First, a shout out to all those musical acts who choose to use defiantly G**gle proof name. Some of these acts have been profiled in these pages recently such as Navy Blue, Woods, and Slut Magic (ok not so much the latter tho’ that particular phrase does have an Urban Dictionary entry which sounds totally bogus but I digress) and now we can add 95 Bulls to this special list.

In theory, anyway. Maybe it’s only because the Big Googly Eye In The Sky knows me too well but the band’s Instagram account came up as a first page search result, plus another first page hit courtesy of our good friend(s) at Bands Do BK who in late October premiered the 95 Bulls’ two-track debut single “Big Fight”/“Crazy” and shared vital stats on the band’s origins (basically an indie rockin’ punk rawkin’ bartender and barback and barfly supergroup formed at Our Wicked Lady) and motivation for formation (quarantine-itis).

Maybe it’s got something to do with the latter but I’d respectfully submit that 95 Bulls could furnish an appropriate soundtrack for any of your potential choices in a game of “F*ck, Marry, Kill” (well dunno if you’d wanna get married to any of their songs but they’ve got good tunes for people you wanna f*ck or kill for sure). This F*CK/KILL duality comes across even more strongly on stage where the band members flirt and rage musically in equal measure like if you can imagine a more aggro B-52s–plus the groovy-warbly Farfisa keyboard makes this comparision even more apt and ups the dance ante significantly–or maybe they’re more like a Great Dane getting overly frisky and thrusting his snout deep into your crotch to the point where you get kinda turned on but fear for your genitals at the same time. Anyway I’ve used up my allotted number of analogies so will leave it at that.

And yeah you heard right I said *on stage* because you can at this very moment watch a live set and an interview with 95 Bulls as part of Footlight Bar’s “FLTV” series filmed under safe conditions at Brooklyn’s Starr Bar. Check out the link HERE where for a small fee you’ll not only see the last-danceless Bulls play live and hear some of their unreleased songs like “Red Nails,” “Trichotillomania,” “Young Love,” “Golden Tooth,” and “Your Father’s Watch,” but you’ll also witness exclusive footage of the band drinking heavily in the recording studio and also a couch-based convo with sparkle-masked host Kendra during which intimate thoughts are shared on penguin orgasms, band Tinder accounts, getting twerked on at Covid testing sites, meeting depressed divorceés In New Jersey, and the ultimate dream of receiving a Popeye’s sponsorship. (Jason Lee)

That sketchy looking dude on the corner asking if you like Hunky Dory era Bowie or Black Box Recorder or St Etienne is most likely selling bootlegs of the new CD by Midnight Sister that just came out this Friday and he’s got his target marketing game on point. Too bad tho’ he didn’t get the memo about the whole streaming thing, but it works out nicely for you cuz you just saved a few bones and can listen to Painting the Roses (Jagjaguwar) through various types of devices at your convenience.

And get this Midnight Sister isn’t even British. Instead they’re Angelinos but it makes sense when you find out that the duo of Juliana Giraffe and Ari Balouzian are, respectively, a music video/short film director and a film scorer in their other lives. So all those finely honed and orchestrated arrangements and glam antics and dark disco dramatics arise organically from their residing in the Town of Tinsel.

Plus their film backgrounds pay off when it comes to making music videos natch as dispayed in the trippy videos on display here. (Jason Lee)

In 1973 a local news report on the "social phenomenon" of "New York street bands" centered around the nightclub Max’s Kansas City–where Debbie Harry could very well be your waitress and William Burroughs passed out at the bar–zeroed in on an exotic group of young men called the New York Dolls. In somber tones the newscaster described their music as "rough not polished" with "lyrics [that] are shouted, not sung" and live shows that are "always belligerent, hostile and deafeningly loud." Now there’s a sales pitch!

And while the New York Dolls’ guitarist Sylvain Sylvain (he also played piano/keyboard) was by all accounts neither particularly belligerent or hostile or loud in person–just the opposite, in fact, he was credited with holding the highly-volatile group together both personally and musically during their initial five-year run from 1971 to 1976–his guitar playing sure as hell was all three of those things. What’s more Sylvain has been credited for coming up with the band’s name and their (for the times) highly provocative look and for being their musical anchor with his slashing, rock solid and memorable guitar lines.

