While the name "pug" generally inspires images of excitable canines, Joe Pug's second album Messenger is of a decidedly more melancholy nature. His 2007 debut EP, Nation of Heat, was a tribute to the trials of quarter-life-crisis sufferers full of fierce guitar strums and harmonica riffs. Though not a total miss, Pug's second album lacks [...]

Social commentary, especially in music, is a tricky act: too blunt, audience rolls its eyes; too fine, audience scratches its head. "Whitman once explained that poetry's not supposed to confuse people," Joe Pug–local boy and folk icon-in-waiting–said in an interview last summer. At the same time, musicians that merely trot out talking points or shout [...]