Queen City Sounds and Art

Endearments Offer a Lush and Heartfelt Post-Break-Up Song For Adults on “Too Late”

Endearments have tapped into a certain aesthetic of 1980s New Wave/synth pop sound for its single “Too Late.” That mix of lush, atmospheric melodies, soulful vocals, soft but finely accented percussion and palm muted guitar followed by elegant and minimal leads giving definition to the more ethereal synths. That sound is suited well to nuanced takes on the complex interpersonal politics of relationships especially those that have fallen apart in ways that leave at least one of the people hurt and confused until they sort out what it is they wanted all along and more importantly what they don’t want. In this song when Kevin Marksson sings “That is not the way to love me at all” it’s a declaration of self-worth. The earlier part of the song describes the awkward conversations in which the person who has transgressed against the formerly shared trust of the relationship tries to explain themselves with excuses that amount to insults by way of rationalizations. The perspective of the song seems to be an interesting emotional place of having gone beyond the initial hurt and pondering what went wrong to embracing what’s best instead of what once was but is now broken. It’s an important psychological turning point for anyone that’s been in a relationship gone awry and essential for moving on to better places in one’s own heart and perhaps better recognizing earlier when things won’t work out. There are a lot of love songs, a lot of break-up songs, a lot of songs about missing someone, a lot sitting in a place of anger and betrayal but this one is about loving yourself and being adult and we could use more of that sort of framing in pop music. Fans of Washed Out and Future Islands will appreciate the sounds and sentiments in this song. Listen to “Too Late” on Spotify and follow Brooklyn-based Endearments at the links below.

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The Wheel Workers Rally to Burn Past the Creative Doldrums on “Suck It Up”

The Wheel Workers, photo courtesy the artists

“Suck It Up” might initially get The Wheel Workers compared to the Pixies or some older alternative rock band and not just because the group has been around since the turn of the century. The loud-quiet-loud dynamic is there but the Pixies didn’t invent that. That was another Boston band called Mission of Burma. But obvious comparison aside, this song has a wonderfully demented structure so that its buzzsaw guitar riff hovers above and then below the vocal line and the frantic keyboards, which get to shine in spectacular fashion mid-song going off the rails and circling back on track, while the drums and bass seem to guide the arc of the song and anchor it as it seems to threaten to fall apart at any moment. The vocals, both the leads and backing, are anthemic in their enthusiasm in expressing a fairly complicated emotion seemingly jaded but ready to pick oneself up to try the things you love again even if you have to coax yourself into even making the effort. Lines like “Stab deep until can’t bleed anymore” and “All the dreams, unstuck, unstored” really capture that moment in life when you really do need to put effort into endeavors you take for granted and have been through countless times. When it’s a creative project you need to summon a bit more of actual juice from your psyche rather than depend purely on going through the motions ritual or it feels like and comes across like phony bullshit and this song is very much in form and spirit the opposite of approaching the music from a place of psychic numbness. Maybe you need to give yourself a little tough love and knock the dust off as the title suggests to get going but it seems obviously worth it. Listen to “Suck It Up” on YouTube and connect with The Wheel Workers at the links below.

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MF Ruckus Finds Its Gritty, Soulful Boogie Sound on “Polly Ann Marie”

MF Ruckus may have hit its songwriting stride with its new single “Polly Ann Marie.” While its sound has run the gamut of thrashy punk to honky tonk-ready country rock to glam the storytelling element has helped make its music a worthwhile listen from the beginning. “Polly Ann Marie” is the story of a man who witnessed perhaps indirectly his father’s philandering ways and decided he never wanted to go that route in his relationships with women and instead sets out on the road going from town to town, maybe in a band, maybe in an otherwise nomadic lifestyle and doesn’t pretend to be someone looking for anything but a good time and not make promises and otherwise lie about his intentions as summed up by the line “why should I wreck some woman’s life when I can make some lady’s night.” But in the life of most people living such a free spirited life there comes someone that inspires more than the usual casual, carnal interest and for our narrator that is the singular Polly Ann Marie. The song with its lively use of saxophone and Aaron Howell’s passionate and expressive vocals alongside grittily tuneful riffs might be compared to New York Dolls or Hanoi Rocks but really it has more in common with Faces and its hard edged, soulful boogie. Listen to “Polly Ann Marie” on Spotify and follow MF Ruckus at the links below.

