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Queen City Sounds Podcast S3E07: Charming Disaster

Charming Disaster is a “goth-folk duo” comprised of Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris based out of Brooklyn, NY that has since 2012 written high concept songs that explore themes of human exploration of the natural world and the ways our attempts at explaining the world and our lives weave their way into culture in fascinating ways that are often hidden from contemporary society. In its songwriting Charming Disaster uncover these secret and often merely neglected connections and turn those paths of curiosity into fascinating narratives for its body of work. The project’s latest album is Super Natural History, a musical cabinet of curiosities in which each song is a curio and oddity of our collective mythological heritage in the form of stories of witchcraft, monsters and the underworld and where our ideas of magic and science intersect in alchemical fashion. The music is rooted in a sense of wonder and strong songcraft that renders the sometimes unusual subject matter accessible and immediately relatable.

Listen to our interview with Charming Disaster on Bandcamp, listen to Super Natural History below where you can also purchase the album digitally, on CD or vinyl on the group’s own Bandcamp site and follow the adventures and exploits of Charming Disaster at charmingdisaster.com.

HEAR ME OUT Leans Into the Ebb and Flow of Powerful Feelings While Processing the Experience of Abuse on Post-punk Song “Meaning Less”

HEAR ME OUT delves into a complex emotional space on “Meaning Less.” Its gentle guitar work, often like glimmerings of tone on the edge of the song, spare but strong percussion propels the song along as the vocals shift from introspective tones to a swell of emotion like you might when thinking back to the ways you’ve been treated and mistreated as suggested in the song where it sounds like someone who was used and abused for their body with their humanity discarded and the way that experience can stick with you even after you revisit it in your mind, even if you write a song or make a creative work with that energy behind it and informing its creation. But this song that seems equal parts post-punk and indiepop feels like a moving through those feelings to the other side of personal grief. Its blend of tenderness and intensity is reminiscent of the likes of Porridge Radio and leaves one feeling exultant in the moment rather than defeated. Listen to “Meaning Less” on Spotify and follow the German band HEAR ME OUT on Instagram.

Anna Rose’s Majestically Vulnerable “Pray To The Trees” is Song of Reclaiming Your Dignity and Strength in Challenging Times

Anna Rose brings to “Pray To The Trees” a sense of intimacy and mystery. Following the spare opening of minimal guitar accompaniment, Rose’s warm and clear vocals shine through a menacing soundscape of processional rhythms and roiling, ambient noise that borders on the industrial. Burbling, chaotic synth in the background at one point sounds like systems breaking down as the song transitions back to the vulnerable and unadorned passages of music with Rose’s vocals becoming more impassioned as she sings about not being someone’s savior and that that person is their own. This after showing her own vulnerabilities and words about being “broken in places I can’t talk about” and “pills I’ve taken to carry the load.” And having “questions worth asking when you’re on your knee, pray to your god, I’ll pray to the trees.” It’s a song that feels weighty and existential suggesting that we all have burdens and demons and limitations but we are perfectly capable of working through these issues while making our way in a troubled world and that you’re never completely on your own in feeling the pressure and looking for a source of strength outside of yourself in the most pressing of times. Listen to “Pray To The Trees” on Spotify or any of the services from the LinkTree below where you can listen to the rest of the Already Gone EP (released June 29, 2023) and follow Anna Rose at the links provided.

Where to Stream “Pray To The Trees”

Anna Rose on Facebook

Anna Rose on Twitter

Anna Rose on Instagram

Anna Rose on YouTube

annarosemusic.com

DeFi Rock Band’s “Funny Things” is a Sweet and Gritty Love Song of a Garbage Man for an AI Cyborg Girl

“Funny Things” by DeFi Rock Band is a song about the love of a city garbage man for an artificially intelligent cyborg girl. Which could be merely gimmicky but there’s something charming about how the song’s driving, grunge-y guitar riff with the steady percussion carries the intentionally gritty lead male vocals and the processed voice of the cyborg as they harmonize in the most unconventional way you’re likely to hear in a song for awhile. Little pulses of synth accent the song all the while and the melody is reminiscent of something out of early punk as influenced by 1960s girl groups. It shouldn’t work, or it should fall apart at some point but just like a near future of decayed civilization and a hodgepodge of technology and street level existence that is going to be there no matter what the tech bros in their pampered and fragile towers of privilege insist is the manifestation of their detached dreams of posthuman existence. Listen to “Funny Things” on Spotify and follow DeFi Rock Band from Barcelona, Spain at the links below.

