have to sweep a lot, and mop a lot,” Gillis recalls on a conference call with Style Weekly and the rest of the band. “It was so boring that I remember constantly working on the songs by singing them in my head. Gradually trying to ad-lib.”
This penchant for nurturing a creative impulse on the clock has always been something he’s done. “Growing up I worked at a pizzeria and if the boss saw a drawing at work, he would view it as proof of stolen time. He was very hostile towards art,” Gillis says. “I interpreted that as a challenge to try and find a way to make art when I was at work.”
Workers Comp is a labor of love, as is the case with many musicians and artisans of every feather. Gillis hoped the band would be productive enough from its first practice to warrant bassist, Luke Reddick, and drummer, Ryan McKeever’s hour-plus commute from their respective Washington, D.C homebases. “I felt like I would be wasting their time if there wasn’t something to show for them coming out here,” Gillis says.
As a result, they kept a four-track at the ready. Fortunately, Reddick and McKeever were happy with the results and kept coming back. “We would try to just record one song, and then we would order pizza and drink a bunch of beers,” Reddick reasoned. “I think it was worth the drive, and [Gillis] bought the pizza too, so that was helpful.”
Three cassette releases later (on Gillis’ Glad Fact imprint) without a single show, I didn’t think I’d ever see Workers Comp in concert until last December and their live debut in Richmond at OSB.
“It was just an accident that the first show happened there, but it was the happiest accident you could ask for,” Reddick says. “Brendan [Reichhardt], who played on a bunch of the songs on the record, and is a good friend of all of ours, lives in Richmond. And, I don’t know, my brother lives in Richmond,” he adds, as if reaching for more rationale. “I’ve always really liked it.” Gillis is more expansive on the matter: “Virginia was my favorite colony, if I’m being candid, growing up. Absolutely. It felt like a noble colony for some reason, it just had this air about it that I liked.”
On the heels of Workers Comp’s self-titled LP (Ever/Never Records) the band is returning to Richmond supporting The Sheaves (closely studied acolytes of The Fall, on tour from Phoenix, Arizona) and locals, Ultra Bleach, at Banditos’ iconic Diablo Room this Thursday, July 18. The album serves as a Workers Comp comp, collecting their output along with a previously unreleased song written by McKeever. Maybe it’s the band’s collaborative DNA, but the album escapes lazy classification in favor of a constellation of moments rendered in vast sounds and a life’s worth of mixtapes and mood boards. After all, it’s all work — on the clock or not — and it all works here for the adventurous listener, whether they’re tapping Guided By Voices or Crazy Horse or something lost or archaic. This is the creative process put to song and captured on tape, to share. It’s cosmic, but also utilitarian. Intimate, but also relatable. Classic, and also of the day.
McKeever sums it up before jumping off the call: “Workers Comp is a band of lived experience. Jot that down.”
The Sheaves perform with Ultra Bleach and Workers Comp at Bandito’s Burrito Lounge on Thursday, July 18. Doors at 7 p.m. $10.
