Queen City Sounds and Art

Von Pearl’s Ethereal and Intimate “Here” is an Ode to Emotional Resilience and Being Present

Von Pearl’s voice is vulnerable in its declaration of resilience in “Here.” She seems to be floating in a realm of tonal bubbles in the beginning of the song, a bright and vivid point in indistinct darkness. Then hand percussion comes in to beat out a simple beat and updrafts of melody soar with Von Pearl’s emotional outpouring, traced by violin figures. The song has an arc from a place where it seems like someone tried to undermine confidence but getting through that time and coming into one’s own and learning the truth of the situation and one’s own power makes it more challenging to keep that destructive and toxic situation going as it was and later in the song Von Pearl sings of being someone who can be an example to anyone that feels the need to live that way by shining a light of how it’s better to live with honesty and integrity and being present. The music is a lovely mix of the organic and the transcendent and humanized completely by the intimacy of Von Pearl’s delivery thus making an emotionally complex subject accessible. Listen to “Here” on Spotify and follow Von Pearl at the links below.

Von Pearl on Instagram

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Rare Monk Dreams of a Life Free of the Destructive Grind Culture of Modern Life on Psychedelic Pop Single “Missing Forever”

“Missing Forever” is a song in which Rare Monk utilizes the language of distorted and hazy, psychedelic folk pop, an ideal format really, to articulate a feeling most everyone living under late capitalism has experienced deeply at some point. In the music video we see what looks like Super 8 footage of a trip to a more or less endless expanse of nature in the wooded mountains with two humans and their dog, camping equipment ready for more than a mere vacation. Playing cards, clear waters, sun dappled skies. Great soaring melodies, ebullient and roaring song dynamics and propulsive, expressive rhythms that stretches the song beyond any specific subgenre and into pure mood, one of joyful liberation. The lyrics are a playful, day dream that evolves into a plan of escape sort of thing about needing some peace, needing a holiday, unlimited time and yes quitting one’s job and “go missing forever.” Even if that’s not ultimately realistic or viable for most of us and certainly not long term you can’t help but entertain such ideas because they are outside the thinking of a culture that insists you work yourself to death to be a “real” person and crave being “productive” all the time and for what? To not be able to afford housing, to pay too much for food and transportation and to have to have a subscription to everything, the complete erosion of public spaces and the encroachment upon the public sphere by oligarch bootlickers? That’s no kind of life. Forget quiet quitting, even a day or a week of a general strike would derail the system that keeps us down but until some kind of revolution seems possible there’s no harm in dreaming about turning off, tuning out and dropping out to “go missing forever.” Watch the video for “Missing Forever” on YouTube and follow Portland, Oregon’s Rare Monk at the links below. The song is from the forthcoming Coronation EP due out later in 2023.

Rare Monk on Facebook

Rare Monk on Bandcamp

Rare Monk on Instagram

raremonk.com

Lennie Rayen’s Visually Stunning Video for “A Fruit” Pulls You in For the Song’s Poetic Exploration of the Nature of Perception

The fantastical music video for Lennie Rayen’s “A Fruit,” the first single from her upcoming EP, as filmed and edited by Dylan Locke, embodies the lyrics of the song in an manner immersively cinematic. The short song and its lush melodies and moodily ethereal vocals is about perception and how ours can be challenging to bridge our own worlds with each other in the specifics of our cognition and interpretation of not only sensory stimuli but of course of those more psychological/emotional. The song is one minute fifty-one seconds long but conveys much with its engaging and spare melody and the immediacy of Rayen’s voice. When paired with the dazzling colors and dreamlike imagery like an 80s fantasy anime come to life it pulls you in and invites revisiting to take in the rich details both musical and visual. Watch the video for “A Fruit” on YouTube and follow Lennie Rayen at the links provided.

Lennie Rayen on Instagram

Dream Of Industry Sketches a Vivid Span of Late Night Introspection of Energetically Brooding Post-Punk Single “The Start”

Dream Of Industry, photo courtesy the artists

Dream Of Industry really traces the mood ahead with the intro to “The Start” with a driving rhythm and guitar notes hitting various corners of a melody that develops across the rest of the song. Like a Chameleons song the song reveals itself in dashes of mood and sketches of tone with the musicians giving up pieces of the song, hints of a theme. A melodic bassline pushes the song as guitars layer over its foundation with the drums and vocals haunt the song like a person walking along dark alleys in search of meaning through introspective couplets and coming up with more questions at the song’s all too soon conclusion. The Denver-based band recently went on indefinite hiatus as its core membership moved to other parts of the country but its Candidates EP from which the song is drawn offers some of the more refreshingly tonally rich post-punk in an environment when there’s too much sonically thin guitar work and cookie cutter songwriting. Dream of Industry not only learned from forebears like the aforementioned Chameleons and The Cure and Clan of Xymox but especially live had established itself as a band of uncommon musical presence. Listen to “The Start” on Spotify and follow Dream Of Industry on Bandcamp.

