“hidden in plain sight (walked away)” is the title track to the debut album hidden in plain sight by Boise, Idaho-based guitar rock band Chief Broom. The album represents well the legacy of the late Tanner “TJ” Tuck, the group’s gifted and imaginative drummer who tragically passed away due to a fentanyl overdose on June 11, 2021 at age 22. This song showcases the broad sweep of Chief Broom’s sound from angular post-punk and post-hardcore to jazz flourishes with a through line of a chiming and deeply melancholic melody around which the song fragments and distorts in a swell of emotion with lyrics that seem to be about struggles with substance abuse and the betrayals that can happen in a social circle that help to keep people strung along and the conflict that often results when people are tangling with these issues especially when someone wants to get away from it all. The song has a sonic complexity that hits with a desperate energy and crushing simplicity and intensity of expression that is reminiscent of early post-rock bands like Slint and later hardcore inflected post-punk artists like Pink Reason. It has that level of deeply imagined and felt songwriting that sticks with you and is impossible to pigeonhole because in the making the music the musicians aren’t limiting themselves to genre tropes. The album was many years in the making due to personal issues dating to before the death of TJ Tuck and exacerbated with his passing and perhaps finding the very idea of mixing and mastering the music and giving it concrete form for the world to hear a painful endeavor but fortunately the legacy of the drummer and his bandmates was honored with the release of the album on September 28, 2023, what would have been TJ Tuck’s twenty-fifth birthday. Listen to “hidden in plain sight (walked away)” on Spotify and follow Chief Broom at the links below. The record is available on digital, cassette and limited vinyl editions via Mishap and Earth Libraries.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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