Jim Jarmusch – Queen City Sounds and Art

Mary Ocher Entreats the World to Awaken to its Human Solidarity on Operatic Art Synthpop Single “Syhmpathize”

Mary Ocher’s single “Sympathize (featuring Your Government)” is well represented in the music video that shows the artist floating in a turquoise ocean on a rubber raft looking like a character from the end of The Lord of the Rings who has returned from the Undying Lands in white robes and rams horns. Nearby a cluster of refugees from the ravaged world frolic on an island of junk with a “For Sale” sign while industrialists in a red ship demonstrate their designs on what’s left of normal people. All while Ocher sings “Sympathize with us!” in entreatment to the basic humanity of those who might just snuff out what there is left of a world not completely unconquered by rapacious economic interests. Musically Ocher’s operatic vocals and beautiful pulses of synth melody and circular rhythms are reminiscent of something Lene Lovich or Nina Hagen might have written for one of Jim Jarmusch’s or Wim Wenders’ more eccentric and engrossing globe hopping films. Watch the video for “Sympathize” on YouTube and follow Mary Ocher at the links below. Her new album Your Guide to Revolution releases on June 14 in the EU and in the rest of the world on July 19 via Underground Institute.

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“Recent Mineral” by Church Chords is an Enchanting and Mysterious Blend of Krautrock, Bossa Nova and Noise

Church Chords’ forthcoming album elvis, he was Schlager (out February 26, 2024 on Otherly Love Records) sounds like an ambitious, experimental post-punk album years in the making with numerous collaborators that songwriter and producer Stephen Buono brought together after the manner of a hip-hop producer. And you get a taste of what’s in store with the single “Recent Mineral” with the quietly sultry vocals of Genevieve Artadi who sings in Portuguese. What are the lyrics about? Might have to ask someone that understands the language or wait for the full release of the record. But you don’t need to know in order to really be taken in by the finely accented percussion and hypnotic arrangements of texture tones, slashes of echoing, stretching, warping guitar altogether reminiscent of Young Marble Giants, Faust and an abstract Bossa Nova band mixing it up to make a song that is entrancing and mysterious and you wouldn’t think overmuch about if it was in a movie like something Jim Jarmusch or Sofia Coppola would produce.

Church Chords on YouTube

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Isaac Watters’ Noir Pop Song “Coconut In The Street” is a Vivid Glimpse Into the Contrasting Social Reality of the Haves and Have Nots of Los Angeles

Isaac Watters brings a downbeat, noir mood to “Coconut In The Street.” In the live video version below we see what looks like black and white with some blue tones allowed in the color palette enhancing the cool, late night feel of the song. It sounds like a brooding blues song with a touch of urgent and shimmery synth around the edges. And of course Watters relating a story of tensions between the moneyed and the down and out and how both seem to exist not so far apart in the streets of Los Angeles where it’s not like a sanitized version from a movie but a city with as much grit and desperation as one might find in a city with more of a reputation for that, just with generally better weather unless it’s wildfire season. Watters’ imagery captures these contrasts well and sure early in the song you hear the ghost of Leonard Cohen haunting his style but as the song progresses and his wailing bursts in singing the late song chorus gives it a different flavor, one more imbued with an immediacy that elevates the song beyond a merely good singer-songwriter in the bluesy folk vein of today into something more mysterious when paired with the vivid poetry of the song’s lyrics that make it feel like watching one of William Friedkin’s Los Angeles movies do or if Jim Jarmusch did an entire movie set in the City of Angels. It hits as unexpectedly cool and uncommonly observant while giving you the language to describe social dynamics in fresh and creative ways. Lines like “You were so angry at the laughing stock downtown/Stumbling zombie on the edge of the freeway/You call the police, they say they’re on the way/But you can’t pull over” and “Double back flip off the new glass tower downtown/Is that you they found? Is that your enemy?/Is that the friend you always meant to be?” capture such a specific emotional space while grounding it in a specificity of place it invokes the familiar while inducing new ways to think about places you’ve been physically and psychologically. Watch the video for “Coconut In The Street” on YouTube and follow Isaac Watters at the links below.

Isaac Watters on Facebook

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Isaac Watters on Instagram

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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

Sam Himself Eases Himself Into Transitioning to a Better Self on the Brooding Yet Luminously Melancholic “Like A Friend”

Sam Koechlin aka Sam Himself sounds like he’s tired of struggling with himself and outmoded notions of his own identity on his single “Like A Friend,” coming to accept that what he once thought was a core part of his identity was just like an awkwardly outfit that you keep telling yourself is cool but makes you look like an idiot. Most people do this in their lives insisting truths about themselves that they embrace as central to their entire being even if it limits them and comes to hurt them long term. But rather than a self-disintegrating blowout, Sam casts this process as a melancholic, compassionate goodbye and to take this news, this realization like he’s hearing it from a good friend who knows what to say even when it’s something heavy and hard to say. A friend who knows how to tell you some aspect of your personality and identity is bullshit that is dragging you down but without brutality so that you have time to embrace the change as painful as it can be with resignation with the blow landing softly. It’s unrealistic to expect people to change quickly because of all the ingrained habits of life and mentalities that reinforce the core of who you are or who you think you are but it’s also not so difficult to make that change once you understand why the changes are necessary. The lush song and its downtempo, late night vibe with Sam Himself’s brooding croon is reminiscent of Nick Cave is paired well with a music video taking place in the gritty part of Zurich, Switzerland like something out of a Jim Jarmusch film and all the creative use of darkness and color to suggest a mood, a spiritual quality to the setting that enhances the meaning of what you’re witnessing. Watch the video for “Like A Friend” on YouTube, connect with Sam Himself on Soundcloud linked below and look out for the songwriter’s new EP Slow Drugs.

Behold Bad Flamingo’s Slinky, Psychedelic Spaghetti Western Song “The House Is on Fire”

BadFlamingo2_crop — Bad Flamingo, photo courtesy the artists

“The House Is on Fire” by Bad Flamingo sounds like something that will be in the inevitable Jim Jarmusch haunted rural town where a secret society of dentists that practice mummification in their “health cult” undergoes a power struggle for the leadership of the group that changes its membership and mission forever. Just plug “dentist mummy cult” into a search engine and have at it. But this song, slinky, spaghetti western psychedelia, downtempo and sensual would fit a montage when the whole thing goes upside down and the final conflict is afoot. Simple guitar accents, soothing vocals and spooky bell tone and synths conspire to give the song a feeling like something out of 60s garage rock and Peggy Lee’s weirder songs. Listen to “The House Is on Fire” on Soundcloud and follow Bad Flamingo at the links below.

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