''Onion'' is the fifth

studio album An album is a collection of audio recordings issued on compact disc (CD), Phonograph record, vinyl, audio tape, or another medium such as Digital distribution#Music, digital distribution. Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early ...

by American band Shannon and the Clams. It was released on February 16, 2018 under Easy Eye Records. The album was partially inspired by, and pays tribute to, the 2016 Oakland

Ghost Ship warehouse fire The Ghost Ship warehouse fire was a fire that occurred in a former warehouse in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland, California, that had been converted into an artist collective with living spaces. The fire occurred on December 2, 2016, at ...

Production

The album was recorded over a ten day period in January 2017 at producer

Dan Auerbach Daniel Quine Auerbach (; born May 14, 1979) is an American musician, singer-songwriter, and record producer, best known as the guitarist and vocalist of The Black Keys, a blues rock band from Akron, Ohio. As a member of the group, Auerbach has ...

's Easy Eye Sound Studio in Nashville, Tennessee.

Release

Shannon and the Clams announced the release of their fifth studio album on December 7, 2017.

Music videos

On December 8, 2017, the music video to "The Boy" was released. Directed by Ryan Daniel Brown, it features vocalist Cody Blanchard travelling along a country road. Andrea Domanick from

Vice A vice is a practice, behaviour, or habit generally considered immoral, sinful, criminal, rude, taboo, depraved, degrading, deviant or perverted in the associated society. In more minor usage, vice can refer to a fault, a negative character tra ...

said the song is "a sparkling, hook-laden track that immediately gets under your skin with its wall-of-sound chorus, rife with crisp guitar strums, cascading riffs, and raw harmonies led by vocalist-guitarist Cody Blanchard." On February 1, 2018, the second music video "Backstreets" was released. Blanchard explained the song: "It was one of the last things we wrote for the record. It had a completely different hook at first and nobody liked it except our keyboard player Will prottand we tabled it, but Will saw promise there and really wanted it to make the album. At the final rehearsals before leaving for Nashville, he suggested we just keep the verses and mash the song together with this other glammy hook I had written (the half-time ‘takin’ the backstreets…’ part) that needed verses to go with it and we all loved the weird combo."

Critical reception

''Onion'' was met with "generally favorable" reviews from critics. At

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

, which assigns a weighted average rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, this release received an

average In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7, ...

score of 81 based on 8 reviews. Aggregator Album of the Year gave the release a 71 out of 100 based on a critical consensus of 7 reviews. Mark Deming of

AllMusic AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the databas ...

said of the release: "Onion is mature and contemplative compared to Shannon & the Clams' earlier efforts, but it's music that comes from a place of celebration and love, and these songs will make you dance and sing along". Hal Horowitz from American Songwriter gave the album four out of five stars, explaining "The 13 tracks sprint to a conservative 42-minute finish and the styles, although clearly retro, are varied enough to make the set seem even shorter. The production is sharp, focused and plays to the band’s strengths without seeming clichéd or a parody of the classic pop the band obviously idolizes."

Track listing

References

{{Authority control 2018 albums