Song Post – Page 9 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Sonny & The Sunsets’ “Androids” is a Modest, Indie Garage Folk Protest Song Against Ritualized Conformity

Sonny & The Sunsets, photo by Sarah Moore

With the title “Androids” you may not be expecting the folk-inflected garage pop song Sonny & The Sunsets have given us from the Self Awareness Through Macrame album that released on September 1, 2023. The bright accents in the jangle give it a physicality that gives its circular riffing some real momentum and at times it’s reminiscent of some of New Order’s more garage-y moments like “The Village” or like later period Beat Happening. But Sonny Smith’s words about wanting to be able to honest and comfortable in his truth and genuine feelings with another person give context to “Androids” as a symbol for how we so often have to be politic in life and adopt a depersonalizing presentation to fit in with a technocratic view of humanity that seems in place in so much of public life. So this song is about a quiet resistance and rebellion for one’s humanity in the face of the pressure to conform and become a product to be tweaked like, yes, some android. The rest of the record has similar expressions of moments of focusing and thinking about presumed norms and things we take for granted without ever examining whether they’re really of value or whether its more dead weight conforming impulses and ritualized behavior. Listen to “Androids” on Spotify and follow Sonny & The Sunsets at the links below.

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A Beacon School Coaxes Us Into Stepping Into Our Best Life With Effervescent Dream Pop Song “KITM”

A Beacon School, photo courtesy the artist

A Beacon School unfurls a swirling, kaleidoscopic melody to wash around the introspection expressed in “KITM” (which means keep it to myself). This finds entrancing form in the music video by Alex Beebe and Chase Wagner with illustrative colors, geometric shapes and spectral overlays and following some seemingly educational film footage about a variety of red flowers that grow on trees and bushes. But the colors are all otherworldly with the blues overwhelming the greens and the rose tones enhanced. We see an image of a boat coming into harbor in the night and hands placing tiles as colors switch and flash. It’s all very surreal yet oddly reassuring. The song is like if Animal Collective collaborated with Washed Out to make a tonally rich yet hushed shoegaze track. It teems with energy yet doesn’t overwhelm and because of that it invites an immediate re-listen. For a song that seems to urge you to stop procrastinating and take that next crucial step into a rewarding life it coaxes more than cajoles and that makes all the difference. The new A Beacon School album yoyo released on October 13, 2023. Watch the video for “KITM” on YouTube and follow A Beacon School at the links below.

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Shelf Lives’ Electro Post-Punk Song “Off The Rails” is a Short Course on Self-Deprogramming From Consumerist Psychosis

Shelf Lives start “Off The Rails” with a repetition of the line, “No fuckin’ way man” as the song careens into a glitchy, driving song that captures the headiness of the hypnosis in being caught up in a cycle of consumerism. Succinctly, Shelf Lives with the touches of distortion on the lead vocals and the frantic pace of the song and its urgent electronic melodies incisively outlines how consumerism can tap into basic human psychology and induce compulsive behaviors and manipulate the mind’s reward and punishment system at a basic level that’s provided and marketed to us as little things that we can buy as a seeming shortcut to fulfillment when it just isn’t. The chorus of “Can’t go off the rails now ’cause you’re none in a million” encapsulates how consumerism both controls and depersonalizes in equal measure with the corrosive nature of its inherent appeal as a tool of capitalism in a social and economic system that reinforces compliance on a nearly instinctive level. Shelf Lives in creatively delineating the dynamic point to how we can deprogram ourselves in first breaking the cycle of manufactured desire. Listen to “Off The Rails” by electro post-punk band Shelf Lives on Spotify and follow the group at the links below.

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&Tilly’s Video for New Age Dream Pop Single “In Circles” Transports Us to an Aquatic World of Tranquil Contemplation

&Tilly’s video for “In Circles” was shot entirely on iPhone but its color palette and textural detail looks like something that could be part of an A24 film set in parallel universe. We see a figure seeming to be floating on and in azure waters with visuals of luminous, aquatic invertebrates floating gracefully about and a shoreline of darkened trees. The music itself is elegant layers of processed piano, sublimely subtle guitar and ethereal percussive sounds and hushly melodious vocals. Perhaps even plucked violin to give it all an even more classical sensibility that lends the song a timeless aspect like something that could have come from a more pop 90s New Age alternative music realm for fans of Enya and Loreena McKennitt or newer artists like Cate Le Bon or Julia Holter. But &Tilly’s sound is also in the realm of dream pop but with more than usual mastery of sonic details masterfully orchestrated. Watch the video for “In Circles” on YouTube and follow &Tilly at the links provided.

Coworkers Exorcise the Inner Tension and Cognitive Dissonance of Striving to Thrive in Late Stage Capitalism on “Legwork”

The sense of building tension and being a the breaking point drives the first part of “Legwork” by New Orleans post-punk band Coworkers. Spiky guitar work and hypnotic repetition are the perfect framing for a song seemingly told from the perspective of a man who has tried so hard to fit in and to do what you’re supposed to do to earn acceptance by the powers that be, however low rent, and turning himself into what he thinks would garner him the recognition and rewards that in a more sane social and economic system he would have. But he knows it was all a waste of time and in the chorus there a touch of a desperate break and the emotions rage. The opening bass line and general tone of the song is reminiscent of The Fall’s “Bombast” but of course more manic and unhinged in a thrilling way. Most of us have had to go through the soulless motions of a job or social situation only to realize we’re not the special people who get all the rewards society has to offer and one of the only sane things to do is write a fun and emotionally explosive yet surreal humorous song about it. Listen to “Legwork” on Bandcamp and follow Coworkers at the links below.

