I should have no trouble meeting the word limit, reviewing an album with a title like It’s Never Too Late to Throw in the Towel, But It’s Always Too Late to Die with Dig?
All joking aside, …Die with Dig? is the second full-length offering from Alec Lang, a.k.a. Jung Min-Noh, and straightaway its name raises questions about intent and subtext. Why is the phrase “die with dignity” presumably cut short? Why is the statement posed with uncertainty? Is there a deeper in-joke, or is it more of a disorienting tactic, meant to put us on the backfoot right out of the gate?
It’s hard to say for sure. But those who appreciate words will value how the title works as a rhetorical framing device. As for the songs inside, they double down on this idea. Songs like “Crosshairs” or “Cannonball” actively challenge things like mythmaking and religious imagery, while a selection like “Nothing / Nowhere / No One” rejects any potential meaning altogether.
Though the tone and lyrical content here is dense and ambitious, the musical choices are sparse and understated. Produced by Charlie Cacciatore of Good Morning Midnight, he and fellow GMM member Sara Weiler provide lead and bass guitar backing on the album, with drumming by Des Moines’ Joryn Brown. The background arrangements gravitate around this bass, drum and guitar combo. Lang’s stark vocal delivery sits right on top, never “soaring” above the backing with any overbaked affectation. The words speak for themselves, often in a kind of Silver Jews or country-trio packaging.
“Skokie, IL” is a standout track. The song is a Midwestern slice-of-life portraiture with an upbeat backing. The first verse is basically a step-by-step TV dinner routine (“She scoops the chicken breast out of the can / into a pot of noodles that she mixes with her hands”) but then the chorus sits back and zones out to that television right along with its subjects. As this chorus repeats, a word or two is tweaked, and a deeper dissatisfaction is hinted at.
Lyrics like these remind me of a post-Pet Sounds Brian Wilson, interrogating the mundane with an uncommon attention to detail (see Beach Boys songs like “Busy Doin’ Nothin’” and “Little Bird,” for instance). For all of the album’s existential quandaries, Jung Min-Noh still intuits that the bigger picture is best understood through our everyday exhaustions and binges. Indeed: “You can see the whole world from Skokie, Illinois.”
Alec Lang also knows when to zoom out. The vocals in “The Big Goodbye” paint a surreal scene: this doomed parade of sorts, complete with cake, pie, a rogue agent shooting an angel out of the sky and the ensuing debris being swept out of the street. It’s Dylanesque; it’s an enigma. You’re left to pick up the shards of glass when you think to ask what it might mean.
It strikes me that Jung Min-Noh is unconcerned with tying up song meanings in a neat little bow. You are instead left with experience itself… statements become questions, questions cut short, but meaty guitars and the crisp crack of drums are still easy to latch onto. At the end of the day, that’s really all you need.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2026 issue.