Rather than trying to tell Sylvain’s story here or making a case for his significance, I’ll simply point out that Sylvain and his guitar playing are very likely buried deep in your DNA. In other words if you’re someone who listens to and/or creates what is referred to "indie" or "alternative" music, the New York Dolls were one of the central bands/central strands in the musical DNA of so-called proto-punk music (alongside the Stooges and MC5 and Death) leading directly to punk rock, obviously, and then to post-punk and alternative and indie rock. 

Here’s a few good obits that were published today if you wanna know more about the man, the Dolls, and Sylvain Sylvain’s post-Dolls career.

A British perspective from The Guardian (without the New York Dolls there’d been no Sex Pistols): 
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/jan/15/sylvain-sylvain-the-new-york-dolls

And here’s what some obscure old hippie rag has to say about Sylvain Sylvain:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/sylvain-sylvain-new-york-dolls-dead-1114962

Versus a more punk rock perspective from Alternative Press:
https://www.altpress.com/news/sylvain-sylvain-obituary-the-new-york-dolls

Last but definitely not least, Sylvain’s memoir published in 2018:
https://omnibuspress.com/products/theres-no-bones-in-ice-cream-sylvain-sylvains-autobiography

Now for some sounds and visuals cuz that’s what matters. Exhibit A: If th song "Frankenstein" with its glorious twin guitar assault by Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, taken from the Dolls’ 1973 eponymous debut LP, doesn’t send chills up your spine then maybe you should pay a visit to your local cardiologist and have her check to see if you still have a pulse:

This is probably the New York Dolls’ best known song, though there’s a case to be made for "Personality Crisis," in which David Johansen (aka Buster Poindexter) kicks things off by quoting the Shangri-Las’ "Give Him A Great Big Kiss":

And this is probably the best known filmed performance by the Dolls–appearing live on the German pop music show Musikladen, with two more songs taken from New York Dolls (1973):

Footage of the Dolls performing live in 1974 following the release of their oft-overlooked sophomore LP Too Much Too Soon. Rock entrepreneur and announcer Don Kirshner poses the $64,000 question: Are the Dolls "outrageous and bizarre" or "incredibly talented"? But Don, why they can’t be both!

Excellent instrumental B-side from a band called Criminals, one of Sylvain’s post-Dolls projects, 1978’s "The Cops Are Coming" is a rocked-out rewrite of the iconic "Peter Gunn Theme."

Slyvain Sylvain’s first solo album in 1979 contained this very cool track which could easily be passed off as an overlooked gem from the Goffin & King catalogue ("King" as in Carole King).

Nice live set here from Sylvain Sylvain & the Teardrops, again from German TV, a musical project whose one one and only album came out in 1981. Note the retro-rockabilly vibe and note that this was the same year of the Stray Cats’ debut album. Sylvain was often on the cutting edge but often not getting due credit. Bonus content: you get to see Sylvain talking a bit about the Dolls during the wonderfully awkward interview segment.

And finally here’s a song off One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This (2006), the first of several well-received New York Dolls’ reunion albums co-written by surviving members Sylvain Sylvain and David Johansen. 

When it comes to the rest of the Dolls: Johnny Thunders passed away in 1991; drummer Billy Murcia died in 1972 on tour in the UK before the first album was even recorded, and subsequent drummer Jerry Nolan died in 1992; bassist Arthur Kane held out until the next decade and played the first Dolls reunion show in London in 2004 but died shortly thereafter before the Dolls had started work on their mid-aughts album. This excellent article from Classic Rock magazine traces the band’s path of self-destruction and their salvation of rock ‘n’ roll. Today, only Buster Poindexter survives to carry the torch. (Jason Lee)

One good thing about playing in a one-man shoegaze band is that you always know whose shoes you’re gazing at. And for a style of music that’s the aural equivalent of cocooning, this sense of isolation isn’t necessarily a bad thing. On Sunflares EP, which you guessed it, is the coming-out EP by Sunflares, a project said to be inspired by the isolation of quarantine (wait, better make that the “staying in EP”) the alone time appears to have paid dividends.

