Song Post – Page 38 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Hoon Rage About Escaping Negative Attention and Abuse at the Hands of the Law on “ACAB”

A “hoon” is a person that drives a vehicle in a reckless and dangerous manner or simply a hooligan in general. Not necessarily a bogan but the identities aren’t mutually exclusive. So a band adopting the name HOON might embrace the terms the way punks did and to that effect the Australian band ahead of the release of its debut studio album Australian Dream has released the video for its song “ACAB.” It starts off with some choice graffiti imagery and gives way to a relentless and pointed fusion of punk and noise rock with the joy and menace intermingled. Bursts of distorted guitar splay and gouges of rhythm over the course of little more than two minutes like a deconstructed Dead Kennedys come up through the grunge era is the perfect setting for a song about what the title suggests. There are marginalized groups (ethnic minorities, the indigenous etc.) in most societies that garner attention from police forces by their very existence and anyone who has ever run afoul of the law often ends up in the system and it can be challenging at best to get out despite your best efforts otherwise and to avoid attention and abuse by the agents of enforcement. Channeling that frustration and anger into a song is a classic worldwide and Hoon’s song is an especially potent, cathartic and to the point example of that spirit. Watch the video for “ACAB” on YouTube and follow the band from Wollongong, Australia at the links below.

Paul Spring’s Cosmic Folk Song “Beetle on a Blade” is Meditation on the Interconnecting Cycles of Life and the Precious Fragility of Existence

The intricate guitar work of Paul Spring’s “Beetle on a Blade” fits well with the delicate flute work and the brisk pace of the track. The simple rhythm and percussion feels like the kind of pace one might count out for a campfire song if that campfire crowd included Emerson, Lake and Palmer. The song also has a quality that sounds like something one might expect to hear on a soundtrack to a movie about a medieval minstrel or troubadour. The lyrics seem to be a meditation on the nature of life cycles and cosmological time and how they intersect and influence each other as well as the precious fragility of existence as made poetically real to one by little details that strike one in moments when you have the time to consider deeper meanings beyond surface level experiences. As acoustic and organic as the music sounds its interesting to note that the pulsing beat is likely generated by an 808 rather than a traditional drum suggesting that the mathematical backdrop to the structure of the universe as we experience it interconnects the rhythms of music and the frequency of existence itself. Listen to “Beetle on a Blade” on YouTube and connect with Spring, collaborator with Mary Lattimore, Blackthought, Sasami and Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes as well as serving as lead singer of Holy Hive, at the links below. Spring’s album Thunderhead of which “Beetle on a Blade” released on December 16, 2022.

Paul Spring on Instagram

The Psychotic Monks Gives Form to Humanity’s Industrial Colony Collapse in the Thrillingly Clashing Noise Rock of “All That Fall”

The Psychotic Monks, photo courtesy the artists

The Psychotic Monks sound like they’re using the sounds of industrial civilization colliding and collapsing to craft the main riffs of “All That Fall.” You can hear bass but it’s so blunt in its pulse it’s like a machine sound too as are the accenting drums. It’s fitting given that the song sounds like it’s about the collapse of the the world we know. The stretching sounds and the vocals bordering on the chanting and ritualistic in the din of unfolding events as the whole big mess winds down into the first third of the song. But the song is nine minutes fifty-three seconds long and if this can be considered something like a post-punk noise rock song for those who want familiar frames of musical and aesthetic reference, something of that sprawl in length and structure is more in the art realm of that music. The middle of the song is quiet with widely splaying percussion and a sound like a huge metal can being struck periodically. As touchstones one recalls perhaps This Heat or Liars in its few concessions to conventional musical style and arrangement in favor of the more conceptual in its emotional expression of mood. This middle part of what might be considered a triptych gives way to a furious, industrious clash and wild distortions that endlessly escalate until hitting a plateau that fractures and not giving one much of a stable musical footing but all the more thrilling in its projection of unease and frustration and anxiety given a direct and dramatic sonic release like something one might more expect from a The Jesus Lizard record. Listen to “All That Fall” on Spotify and follow The Psychotic Monks at the links provided. The group’s new record Pink Colour Surgery drops on February 3, 2023 via Vicious Circle/FatCat Records.