DeFi Rock Band on YouTube

DeFi Rock Band on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S3E06: Isadora Eden

Isadora Eden started as a solo project in a more indie singer-songwriter vein but even the early releases were imbued with an imaginative flair and an ear for deeper emotional coloring. As Eden brought on board collaborators to help flesh out the sound in the newer songs she was writing the music evolved into a darker, more sonically rich sound that was a bit more like something one might expect to hear from a songwriter like PJ Harvey or Mary Timony but more darkwave, more flourishes of atmospheric sounds both guitar-rooted and electronic akin to the stranger end of shoegaze. This creative period has resulted in one of the more fascinating records of 2023 in forget what makes it glow, the debut full-length for the project. Eden’s deeply evocative voice guides you through an introspective set of songs that are melancholic, reflective and in the end cathartic. Like the kind of dream pop record with some grit and edge, willing to wax noisy in moments as if to embody the way life and our subsconscious experiences are analog and meaningful, intimate, in a way pristine digital and curated experiences rarely are. The album will be available on vinyl and digital and for more information on finding group’s releases, social media and upcoming shows please visit the band’s website.

Listen to our interview with Isadora Eden and main songwriting partner and drummer Sumner Erhard on Bandcamp and catch one of the album release live shows listed below.

Thursday 7.13 w/Mystee and SGRNY at The Lair (207 ½ S. 3rd) 7 p.m. Laramie, WY

Friday 7.14 at The Lyric Cinema 7:30 p.m. w/Safekeeper, Elke and Mystee

Saturday 7.15 w/Pink Lady Monster and Deth Rali at The Marquis 7 p.m.

Queen City Sounds Podcast S3E05: Carl Baggaley of The Royal Arctic Institute

The Royal Arctic Institute, photo by Charlotte Hysen

The Royal Arctic Institute calls itself “an instrumental, post-punk, cinematic jazz quintet” and is currently based out of New York City. Its compositions strike one as soundtrack music for coastal noir with the hard to define sense that part of its sonic DNA is nearby large bodies of water and the ways sunrise and sunset ripple across the ocean. There is the mood of day into night as though the music was conceived and written for a time between an active workday and night time plans. The elegant melodies and percussion rise and resolve with an intuitive grace and evoke emotional states like the musicians have in mind creating imagery with luminous layers of tone and sonic shading. In 2022 the group released the From Catnip to Coma EP and in 2023 a companion EP From Coma To Catharsis perhaps charting and processing the long stretch of the early pandemic and its effects on life and the psyche. Both records were recorded and produced by James McNew of Yo La Tengo fame in the historic Neumann Leather Factory in Hoboken, New Jersey. The band consists of veteran musicians drummer Lyle Hysen (Das Damen, Arthur Lee), guitarists John Leon (Roky Erickson, Summer Wardrobe, Abra Moore) and Lynn Wright (And The Wiremen, Bee And Flower, Shilpa Ray), bassist David Motamed (Das Damen, Two Dollar Guitar, Arthur Lee, Townes Van Zandt) and keyboardist Carl Baggaley (Headbrain, Gramercy Arms) whose musical chemistry is obvious across the project’s recorded output. On August 4, 2023 Already Dead Records and Tapes will release a full length album on 12” LP vinyl of the two EPs combined as Catnip to Coma to Catharsis.

Listen to our interview with Carl Baggaley on Bandcamp and follow The Royal Arctic Institute at the links below.

theroyalarctic.com

The Royal Arctic Institute on Bandcamp

Kelly Garlick and Agnar Guide Us Through Nuances of Psychic Trauma on the Elegantly and Sensitively Composed Ambient Track “your progress”

Kelly Garlick, photo courtesy the artist

On “your progress” Kelly Garlick and Agnar truly dive deep into exploring in tone and texture the journey into the psyche of a person processing trauma whether of the kinds everyone experiences and/or more specifically the kind one imagines or knows directly of the agony of gender dysphoria. The sample of a male-sounding voice saying “In order for me to progress I had to shed everything I was, I had to be put through psychological torture in order to be seen as an equal as human, now I don’t think I can regain that part of me every again, just gone and I just wish I had my life back” in the first half the song is so haunting and poignant, vulnerable and real that pretty much anyone that has had to conform to some bizarre, arbitrary social and cultural standard and has had to work through it can identify with that sentiment. All around, the sounds of machinery run in the background, processed metallic sounds, sharp drones like distorted electronic wind, an assembling ambient circle of tone, abstract chimes in the near distance, shuffling, percussive sounds traversing in stereo effect, the sounds of an autoharp, field recordings of crickets and other animals near a body of water, acoustic guitar strumming in an informal rhythm giving an identifiable form to the emotional expression even as one feels the other emotions though they can be challenging to identify in standard language, glimmerings of bell tones. This array of sensory stimulation through pure composition of sources can be subtle and dazzling. Later in the track a female sounding voice says “and if I’m being honest I’m scared that I’m going to harm myself beyond repair” before the soundscape takes a turn for the darker with more industrial type moods and more menacing drones and tonal swells, gibbering voices echoing in reverse delay like an interdimensional creature in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, rippling repeating textural bubbling, panning sounds like machines speaking and then more melodic chimes at the end like the peaceful sound of a time of agony fading out. It’s a work with a lot of depth and emotional nuance that can really only be described in that impressionistic way and one worth revisiting as it articulates a challenging emotional and psychological space with elegant poetry of sound design and organic structure. Listen to “your progresss” on Spotify and follow Kelly Garlick on Instagram. Garlick recently released an excellent album Wild Goose Victim on Multidim also available to stram on the Spotify link.