And the same goes for listening to the EP for those of us under our fifth or sixth lockdown. When lines like “Are you out there?” and “I wanna know your secrets” emerge from the layers of fuzz and flange they sound eerily familiar as they’re questions I’ve been asking myself after sitting at home for the whole night, drinking an entire case of Bud Light that was planned to last for the rest of the week or longer, but at least existential crises keep things interesting. Shoegazer, know thyself.

Sunflares’ opening track “Numb” kicks things off with some nice Lush-like swirly guitars, but any trace of Sweetness and Light is quickly interrupted when the song shifts into Superblast mode with distortion turned up to 13, but with a cool little Cure-like melody over the top and some satisfying tom-tom fills, before settling into the first verse with this enterprise’s Kevin Shields fully engaged and phaser pedals set to stun, all ready to swoop in and take out the Ringo Deathstarr. And here’s a couple music videos for those two very subtle Lush references I made because I’m always looking for a good excuse to post Lush videos.

In other words, Mr. Sunflare hits the major signposts you’d hope to hear on a 2021 shoegaze album (or shoegaze EP let’s not be pedantic here) with satisfying walls of sound and layers of effects-laden guitar smeared across this EP like strawberries and cream. But at the same time there’s some enticing twists and things are mixed up nicely overall, between and within the four tracks on offer, with shifting tempos and textures and heavy-devy parts and dreamy ambient parts. And finally here’s a video for the even more artfully subtle Cure reference contained in this paragraph. (Jason Lee)

Depending on your existing knowledge of skate culture, streetwear, and Frank Ocean minutia you may or may not know Navy Blue by the name of Sage Elsesser. Under his birth name he achieved teenage/early adulthood renown as a professional skateboarder sponsored by such obscure niche brands as Supreme and Converse before branching out into modeling, sneaker design, and art direction, then going on to appear on Frank Ocean’s Blonde and collaborate musically with his roomie Earl Sweatshirt, which makes sense given their shared taste for blunted beats and razor-sharp lyrics and laid back but tongue twisting flows. Today Elsesser draws more than occasional comparisons to legends like Dilla (RIP) and Doom (RIP) which is enough to make the rest of us reassess our five-year plans.

On Song of Sage: Post Panic!, his second full-length released under Navy Blue, the moniker is linked (“I been feeling Navy Blue just like my father’s cigarettes," referring to a now-obscure brand of British cigarettes) in one single turn of phrase to familial heritage and chemical addiction and struggles with depression which just happen to be a few of the recurring themes on the album. Across eighteen tracks of introspective, incantatory raps and equally incantatory, trance-inducing production, Song of Sage bridges the gap between the blues and hip hop with its emotional power and musical aesthetics. It would be interesting to test the theory but I bet open-minded fans of old-school Hill Country blues artists (see Mississippi Fred McDowell, Junior Kimbrough, Rosa Lee Hill, R.L. Burnside) would get into this album intuitively given their overlap in mesmerizing grooves and plaintive vocals and heady vibes.

Tracks on the album like “Tired", “Post Panic!” and “Self Harm,” with their unsparing accounts of trauma and its PTSD-inflicted aftermath, act as mental health mic checks (in high demand these days) but by the final track the light at the end of the toll tunnel shines on our guide with hard-won “tears of joy / my pain fixed.” Further musical solace is provided throughout Song of Sage, which some Internet heads have deemed the best produced album of 2020, with production duties shared by Animoss, Bori, Nicholas Craven, Evidence, Jacob Rochester, Alexander Spit, Chuck Strangers, and Roper Williams, alongside five tracks produced by Navy Blue himself.

Throughout the album Navy Blue has seemingly no fear when it comes to exposing open-wounded vulnerability like on “Moment Hung” where he dives straight into the troubling ambiguity of its title vacillating between states of grace, resignation, rage, and pacification just in its opening bars–“I’m moving graciously through all the nonsense / I was complacent when this shit was toxic / fuck all these racists they getting their tops split / your lucky day ‘cause I’m not with it / never fazed by a white critic [that’s me, admittedly] crucial / most this shit not unusual”–going on to lament the by-now-tragically-routine dehumanization of bodycam/cell phone public lynchings that “televise the demise” of “our fathers, our aunties and uncles.”