The Psychotic Monks on Facebook

The Psychotic Monks on YouTube

The Psychotic Monks on Instagram

Bad Flamingo Tread Close to the Edge of a Good Time on the Fringe of Its Expiration Date on “Fiddle”

Bad Flamingo, photo courtesy the artists

It’s really astonishing how Bad Flamingo delivers such stylistic diversity across its prolific songwriting career. Always inventive, always incisive and creative lyrics. And “Fiddle” is no exception. Employing a simple acoustic guitar riff and narrowly executed vocals like a Laurel Canyon era song but written by Gordon Lightfoot it’s a song about opening oneself up to someone who isn’t so good for your life but who has an appeal that gets past your defenses and for a time you indulge their trespasses because there’s something about their energy you find enjoyable for the moment. The chorus lines with “right now just play me like a fiddle” suggest there is a complicity in and awareness of the manipulation to which one is allowing into your sphere but no guilt because “I wanna pin your clothes on the line, I want to pin your body under mine.” Our narrator of this story song is getting something she wants out of the situation and is willing to put up with nonsense until she’s through with it. We find out in lyric “giving you my hands, finger the middle,” surely a deft and creative turn of phrase, that even in the acceptance is a willingness to drop a fool when the time to move on arrives. Listen to “Fiddle” on Spotify and follow the talented duo of Bad Flamingo at the links provided.

Bad Flamingo on Facebook

Bad Flamingo on YouTube

Bad Flamingo on Instagram

badflamingomusic.com

Orbital Returns With a Spooky Yet Danceable Reworking of a Folkloric Childhood Pandemic Classic With “Ringa Ringa (feat. The Mediæval Bæbes)”

Orbital took an old pandemic classic “Ring a Ring o’ Roses” and set it to ultra modern electronic music with “Ringa Ringa (feat. The Mediæval Bæbes)” but with a music video that hearkens back to the era of the bubonic plague of the Fourteenth Century though the song has long been debunked as dating back that far or even to the Great Plague of England in the Seventeenth Century. It is nevertheless a haunting song with a modern resonance, in no small part due to the ghostly vocals of The Mediæval Bæbes, that Orbital and video director Luke Losey and producer Lindsey Bowden and the various collaborators brought to dramatic fruition. With plague doctors and animal-masked attendants, a ritual master and the figure of death the typically playful and luminously melodic music of Orbital is infused with a spooky energy that truly reinforces the haunted undertones Orbital seems to have intended. Watch the video for “Ringa Ringa (feat. The Mediæval Bæbes)” on YouTube and follow Orbital at the links below. The legendary UK duo’s new album Optical Delusion releases on February 17 via London Records.

Orbital on Facebook

Orbital on Instagram

McDead’s “Old Sparky” is Like a Modern Library Music Companion to a Retro Science Fiction Film

One might be excused for having a different set of expectations with the title of McDead’s “Old Sparky.” It’s not a nostalgic punk song or pop ballad tribute to an old pet or car. It’s like an alternative soundtrack to Fantastic Voyage and the sound of fluid churning and flowing around you as the spectral synth stream distorts and stretches in tone counted out by a simple melodic arpeggio that shifts throughout the trip. It all sounds bright and shiny and enigmatic. It has that library music quality and thus the vintage science fiction film soundtrack comparison and thus out of step with normal time as it was obviously crafted using modern methods yet captures the aesthetic essence of a bygone era. Listen to “Old Sparky” on Spotify and follow McDead at the links below.