Lily Taylor Excavates the Strands of Human Connections on the Ambient Pop Single “Kepler Wells”

Lily Taylor seems to be floating in a technicolor otherworldly dimension in the video for “Kepler Wells.” The vertical hold is glitching and stretching the image and iterations of that image echo and overlap. Like a transmission from another time that has degraded in a way that’s visually creative and eerie. The slow beat and background melodic drone interspersed with bell tones and a spare keyboard melody while the vocals tell a story seemingly out of a journal examining failures of communication and how relationships evolve in ways we’ve never planned or predicted only to realize that they have outpaced our understanding of them and their utility to us. But memories remain to anchor us to moments in our lives and the people prominent at that time. The song feels very introspective and intimate and has to come from a vulnerable and personal place. And yet there is an air of a time traveler to the story who is able to step back from the contexts described like the narrator of a truly unusual Ray Bradbury short story and the air of mystery and timelessness those stories often conveyed about the human condition without receding into an abstraction of experience. Watch the video for “Kepler Wells” on YouTube and follow Lily Taylor at the links below. The song is from the latest album from Taylor called Amphora which released on July 21, 2023 via digital, vinyl and cassette formats.

Lily Taylor on TikTok

Lily Taylor on Facebook

Lily Taylor on Twitter

Lily Taylor on Bandcamp

Lily Taylor on Instagram

lilytaylormusic.com

Sloome Combines the Heady With the Introspective on the Shoegaze/Indiepop Single “Wonderful Nice”

Sloome begins the title track to it’s latest EP Wonderful Nice with a sweeping drive and jangly guitar. But the song goes off this course in unexpected ways with a slowdown and wind back up to full flight. Like the song is breaking down periodically and losing momentum. But inside these cracks in conventional structure give the song some room to breathe and to shift tone from the urgent to the reflective and in the end reconciling these impulses as the guitar tones soar and shimmer, warping like a structure getting misshapen in the heat of the headlong passages. The relatively lo-fi production lends the song the feel of something recorded in another era weaving together the delicacy of a C86 dream pop band and a more modern shoegaze/art pop band like Wombo or Blushing. At least fans of those things will appreciate the way Sloome seems to effortlessly incorporate strands of influence and creative impulse on this song and the rest of the EP. Listen to “Wonderful Nice” on Spotify and follow Sloome from Modesto, California on Instagram.

Sonny & the Sunsets Yearn to Be Whisked Away by a UFO From This Terrible Moment in Human History on the Charming Indiepop Single “Waiting”

Sonny and the Sunsets, photo by Sarah Moore

Sonny & the Sunsets has certainly written one of the most charming and spare pop anthems of the current period of human society with “Waiting.” Few frills, just a repeated jangle guitar melody, some hovering, very basic, classic keyboard tone that one might associate with garage rock but more like something The Kinks might have done if they were a twee pop band recording demos and emerged in the early 90s. More like the 90s indiepop bands the Davies brothers and company influenced out of the Elephant 6 collective and associated scenes. Sonny Smith sings about waiting for someone to come and sewing an outfit while in bed for the inevitable trip away from all this paradoxical chaos, stasis and peril of the pandemic era. He sings of having an outer space radio and waiting upon “my UFO” to take him away after the manner of the Calgon commercials of the 70s and 80s minus the consumerist angle. The song isn’t complicated, intricate, it is all but unadorned and that’s what makes it so effective and why it stays with you. Listen to “Waiting” on YouTube and follow Sonny & the Sunsets at the links provided. Look for the new album Self Awareness Through Macrame due out August 25.