Despite this painful subject matter, the Ryosuke Tanzawa directed music video for the song features Mr. Blue taking his adorable pooch for a walk down a snow-covered Brooklyn block and across a neighborhood park while massaging the doggie’s ears, and listeners’ ears, with a melodious flow backed by a buttery Natalie Cole-sampled track produced by Jacob Rochester. Taken together the music, lyrics, and video are a beautifully executed example of the centuries-old tradition of signifyin(g) where familiar one-to-one associations and seemingly incompatible impulses are mashed up and subverted and inverted, using the language of the oppressor as a means of subverting the language of white supremacy itself. In other words, it’s complicated, just like real life.

Along these same lines of colliding impulses and emotions, it’s no mistake that the crossroads is the storied origin of the blues, as in the famous Mississippi crossroads where Robert Johnson made his famous Faustian bargain, serves as a stand-in for all the deals with the devil made in the nation’s history and bringing us to our current state of affairs. On Song of Sage Navy Blue deals with all kinds of crossroads especially those moving across space and time. For example take the opening track “Dreams Of A Distant Journey” with a hook evoking the tangled roots of uprooted peoples, linked to the Yoruban veneration of sacred points of intersection as preserved in Afro-Caribbean religious traditions: 

I got a fam in Santiago, I got a fam in Tennessee
Child of Ogun his spirit walk amongst the trees
Proper dearest came from Nashville, it’s Choctaw in me
It’s Choctaw in me

Moving from spatial crossroads to temporal crossroads on “1491,” the legacy of Christopher Columbus’s so-called discovery of the Americas is traced forward to its echoes in the present–a crossroads reaching across centuries that’s yet to be transcended. But in the meantime and in these mean times, at least we have music like Navy Blue’s as a way to transcend and to acknowledge all those who are simultaneously bleeding. 

Forgive me, dear reader, for I am still willfully stuck in "2020 Year In Review" mode and refuse to believe that 2021 has even begun yet. Not without reason obviously. So let’s agree to decree the past week as the messy afterbirth of 2020 and now officially move on to the actual start of 2021 if nobody minds. And let’s pray we’re not dealing with evil twin years because a conjoined 2020/2021 would no doubt make those creepy twins from the Overlook Hotel look like nothing more than adorable "cousins…identical cousins." And on that note we recommend you listen to "2020," a song released by Fiona Silver near the end of the year, to help us usher it out the door and into oblivion: 

Fittingly for its subject, the song is a blooze-rockin’ gutbucket punch to the gut but just think what it’s doing for your abs. Fiona’s lyrics liken the year just past…whoops I mean about to pass…to a petty thief (maybe a slumlord too judging by imagery in the video) and then to a leather daddy who likes to play rough. It all builds to a frenetic guitar solo and a sound collage of news reports laying out some of the lowlights of the year before thankfully wrapping up with a final rousing chorus.

Speaking of all things fit for a masochist, back in the halcyon days of January 2020 Ms. Silver released what turned out to be an oracular track for January of this year called "Violence" whose lyrics describe abuse and its aftermath ("My sweet Lord, you bring me down / swinging low sweet chariot of sound / violence, I hit the ground […] will you come and dig me out / six feet under no voice left to shout / pushing daisies I’m home sweet home") but this song comes swaddled in a funky uptown arrangement with a strong Daptone vibe which creates quite the interesting juxtaposition. Check out the live rendition below with full-on horn section and wah-wah pedal in full effect.  