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Laura Carbone’s “Horses” is a Pastoral Dream Pop Song About Connecting With Your Neglected Instincts For Personal Freedom and Dignity

Laura Carbone, photo by Thomas Von Der Heiden for Rockpalast in 2019

One imagines Laura Carbone doing slow turns in a desert landscape at sunset listening to “Horses.” Her more crisp vocals give way to ethereal, wordless singing like she’s matching the wind and contemplating the personal fortitude one must muster to stand up for oneself and envisioning how wild horses running free seem unconcerned with the unconcerned with arbitrary and internalized limits to their freedom. The melodies are pastoral and textural, unfurling slow and at their seeming leisure and yet they pull you into Carbone’s creative vision and ability to turn melancholic feelings into something more vivifying. Listen to “Horses” on Spotify and connect with Laura Carbone at the links provided. “Horses” will also be found on her forthcoming album The Cycle.

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Christopher Tignor’s “Off-Centered Hearts” is a Sublime and Stirring Performance of the Possibilities of Processed Violin and Electronics

Composer Christopher Tignor has made a name for himself as an electro-acoustic violinist who as a live performer has fused the aesthetics and live performance style of acoustic instruments with computerized processing and use of pedals. His 2023 album The Art of Surrender showcases the broad spectrum of his experiments in minimalism and the subtleties of musicianship and expression available once you open up the possibilities of modifying tone in real time and pairing it with unconventional rhythms and song structure. The single “Off-Centered Hearts” has the soaring melodies one might expect but Tignor angles the long themes of the song to come together in elegant dramatic convergences with the mood of the song augmented and anchored by electronic low end and steady, finely syncopated percussion. When the violin glides seemingly along in a space of cosmic background drones near mid-song it’s a passage of sublime contemplation that segues into a short moment of atonality and directly into lightly plucked and processed violin tones and reminds one of the creative potential of an instrument most of us think we have heard taken to its sonic limits already. Listen to “Off-Centered Hearts” on YouTube and follow Tignor at the links below.

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Bestial Mouths’ “Road of Thousand Tears” is an Orchestral Post-punk Song of Farewell to What Will Never Be Again

Bestial Mouths, photo courtesy the artist

The latest Bestial Mouths album R.O.T.T. (inmyskin) came out on August 11, 2023 via Negative Gain on digital and vinyl and, produced and mixed by Rhys Fulber of Front Line Assembly fame, it sounds like a new chapter for Lynette Cerezo’s songwriting. This is perhaps dramatically highlighted by the track that closes the album, “Road of Thousand Tears.” It mourns the losses of the world and of personal losses and trying to get back some of what you didn’t know you lost along the way as you make your way through the often rocky and challenging path of life. The song swims in expansive, ethereal synth melody and its processional pace is marked by electronic beats that splay in a crumbling distortion while maintaining a hypnotic cadence. In the music video Cerezo seems to be hanging out in the ruins of an old industrial town in the American West, all dry scrub and desert landscapes and the remains of buildings and railroads and of the skeletons of a once great world power. It’s like a post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy novel come to life and yet there’s a yearning in the mood of the song a hope for being able to reclaim what remains and make something of it whether that’s your life, your culture and/or your community, the seeds of that hope reside in the song and its slowly expansive dynamic and what initially sounds like a work of deep melancholy becomes more like the saying a goodbye to a difficult chapter of existence and working toward what must come next but not before mourning what will never be again. The song and the album has features of the darkwave and post-punk sounds of previous Bestial Mouths releases but also a way of songwriting that feels markedly different and new. Watch the video for “Road of Thousand Tears” on YouTube and follow Bestial Mouths at the links provided.

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Freedom Fry Tells Us to Live Our Best Lives In This Moment Because We Can if We Just Say “YOLO”

When Freedom Fry takes us into “YOLO” it feels like we’re going on a flight with the duo somewhere. That ascending non-musical tone just has that vibe like you’re about to step onto a fast moving airplane to adventure. And the tropical percussion accents and retro synth pop melodies mixed with what might be described as summery melancholic pop. The title suggests a foolhardy sentiment of gusto but the lyrics tilt that spirit in a positive and self-affirming direction by pointing out how there is only living and the alternative and that mistakes and fear of them are unnecessarily stumbling blocks that you can get past with ease as long as you keep your focus on living the kind of life you want excepting perhaps if that means dire consequences for others but most of us don’t have to tangle with such potential quandaries and adhere to arbitrary social bounds implanted by us in our own minds to prevent us from living life as fully as we can in the moment. Listen to “YOLO” on Spotify and follow Freedom Fry at the links provided.