The Deep Layers of Progressive Drone and Abstract Melody in YULYSEUS’ “In the Dark Palaces of Both Our Hearts” is Like a Shared Journey Through the Chambers of the Subconscious

For a full minute of YULYSEUS’ “In the Dark Palaces of Both Our Hearts” it sounds like you’ve woken up in an immense indoor space with the sounds of motion and life in the distance. But as the track progresses, abstract melodic drones ease in and more concrete if difficult to identify sounds that reveal themselves to perhaps be the squealing of a train on a track at a station, some steam letting out now and then. Like the vehicle just pulled in and waiting on you to stir from barely conscious quiescence to wakefulness. And the roiling arc of drones is on a slow ascent as though tracing the sunrise. Distant sounds and those more up close incandesce with a hazy resolve that recedes as the sound of the track takes on more clarity and a simple synth progression glimmers toward the end, traveling back and forth with a gently panning effect like the sensation of your brain emerging from the ethereal energy of dreams into a wakeful silence. It feels like a journey but one of subtle states of consciousness more so than any actual or symbolic and one that feels born of the mind incorporating physical sonic stimuli into the experience of the subconscious. Listen to “In the Dark Palaces of Both Our Hearts” on Spotify and follow YULYSEUS on Instagram.

SOMOH Helps to Untangle the Emotional Mess We All Often Find Ourselves Within on the Poignantly Heartfelt “I Know You Care”

With spare guitar work and introspective, up close vocals and minimal drums SOMOH starts off “I Know You Care” on a particularly vulnerable footing. But as the song progresses the musical elements swell up, joined by a wash of synth as the emotional arc of the song intensifies before dropping back to a quieter moment and building again. It’s an elegant song about heartbreak and compassionate frustration with great nuance in its simplicity. It expresses how when you’re hurt initially it’s hard to know what to say sometimes so it’s best to just feel and sort out the words as you go. The line “I know you care/But you don’t show it well” in the last half of the song encapsulates so poignantly and succinctly an emotional complexity and nuance that goes beyond the typical love song and heartbreak tropes and gets to the reality of what it can often be like to be in a real relationship with an actual human being who may not be equipped with all the emotional intelligence to react or behave in the ways one would hope with the typically limited set of personal skills we are encouraged to learn in many cultures. SOMOH singer and songwriter Sophia Mohan’s breathy vocals and way of diving deep into that tangle of feelings with a clarity of feeling truly helps to clarify what could otherwise be purely messy. Listen to “I Know You Care” on Spotify and follow SOMOH at the links provided.

SOMOH on TikTok

SOMOH on YouTube

SOMOH on Instagram

Abby T. Imbues “I Want It All” With a Sense of Mystery and Swagger

Abby T. accomplishes the rare union of mystique and swagger on her track “I Want It All.” The almost classical music structure of the songs and the plucked string sounds that mark the bars and sync well with the finely syncopated percussion help to give the vocal delivery a sense of the personal confessional, the aspirational and the dismissal of the ill intent of others with great finesse. She warns all comers to talk to her nice and not to talk with their eyes, advising them to look into some kind of therapy to get over hating what they like. Sounds like a more kind and clever addressing of misogyny than you typically hear in any song. But the core idea of the song is not being ashamed to want the good things in life:“I don’t want the fame, I wanna get paid, I’m not ashamed, I want everyhing.” In that line Abby T. speaks for many of us in articulating the fact that sometimes everything in that essential and meaningful sense is pretty realistic and not the mere survival we’ve all come to accept unless we were born to wealth. Fan’s of the imaginative beats and poetic imaginations of Doja Cat and Kari Faux will appreciate what Abby T. is putting out with this track. Listen to “I Want It All” on Spotify and follow Abby T. at the links below.

Abby T. on TikTok

Abby T. on Instagram

Heradel’s Intimate and Otherworldly “Mother” is the Pop Equivalent of a Space Rock Song

Heradel taps into multiple sonic and emotional resonances with her single “Mother.” The treatment on her vocals brings together a feeling of intimacy and the otherworldly. The rhythmic line, the bass, is like something out of a Fad Gadget song but the organic, percussive background sounds give the song a gently tactile feel that grounds its more ethereal drift and bursts of sounds that rise up to accompany the singing as it floats into luminous fades. In moments it’s reminiscent of Sinead O’Connor circa “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” but with the earthy alien vibe of late 90s Björk. It’s an enveloping piece of work like the experimental pop equivalent of a space rock song and not the kind of music one would expect from an artist with cultural roots in Cuba. Listen to “Mother” on Spotify and follow the Los Angeles and Havana-based Heradel at the links below.