"Violence" could soon also be found on Fiona’s Hostage of Love EP released on Valentine’s Day appropriately enough. These five songs are plenty enough for our guitarist-songwriter-chanteuse to show off her range–the slow burning title track being one example and the mid-tempo groover "Hot Tears" being another. Now, this may be wishful thinking and at the risk of jinxing it, here’s hoping 2021 shows us some of its range soon by getting as far the f*** away from 2020 as humanly and humanely possible. (Jason Lee)

This writer is still stuck in "2020 Year In Review" mode because this writer refuses to believe that 2021 has even begun yet. Let’s agree this past week was merely the afterbirth of 2020 and move on to the real start of the year next week mmm’kay? And let’s pray we’re not dealing with evil 2020/2021 twins because I’m guessing they’d make those twins from The Shining look like nothing more than the "cousins…identical cousins" from The Patty Duke Show. Anyway, here’s one of my fave rekkids from last year I mean this year:

Artist: Death Valley Girls
Record: Under the Spell of Joy

Imagine if the Manson Girls had talked Charlie out of that whole Tate-LaBianca nonsense and instead wrote a bunch of cool songs and talked Mr. Helter Skelter into murdering his guitar parts instead of writing drivel like “Look At Your Game Girl” and then enrolled as a group in some EST seminars and you may have ended up with something like this album rather than a bunch of dead bodies. On the Death Valley Girls’s fourth full-length, frontwoman Bonnie Bloomgarden and company subtly expand their sonic palette with a mix of funhouse organ and guitar, fevered sax squalls, motivational mantras (a children’s choir is even brought into service!) and a clutch of songs that put the “mesmerism” back into “mesmerizing.”

Opening track “Hypnagogia” sets the tone with its cascading layers of sound enveloping the listener in the liminal state of its title–a word for the twilight consciousness between wakefulness and sleep–a state that holds sway more or less to the last track with its declaration that “life is but a dream / that is really happening.” A kinda concept album about joy made by a gothy garage-psych band previously drawn to all things dark and spooky it’s unsurprising that DVG doesn’t offer up too many bromides here–”You will survive / while you’re alive” is pragmatic uplift–but the joy on offer *is* unhesitating and unadulterated. Best of all UTSOJ manages to capture something akin to the blissful state I’ve experienced alongside many others at DVG’s incredible live shows. And that’s a joyous thing indeed. (Jason Lee)

photo credit: Abby Banks

Band Name: Egg Drop Soup

Vital stats: EDS is an inyourface, unapologetic, all-womxn alt-punk trio…preparing for the end of the patriarchy (source: official bio)

Latest release: Five-track “Eat Snacks and Bleed” EP released on Christmas Day, no doubt sending Hallmark movies everywhere scuttling into the shadows and hiding for the rest of the winter

One sentence EP review: EDS have taken their scrappy punk tunes into new territory with injections of doom metal, power pop, and psych rock which should provide listeners with years of immunity to all things lame and oppressive

Two songs & music videos that a generation ago would be all over college radio and 120 Minutes and Alternative Nation and probably would have the band opening for L7 by now: “Hard To Hold On” and the non-EP single “Subdivision”

First track of the new EP described in real time in one long run-on sentence: The opening minute of “Rank Heavy Metal Parking Lot” certainly lives up to its name, or maybe it’s more like the sound of rifling through an older brother’s or cool uncle’s record collection: starting with some lighter-waving Eddie-esque Eruptions and soon switching over to some Paranoidish head-banging power chords before settling into a more typical mid-tempo Sabbath stomp, but then when the vocals enter the song goes a little bit sideways into spacey psych-rocklandia with lyrics about hands and eyes and heads and beds shuffled into unlikely configurations ending with a repeated refrain about “waiting a lifetime” and seriously this song is starting to remind me of the Breeders’ “Safari” with its righteous riffage and brief bout of shreddage (Tanya D!) and hypnotic reverb-laden Deal sister harmonizing (a song whose music video is an homage to Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” hmm…) and then finally we’re back to the faster second riff and it’s all done in less than three minutes—all of which reminds me of the brace-faced redhead with the red cup in the actual movie “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” (go out and track down a bootleg copy on VHS if you haven’t seen it already) who says she wants to jump Rob Halford’s bones—purr purr sweetly deluded and extremely wasted feathered redheaded girl—and really when you think about it this song seems like it should be her soundtrack what with its frenzied hormonal drive and addled thoughts and unfulfilled longings, with our hero bravely making her way in the boyzone of the rank heavy metal hesher parking lot on her own terms and with unrestrained agency; I’ll bet that the red cup girl turned out just fine even if it took a lifetime. (Jason Lee)

