B-Side Guys

Sons of Town Hall have spent their whole career pretending to cross the Atlantic on a raft they built themselves, so a song called “Sirens” lands as the exact hazard their fictional voyage was always going to run into. Odysseus had to be tied to a mast; David Berkeley and Ben Parker wrote the encounter straight into the record.

The actual song stays quiet about it. Temptation and the pull of distant shores get carried by layered harmonies and restrained instrumentation, understated by design, which tracks with how the myth actually works: the Sirens never needed volume, only a voice worth chasing off course. Holding back the arrangement here does more work than a swelling chorus would, letting longing stay folded into the harmonies, never announced outright. It plays sad and moody without ever tipping into spectacle, romantic in the oldest, most dangerous sense of the word.

“Sirens” arrives as one chapter of “Of Ghosts and Gods,” an album the duo is releasing one song at a time inside their own comedy-fiction podcast, “Madmen Cross the Water,” which follows their in-character misadventures crossing the world. Temptation, here, functions as a plot point in a voyage the two of them have been narrating for a while now.

That whole project runs on a strange, specific commitment: threadbare Victorian coats, battered old Gibsons, two grown men playing shipwrecked travelers for a live audience. “Sirens” fits right into that same handmade mythology, sincere harmony wrapped inside a costume that never quite stops being a joke.