The Salesmen Take Aim at the Injustice of America’s Egregious Economic Inequality on Psychedelic Prog Punk Song “From Behind”

The Salesmen, photo courtesy the artists

The Salesmen open “From Behind” with a vocal sample that sounds like something recorded in the 1940s or 1950s with an old man talking about a conversation he had with an “independent businessman” who complained about not being able to get poor people our narrator was saying he was trying to help and discouraging him from helping them. It turns out his so-called job paid $4 a day sunup to sundown and the narrator said it’s like slave wages and no wonder no one would work for him. But, really, isn’t that the kinds of conversations people have these days with massive income inequality hitting hard now but more like the famous frog example in systems theory but with the working class going back to the 1970s when austerity politics and economics began to be implemented in the banking and finance sector ahead of the Reagan administration and then accelerated over decades. So when the band kicks in with sounds like they grew up listening to a lot of weirdo art/progressive rock like Mr. Bungle and Frank Zappa alongside The MC5 and 1980s DC post-punk (i.e. Fugazi) it’s a fitting soundtrack to its lyrics about having to basically work yourself to death to survive often enough or certain not have enough time for yourself often enough. Certainly not many politicians are doing anything to put in regulations and corrections for this oppressive state of affairs like implementing modern monetary theory principles and putting in brakes on the accumulation of wealth and effectively ending the billionaire class with a robust return to anti-trust type of regulations put into place in the 1930s and 1940s including a full restoration of laws like the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. But The Salesmen in identifying some core issues with the song,and with the sample seem aware of American economic history, and setting it to the kind of psychedelic progressive punk on this song is more than a hint that people know that things have gotta change. Listen to “From Behind” on Spotify and follow The Salesmen at the links below.

The Salesmen on Facebook

The Salesmen on Instagram

JENTL Washes the Therapeutic Single “Better For Me” in Soulful Dream Pop and the Will to Change

JENTL brings a soulful introspection to his hazy pop song “Better For Me.” Accents of percussion and guitar touch at the edges of splashes of synth tone but the melody is ably carried by JENTL’s smooth vocals. He describes an immediately relatable feeling of how our own minds can sabotage our best intentions and instincts and reroute our energy into unproductive habits. JENTL questions the desire to get comfortable in the throes of a dysfunctional psychology because it inhibits the will to change. He ponders whether he’s a “good guy” but concedes “at least I try” and in that nugget of hope he finds the impetus to work toward behaviors and practices that are, yes, better for him. This deep exploration of personal accountability couched in lush atmospheres and luminous melodies just makes it seem like the best route overall and one that is easier than we might imagine when we’ve gotten comfortable with what are essentially self-destructive and soporifically twisted. This style of songwriting and purpose imbues the rest of JENTL’s new EP Terminal as well which released on April 7, 2023. Listen to “Better For Me” and the rest of the EP on Spotify and follow JENTL at the links below.

JENTL on Bandcamp

JENTL on Instagram

Richard Tripps’ Whimsically Dreamlike “Dog Days” Gives Us the Sounds of Life Outside the Endless Treadmill of Productivity

Richard Tripps, photo courtesy the artist

Richard Tripps’ ever so slightly husky voice lends an immediacy to “Dog Days” as he relates impressions of the end a time in life that feels comfortable and days pass at a leisurely pace because it’s too hot to do otherwise. But when that time ends, like a summer break or a summer vacation, you miss it a little and the people with whom you whiled-away the hours. Tripps expertly conveys that liminal moment. The percussion is light yet gives the song a vivid coherence. The synth, some of it sounding like a touch of Mellotron to give it a dreamlike haze, brings a charmingly whimsical spirit to the song and comes to the fore for an interlude before the outro. The song recalls the song “A Month of Sundays” by The Church from its underrated and top shelf 1984 album Remote Luxury and the way it conveys the way the relatively brief periods of leisure we get in life under the prevailing economic system allow us the time to stretch out our psyche to entertain the full feeling of life outside of the endless treadmill of productivity expected of us but which is antithetical to a full human life. Richard Tripps gives us a bit of that headspace with this song as well. Listen to “Dog Days” on Spotify and follow Richard Tripps on Instagram.