DURING THESE TIMES when most of us are feeling more than a little disconnected, New Myths‘ “Bad Connection” hits some kind of sweet and sour spot. And while virus as metaphor does feel a little on the nose–alongside mentions of being “frozen in time” and “folded inside”–I can attest to the fact that although New Myths put out the song (just barely) post-pandemic it was written and performed well before any hint of what was to come existed. Anyways a slightly closer listen to the lyrics, and a viewing of the video, reveals the song to be more likely about the foibles of mass media and modern tools of communication and disturbed mental states. But what’s crucial on another level is how it throbs with a nervous energy and a forward momentum that’s sorely needed–I remember seeing them live a couple times in the beforetimes and when drummer Rosie Slater belted out her banshee wail on the song’s hook while still rocking out behind the kit it was pretty damn energizing–so consider this single a shot in the arm.

Because the people demand it: here in one convoluted, name-dropping sentence is how I’d sum up New Myths. Neon-hued both visually and sonically, this power trio’s combination of intense electro-rock sonics, pop savvy, punkish energy, glam theatricality, and occasional gothy moodiness is something like the lovechild of Shirley Manson and Marilyn Manson who’s now all grown up and going to her first orgy with a guest list that includes the Hanson brothers circa “MmmBop” and the full cast of the Josie and the Pussycats movie during which a DJ is slated to spin tracks by Republica, Elastica, and Veruca Saltica to set the proper mood. (If there’s any major label reps out there looking to hire a professional blurb writer just slide on into the Deli’s DMs and I’ll hit you back.)

Speaking of all things neon-hued, New Myths released their music video for “Bad Connection” last month and true to form it’s pure adrenaline. I mean, sure, maybe you’ll never get to see Christopher Nolan’s Tenet in a movie theater. But this video contains enough video-within-a-video high concept moolah shots in the span of five minutes to fully scratch your meta movie itch. In a clip directed by prolific music video director and underground filmmaker Dylan Mars Greenberg (her filmography includes 2016’s Werewolf Bitches from Outer Space starring Janeane Garofalo) the trio of Brit, Marina, and Rosie take on roles ranging from a ‘40s Andrew Sisters style singing group (makes sense given how they can rock those three-part harmonies) to an ‘80s Pat Benetar type band to a Beastie Boys "Alive" homage all in convincing and rapid fire form.

The vid also features a substantial cameo appearance from Tish and Snooky, the legendary sisters on the scene who were active in NYC glam and punk circles in the 1970s. Tish and Snooky aka the Bellomo Sisters took on backing vocal duties in a Blondie-adjacent band and co-formed their own group known as the Sic F*cks (standout track: “Chop Up Your Mother”) and right around the same time in ‘77 they opened the first punk rock fashion store in the country, on St. Mark’s Place, called Manic Panic. And if that name sounds familiar you’re not mistaken because out of the store came the Manic Panic assortment of hair dyes that blew up big time and helped turn many once-average local mall rats into insta punk rockers and new wavers (and goth-ers and ravers) in the ‘80s/‘90s/2000s which is what DIY is all about after all. Power to the Peroxided People.

So suffice to say, New Myths cover a lot of ground in their "Bad Connection" music video. Now if only they’d made some references to the Roaring Twenties and dressed up as flappers it’d be the complete package but I suppose it can wait until the next video. Just so happens I’ve got a side hustle as a music video consultant so maybe have your people call my people… (Jason Lee)

photo credit: Andrew Segreti

Jam (noun): a sweet, sticky edible substance made of fruit and sugar, boiled to a thick gelatinous consistency that’s yielding and spreadable

Jam (verb): to push, shove, squeeze or otherwise manipulate an object into a constrained space, often implied to be aggressively or even forcibly realized

Contained in this little three-letter word are at least six or seven distinct meanings according to this thing once referred to as a dictionary (it’s like a papery blog). And while we’re talking semiotics it’s interesting to note how the two definitions above are on opposite ends of the spectrum in some ways: yielding vs. forceful, sweet vs. aggressive. 

