Abe Vigoda – Queen City Sounds and Art

The music video for Bottled Up’s “Italo Love” hits some surreal notes and not just in the music. The members of the band are depicted performing on the beach and frolicking in a beach town. And the lyrics make references to Los Angeles with houses that look like something you might see in Encinitas, California. Maybe it was filmed there or on a beach area nearer to the group’s home town of Washington, DC. The smooth jazz, funk and pop aesthetics blended together effortlessly in the song certainly gives the impression of something that might come from a band celebrating the good times and nostalgia of the laid back pace and energy of one of the California beach towns including Long Beach. When Nikhil Rao sings the line “I was born from memories of the drives through Beverly” one wonders if he had a connection to the Los Angeles area or fantasized about it from images on television and film and identifying with the vibe. The song and what has been release of the new Bottled Up album Grand Bizarre (due out May 27, 2022) has that quality of being outside usual time and geography while genre mashing in a way similar to that of King Krule and all the more interesting because of it. Fans of that final Abe Vigoda album Crush (2010) and its lush pop interpretation of glam rock will greatly appreciate this track and what Bottled Up has been going for throughout its career to date. Watch the video for “Italo Love” on YouTube and connect with Bottled Up at the links below.

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don’t get lemon, photo by Anthony Flores

The second single from don’t get lemon’s album Hyper Hollow Heaven (out March 26, 2022 on à La Carte Records) has the rather dire title “D.I.E.I.N.T.H.E.U.S.A.” and the lyrics hit with the resigned nihilism born of an accurate assessment of where human civilization is trending. But the music is a special kind of lush, synth pop like bedroom production style Roxy Music or Crush-period Abe Vigoda. In the video Austin Curtis, the band’s singer, seems to party privately in the few creature comforts available in late capitalism before the utter collapse: oddly plentiful, Asian grocery items that seem like a cruel and surreal joke, karaoke night lighting and equipment, late night Vegas lounge aesthetic. This while the audio equivalent of VHS video fidelity and visuals to match has Curtis singing about basically being ready for the end of the world or at least the world as we know it and knowing that it’s kind of too late to do anything to stop it. One imagines if synth pop had existed in the fourth century Roman empire it would take on a tone like this between climate change, widespread political corruption and fiscal malfeasance, deep social divisions, international strife, pandemics and other crises that ended up rendering the most powerful economic and political entity the world had ever seen unable to rally to address the many built in ills that were contributing to its downfall. Many perceptive people had to have seen it coming and had there been a popular art form that survived we might have seen the ancient equivalent of a song like this born out of similar struggles, pressures and a sense that it’s all worse than a recession or political partisanship gone wild. This band personalizes the ambient anxiety of the time with a soothing song that commiserates with us a downer mood. But contained within it is the seed that we could turn this whole thing at least partly around but do you see anyone overthrowing the oligarchic power and economic structure in the next five to twenty years? Seems unlikely so while perhaps hoping and working for the best may as well enjoy some of the small joys of life before it’s completely over. Watch the video for “D.I.E.I.N.T.H.E.U.S.A.” on YouTube and connect with don’t get lemon at the links below.