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Miu Haiti Flips the Power Dynamic Script on Fools in Power on “In ‘Em Face”

Miu Haiti wrote “In ‘Em Face” as a “reminder for anyone who listens to it and for myself to celebrate tour victories shamelessly. Whatever you accomplish, you deserve it, show it off.” And in the course of the music video and in the lyrics of the song she discusses the various way people will try to take, downplay or deny your personal power and trivialize who you are and what you’ve done and dismiss how often you have to be more capable, skilled and gifted in any endeavor to even get to the most meager status. With a jaunty and whimsical yet menacing piano figure and a steady yet low key relentless beat Haiti brings enough attitude to completely derail the train of disrespect with a powerfully irreverent spirit and says how it’s completely okay and even necessary to “rub it in ’em face,” using a touch of that Haitian patois to own a way of communicating that some people might want to use to denigrate your status as well. At the end of the video the old white man captain of the music industry gets a pie in the face and none of the frustration and anger he was anticipating but rather the ridicule he deserves for having the nerve to try to take advantage of another artist in whose league he is not. It’s beyond a hip-hop diss track, it’s a stylishly delivered take down of an entire way of operating whose time is and should be over. Watch the video for “In ‘Em Face” on YouTube and follow Miu Haiti at the links below.

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Flightless Birds Take Wing Craft a Deep Ambient Track of Minimalist Complexity on “Latrobe”

Flightless Birds Take Wing, photo courtesy the artists

Flightless Birds Take Wing bring together distorted, warping drones that course through the soundscape, a pulsing, abstracted bell tone and the sound of a device that makes noises like something has gone wrong with its internal workings and the satisfying hums and automatic rhythms go off course. This is “Latrobe,” the first track off of the project’s debut EP Taking Flight. The song eventually progresses to a place of more vivid musical coherence but still an assemblage of sounds intersecting from independent sources to create a sense of place both physical and psychological. In the last section of the track a more formal melody forms and has such an unconventional tonal structure it takes you out of a conventional music absorption mode as it moves from major to minor key while the more textural sounds hover around and move off. It’s a fascinating piece of work that establishes atmospherics in a way that utilizes the suggestion of a tactile element to the music rather than one purely auditory for a hybrid aesthetic that lends its minimalism a dynamic complexity like the analog of the collection of processes that make up a living being. Listen to “Latrobe” on Spotify where you can further explore Taking Flight and connect with the Australian experimental duo Flightless Birds Take Wing at the links below.

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Flightless Birds Take Wing on 4000 Records

Beth//James’s Warmly Ethereal “The Sun” is a Gently Powerful Testament to the Acceptance of Love

Beth//James cover of 2022 album *Get Together*

Madeline and Jordan Burchill of Beth//James (whose song “Lion Eyes” appeared in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman) wander through a light woodlands in the morning in the music video for “The Sun.” The songwriters directed the video with filming by Madeline Northway and the spare percussion and guitar work ease into and out of the song like waters coming in and out with the tide and the sun creeping over the horizon and back at dawn and dusk. The vocal harmonies the duo brings to bear with a warm elegance suits well the metaphor of the sun with the love of one’s beloved and how it might have been something of which one was wary not sure to trust it and its potential as a steady nourishing presence but accepting it as a benevolent energy in one’s life that illuminates the darkest moments and shins on those more celebratory. Watch the video for “The Sun” on YouTube and connect with Beth//James at the links below where you can listen to the rest of the duo’s new album Get Together.

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“Covered Me” Has elison Using Fuzzy, Energetic Melodies to Help Push Past a Dysfunctional Relationship and Its Gaslighting

It’s not too often a song about being in a relationship with a narcissistic people pleaser who gaslights a romantic partner sounds so driving and upbeat. But elison’s “Covered Me” has some energetic, fuzzy guitar riffs and hazy vocal harmonies in the choruses like a dream pop song with a bit more of an edge. The guitar solo toward the middle of the song sounds like something out of an 80s pop tune the likes of which you might have heard in a Kim Wilde song. But contrast in energy between the progressive pace and Marissa Kephart’s strong yet wistful vocals and lyrics that really capture the portrait of a person who lies all the time in order to maintain a self-image and an illusion for others of a lovable person who is popular with everyone and whose lies are so pervasive that the person with whom they’re involved in an intimate relationship never really knows where they stand and can’t trust their own feelings especially upon witnessing the faux charm exercised with others and the emotional abuse delivered in private. That contrast of moods and sounds is a little reminiscent of the way Rilo Kiley would have some of the most emotionally devastating and sharply observed lyrics paired with beautiful and uplifting songwriting. Which in the end makes the musical complexity implied by that contrast all the more effective. Listen to “Cover Me” on Spotify and follow the duo of Kephart and Scott Yoshimura as elison at the links provided.