Another meaning of jam: “An extended, semi-unstructured musical passage, or entire musical work, in which synchronized, partially improvised interactions between musicians are of key importance–often with the objective of achieving a concentrated, intensified, and/or ecstatic state of perception among both musicians and listeners. The formal properties of the jam (aka “jammers”) tend to revolve around an optimal balance between repetition and variation; and on the macro level, a continuous ebbing and flowing in terms of tempo, dynamics, and/or texture before ultimately reaching a climactic release, with the notable exception of “mellow jams” or “droney jams” where such macro-level formal developments are de-emphasized or not sought at all.”

The long-running bands Woods are masters jammers (but not a “jam band,” you won’t find too many patchouli-besotted noodle dancers at their shows). And in their jamming they capture all the dictionary meanings of jam described above–playing music that’s alternately and sometimes at once both sweet and aggressive, ethereal and ferocious, disciplined and sprawling. 

Besides their proclivity for jamming Woods are master songwriters as well with a musical palette stretching from pastoral folk rock to driving alt-pop to resplendent psychedelic rock. If you need proof of any of this I’d recommend spending New Year’s Eve and Day listening to their eleven albums (the latest being Strange To Explain released earlier this year) plus the compilation released out in October called Reflections Vol. 1 (Bumble Bee Crown King) that brings together rare and unreleased recordings made between 2009 and 2013. One standout on the latter is an early demo of “Bend Beyond” that’s a good deal more jammy than the version on the Bent Beyond album (2012). And below you can hear how they stretched out the song even more when they played it live. 

Strange To Explain is a fitting epithet for the year that just passed, featuring songs that act as a gentle balm for dreamers (“Where Do You Go When You Dream?”) and insomniacs (“Just To Fall Asleep”) alike. Here is an album that puts the “vibey” back in vibraphone and the “mellow” back in Mellotron, both instruments featured heavily on the album.

The writing of Strange To Explain overlapped with the band’s Purple Mountains project, a collaboration with Silver Jews’ frontman David Berman. The reclusive songwriter and genius poet came out of a decade-long retirement from music to record the album with Woods. Sadly, after a life-long struggle with depression, Berman committed suicide in 2019 just weeks before a widely-anticipated Purple Mountains tour.

And so as we say good-bye and good riddance to 2020 let’s pay tribute to those we lost and those among us who feel lost. And give thanks for the transcendence granted by the music that we love–whatever it may be–more important than ever this past year. Personally I’ll be riding it out with “Weekend Wind,” the mellow jammer that closes Strange To Explain. (Jason Lee)

Imagine if a parallel-universe version of the band Television wrote songs about actual televisions with lines like “tell me all the things that you see in me / can it be explained through the TV? / cuz that’s all I know.” Now listen to “Ridden” and imagine no more.  

On Hypoluxo’s third album which is A) self-titled, B) self-possessed, C) self-reliant, or D) all of the above the Brooklyn-based quartet makes the kind of post-punk-inflected guitar-oriented music that critics love to refer to as “angular.” It’s a fitting description but let’s face it there’s lots of different kinds of angles. Any geometrist worth her weight in protractors will tell you there’s acute angles and right angles and obtuse angles just for starters. On Hypoluxo, Hypoluxo has all these angles covered and more.

For sharp-and-severe acute angles take a listen to “Night Life” with its martial drum beat, slithering bassline and twin-guitar sheer heart attack. The song’s ricocheting melodies (headphones recommended) capture something of the anticipation and the anxiety, the potential desperation and potential catharsis of its subject matter, culminating in a frenzied freakout on the dancefloor.

Next, for some obtuse angles check out “Shock” which confronts the vague but pervasive sense of fear hanging in the air as of late. “Well it’s a SHOCK / working up / to realizing this is not a DREAM” is the immaculately articulated opening gambit, going on to describe a mind stressed and dulled by 2020 PTSD. Guitars circle overhead for much of the song, like a flock of angry-but-one-hopes-not-predatory birds, with the fog finally broken by the Rent Is Too Damn High refrain in the song’s coda.