Sonny and the Sunsets on Facebook

Sonny and the Sunsets on Bandcamp

Sonny and the Sunsets on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S3E18: Shamarr Allen

Shamarr Allen has been a professional musician in his hometown of New Orleans since he was a teenage member of Rebirth Brass Band. Allen grew up playing trumpet in a musical family and steeped in the rich and diverse musical traditions and legacies of the city as reflected across his varied and active career. Allen has cited Willie Nelson as his favorite songwriter and Prince, Pharrell Williams, Stevie Wonder and Quincy Jones as influences. Allen calls his style “bridge music” because it brings together a variety of sounds and musical leanings. He has collaborated with Harry Connick, Patti LaBelle, Lenny Kravitz, Willie Nelson, Big Freedia and Galactic. In 2009 he released his debut solo album and performed the National Anthem for President Barack Obama in New Orleans which lead to an invitation to play at the Governor’s Ball at the White House and serving as a musical/cultural ambassador for the United States to Brazil, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Congo. In 2020 Allen established Trumpet Is My Weapon, a gun exchange program following the death of a nine-year-old and the wonding of two other children in a shooting in New Orleans. In 2023 Allen released his latest album True Orleans 2 (due August 18, 2023), a sonically inventive set of songs that is at times reminiscent of a great southern hip-hop album but one informed by pop songcraft, R&B, soul and jazz and long on wit and sharp social observation.

Listen to our interview with Allen on Bandcamp and follow the master musician at the links below. Shamarr Allen is currently on wide-ranging national tour with a stop to perform at Dazzle in Denver, Colorado on Wednesday, August 16, 2023.

shamarrallen.com

Shamarr Allen on Instagram

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Shamarr Allen on YouTube

Queen City Sounds Podcast S3E17: Everything Is Terrible!

Everything Is Terrible!, photo by Jim Newberry

Since 2007 Everything Is Terrible! has mined the detritus of media cultural artifacts from thrift stores, garage sales and the like in the form of VHS tapes and in more recent years some streaming video for content to recontextualize clips of the most absurd and awful videos into informative and hilariously disturbing new forms. EIT helped to propel trash media culture into the mainstream of meme-making with its now nine found footage documentaries that shine a light on what our culture has produced and often decided to forget the way it does the rest of disposable media that reveals often uncomfortable truths about the submerged aspirations and dreams of our collective, modern civilization. Since 2009 the artist collective has toured with screenings of its films and have incorporated a puppet variety show and music to add just that special little layer of the surreal and weird to enhance the viewing experience of the people that show up. Perhaps the collective’s most infamous project is its goal of collecting thousands of VHS copies of the 1996 film Jerry Maguire with the goal of building a pyramid from the tapes in the desert. As of May 2023, the collection has reached 40,000+ copies and counting. In 2022 EIT released perhaps its greatest and most coherent creation to date, Kidz Klub! The film draws on the sheer dreck of the most misguided and misconceived television and home video programming made for children designed to educate and in many cases indoctrinate the nation’s youth. Even a casual viewing of the movie reveals recurring themes that edited together seem to be a continuous narrative with a touch of hypnotic reputation. For this iteration of the collective’s creative output the soundtrack pulled both from the original source material and original composition establishes the perfect air of the hyper real and otherworldly at once. In the live setting the movie is split up into roughly 5-10 minute sections interspersed with the puppet show and dance and song routines giving it the air of a psychedelic variety show in real time. It’s the kind of thing no one was asking for but which we all needed as a dose of sanity in a world in which we are increasingly bombarded with random content disconnected from the endless stream that is life itself.

Listen to our interview with Commodore Gilgamesh on Bandcamp and for more information on Everything Is Terrible!, to purchase merch and copies of the videos, and for information on live performances, please visit everythingisterrible.com. EIT is currently on tour now with a stop at Meow Wolf Convergence Station in Denver on August 15, 2023 and for tickets click this link.

FiRES WERE SHOT Channel the Ghosts of Urban Decay Past on Ambient Drone Composition “Sleeping Land”

FiRES WERE SHOT, photo courtesy the artists

“Sleeping Land” by FiRES WERE SHOT begins with the faint sounds of children at play like an enigmatic reel-to-reel recording found on a machine acquired at a thrift store. No date, no identifying information, simple the raw audio and the question mark hanging there as to why someone would make such a recording with limited fidelity. But then the song drifts into a flowing drone of bright sound sitting in a fog bank of white noise. A faint pulse of the remains of a melody looped like another fragment tape of a recording from the dregs of a public emergency broadcast signal. The effect as the title suggests are like the dreams of a neglected phase of human occupied territory over which our current environs were built and the song is something like urban exploration through the ambient spirits of that place not so long ago rendered irrelevant by a superficial sense of progress and an unrelenting need to redevelop and transform every bit of earth into something of use to the current economic mode of operation where something not turning out a profit is considered a waste. The rest of the Siberia EP, which FiRES WERE SHOT released on June 23, 2023, has a similar vibe but different specific flavors of real time, sonic, urban archaeology. Listen to “Sleeping Land” and follow FiRES WERE SHOT at the links below.

FiRES WERE SHOT on YouTube