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Rupe’s Delicately Rendered Indiepop Song “growing up is strange” is a Nostalgic Look at the Past and an Embrace of Making New Memories to Add to What’s Been

Rupe is a 23-year-old songwriter from rural, north Louisiana and somehow on his single “growing up is strange” he perfectly articulates a sense of nostalgia and loss that people usually only really fully feel in their thirties or older. The hazy shimmer in the background is the perfect tonal backdrop to a spare guitar melody and Rupe’s introspective immediacy in his vocals. He brings to the song details of life in a rural town that translate well to the cognate from your own life of people and places that made up the social circle you took for granted at important stages in your life whether that was in your youth, your young adulthood, even middle age or older. When Rupe sings “I thought those times would last/This life just moves too fast” it just rings true and even more so these days when the social artifacts of our lives are being torn down and replaced with a corporate version of what once had more resonance and meaning because of the memories made and the social context of a time that sit fondly in your memory. And yet change we have to accept and not get stuck in the past and we hear Rupe’s own acceptance that life moves onward whether we’re emotionally ready for it or not with the closing line “And oh for once it feels right.” While it’s nice to revisit a wonderful time in our lives it’s also good to make new memories to add not replace or take away the old. The song is reminiscent of early 2000s indiepop but doesn’t sound particularly stylistically beholden to a particular artist. It just has that refreshingly earnest and intimate feel that puts a song’s hooks into your brain. Listen to “growing up is strange” on Spotify and follow Rupe at the links below.

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“Moire 05” is Betts(JP)’s Deep Ambient Meditation on the Granular Details in the Patterns of the Universe

Betts(JP) layers a lightly distorted and oscillating tone over one lighter in frequency on the track “Moire 05” to suggest organic, fluid movement per the title of the song. Rather than the visual effect the sounds convey movements and resolve like ripples on the surface of a body of water. The cover art displays the image of a pool of water with the waves moving outward from a center where perhaps a solid object or a heavy drop of rain fell from a leaf. The song has a similar specific differentiation of texture and vibe that is subtle but as with the ripples in the cover image there are aspects of how the water moves from that center that create unique visual and physical impacts as the wave moves from the point of impact. It’s an ambient song but like most ambient it’s not the absolute uniformity of mood but rather the subtle changes in dynamics as the waves of sound move outward from the point of creation and as the source of the sounds modulates and the the sonic energy decays over time creating its own sonic phenomena. It’s a deeply relaxing track that seems to have come from a place of deep observation and meditation on the details of our everyday universe that can be missed as we cognitively rush toward the stimuli that catch our immediate attention. Listen to “Moire 05” on Spotify and follow Betts(JP) at the links provided.

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Bad Heather Blasts Coat Tail Riders on the Cathartically Angsty “Stay In L.A.”

Porter Chapman is apparently most well known as the live drummer for The Moth & the Flame’s 2019 tour but with his single as Bad Heather,“Stay In L.A.” from his forthcoming Sad Heather EP due out later in 2022, shows not just some inventive production on the percussion but an energetically forceful songwriting. The song has an intentionally lo-fi sound that best suits the messy emotions expressed in the song with some grit and the distorted quality of amplified feelings. There is a feeling of charged emotion borne of having to deal with a clinger on who is trying to ride your coattails to some imagined higher place but insists they’re going to be huge out of an overblown ego combined with a lack of self-faith. You know the type and it isn’t just in some music or art scene but someone who thinks they can use other people as a stepping stone to asset their own sense of self-importance. Probably most of us have witnessed this misbehavior but Chapman has given some unvarnished expression of the frustration with that social dynamic. Watch the video for “Stay In L.A.” on YouTube and follow Bad Heather at the links below.

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