Queen City Sounds and Art

GLOSSER Vividly Evokes the Internal Tensions and Reconciliations of Adapting Ourselves for Public Consumption on “The Artist”

What make’s GLOSSER’s single “The Artist” particularly effective and standout is how its musical elements establish undeniable melodic hooks but with the emphasis in the rhythm. A clipped bass line in sync with the spare percussion accompany vocals with the most light of effects to give it some glow is the foundation but then the song drops off into spaces of warmly ethereal synths as though free falling slowly before the rhythm picks back up and a simple keyboard melody eases the song back into its verses. Keynotes of background tonal harmonies and the most minimal of drones add a moody detail the lends the track a complexity of soundscaping that is subtle and tasteful and again enhances the main feature of the vocals lyrics about the struggle to balance one’s humanity and genuine emotional life and that of engaging in creative work that will meet an inevitable public. But in order to make resonant work the sensitivity and vulnerability that can’t be faked, that must come from a core, genuine place in order to really reach anyone or be a an expression worth putting into a coherent form which can be more raw for some people to really appreciate and too real and that risks a rejection or critique that doesn’t match that sensitivity and emotional nuance. The song’s lyrics vividly depict that internal process in a way relatable whether or not you’re an artist because just to get through life we often have to present a mediated version of ourselves which can create a tension inside our minds that can feel like a perpetual attempt to appeal to people or a situation that is more demanding than nurturing. GLOSSER was just able to distill the ordeal and reconciliation into a soulful, unconventional earworm of a pop song. Listen to “The Artist” on YouTube and follow GLOSSER at the links below. Look out for the full album DOWNER out January 27, 2023.

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

Queen City Sounds Podcast S2E32: Eszter Balint

Eszter Balint is a singer, songwriter, violinist and actress who released her fourth album I HATE MEMORY! on November 18, 2022 via Red Herring Records. The album is a set of songs that chart the artist’s path from communist Hungary in the 60s and 70s to New York City of the late 70s and 80s. Co-written with Stew (Stew & The Negro Problem, Passing Strange), the songs are like vignettes about the art, music, theater and film world and the community around it in which Balint was intimately involved as an active participant. But the album is more than a mere catalog of the times, it is a meditation on the nature of oppression, freedom, the possibilities inherent to situations in which rules fall by the wayside and one’s struggle with memory when you are someone who is most focused on the present rather than living and re-litigating the past. Long in the works the songs are the basis of an “anti-musical” which is planned for an ongoing series of performances at Joe’s Pub. I HATE MEMORY! is a multi-faceted, multi-layered ambitious work that has helped Balint reconnect with her teenage self with the aid of her various collaborators (for more information on those, visit her website linked below).

Balint as a youth lived with the avant-garde Squat Theatre troupe founded by her father and that’s where she first met Jean-Michel Basquiat who produced her first recordings and with whom she became involved. Balint’s career and proximity to the New York arts world led her to her cinematic debut in Jim Jarmusch’s first major film Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and to later roles in Shadows and Fog (1991), Trees Lounge (1996), The Dead Don’t Die (2019) and in season 4 of the sitcom Louie. All along the way she has performed music and recorded with Angels of Light and Swans (in particular for the sprawling 2012 album The Seer), John Zorn and Marc Ribot.

Listen to our interview with Balint on Bandcamp below and for more information on Eszter Balint please visit her website linked below and give I HATE MEMORY! a listen on Bandcamp as well linked separately beneath the interview.

eszterbalint.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.

Queen City Sounds Podcast S2E31: Mike Baggetta

Jim Keltner, Mike Baggetta and Mike Watt, photo by Devin O’Brien

The trio of Mike Baggetta / Jim Keltner / Mike Watt released its second album Everywhen We Go on November 18, 2022 via BIG EGO Records. The record represents a further development of the project with its master players having come to a new level of comfort and one might say intuitive interplay. Most of the songs were at their core written by guitarist Baggetta with one by Watt and two by the collective and one hears in the results a flow of musical ideas that contains elements of jazz and surf rock but which evolves in unpredictable and fascinating ways for an eclectic album that bears the hallmarks of the trio’s collective roots in punk, art rock and the avant-garde. There is an intimacy in the recorded sounds even in its more rocking moments that draws you into its spontaneous energy. Keltner’s resume reads like a who’s who of rock music from the 1970s onward but his early interest in jazz coincides well with Baggetta’s free jazz chops and Watt’s own diverse and dynamic musicianship beyond his time in Minutemen, fIREHOSE, Stooges and numerous other projects. Everywhen We Go is an energetic yet relaxing listen that showcases the ability of three veteran musicians to play expertly to the song in a way both focused and free form.

Listen to our interview with Mike Baggetta on Bandcamp and listen to the new record for yourself and for more information on Baggetta and the trio please visit the links below.

mikebaggetta.com