And finally, on “Nimbus” Hypoluxo gives the listener the right angle (heh heh) on how weathermen (and weatherladies let’s be fair) are the scourge of humanity or at least one of them anyway. And wouldn’t you know it, the 1% own all the umbrellas. Michael Stipe once posed the question: “Should we talk about the weather [or] should we talk about the government?” But Hypoluxo make it abundantly clear that they’re one and the same thing. So let’s talk about both and hope for better weather in 2021.
(Jason Lee)

Maraschino, aka Piper Durabo, is a Los Angeles-based performing artist, songwriter, guitarist, producer, and radio DJ. So why cover her on the Deli NYC blog? Two reasons: First, having come across her music thanks to the gloriously askew “Synthmus” holiday special recently alluded to in this space, it turns out that Durabo started the Maraschino project while residing in the city in 2018 and had her live debut at a Red Bull Music Academy show in Coney Island; and second, because her featured performance on said holiday special, for which she also served as co-host, was a cover of Cristina’s “Things Fall Apart,” a song that’s New York City to the core.

Cristina, full name Cristina Monet Zilkha (1956-2020), was a massively influential but still largely unheralded New York City native whose handful of singles and two albums–released on ZE Records between 1978 and 1984–established a template for ‘80s downtown cool in terms of music and fashion and overall attitude that helped shape not only the early careers of mainstream artists like Cyndi Lauper and Madonna, but also countless others in subsequent years/decades who fused elements of pop, disco, punk, new wave, and avant-gardism as a sort of “Brechtian pastiche” in Cristina’s own words. Ms. Monet Zilkha sadly passed away on March 31, 2020 after suffering for years from autoimmune disorders and then contracting COVID early in its reign of horror. Obituaries can be found here and here.

The similarly single-monikered Maraschino is by all appearances a 21st-century inheritor to Cristina’s legacy. From her output with the Teen Vogue touted sister-act Puro Instinct, who were once described as “Stevie Nicks through a lens of chiffon and horse tranquilizers” (Isn’t Stevie Nicks usually already wearing chiffon? Oh well, nevermind!) to her several singles released under the new cherrubic rubric, Ms. Durabo is clearly an apprentice of Christina’s outsider pop art, or as she herself puts it “mystic disco-pop for introverts.” Along these lines Maraschino’s debut single “True Lover” (2019) must have had Martin Gore clutching his leather chaps in jealousy with its earworm fusion of boppy major-key synths and sadomasochistic subtext–a dynamic that’s effectively captured in the music video which itself matches the Mode for overall icy hotness.

Also not unlike Cristina, who recorded a clutch of memorable covers ranging from Prince’s “When U Were Mine” to the Beatles’ “Drive My Car” to Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” (the latter of which being one the greatest cover versions ever recorded in the history of humankind in the mind of this humble writer), Maraschino has likewise taken a shine to the art of the musical homage. To wit, this year she’s put out covers of both the Carly Simon/Chic collab “Why” as well as the aforementioned “Things Fall Apart.”

While technically a Christmas song, “Things Fall Apart” is one of those rare instances of a seasonal song that transcends its trappings–a tale of struggle and perseverance in the midst of poverty, perversion, romantic betrayal, tree murder, and motherly love. To her credit Maraschino pulls off a beautifully streamlined synthpop version of the song, capturing the melancholic yet oddly hopeful mood of the original (see the top of this page for the video) and Cristina’s finely-honed deadpan yet fully engaged vocal delivery:

The party was a huge success
"But where should we go next?" they said
They killed a tree of 97 years
And smothered it in lights and silver tears
They all got wrecked
They laughed too loud
I started to feel queasy in the crowd
I caught a cab back to my flat
And wept a bit
And fed the cat

Most widely known from its inclusion on Cristina’s swan song Sleep It Off (1984), “Things Fall Apart” was first released on ZE Records’ 1981 LP A Christmas Record which also introduced the world to the Waitresses’ now perennial “Christmas Wrapping” (by far the most quasi-cheery song on the album). The Xmas comp didn’t shy away from the avant-pop experimentalism and No Wave severity that were ZE’s stock in trade (home to releases by James Chance and the Contortions, Suicide, Was (Not Was), and Lydia Lunch/Teenage Jesus and the Jerks among others) and has been called “the first alternative Christmas album” and “the darkest Christmas record of all time." So now you know where to go for one last dose of holiday weirdness this year. And should you go there (trivia alert!) you’ll also learn where Madonna found inspiration for the hook on her first hit single. (Jason Lee)