photo by Tasha Lutek

The piano isn’t exactly the coolest instrument in the public imagination these days and it hasn’t been for a good while which yeah of course there’s plenty of cool piano music out there but not like back in the day like say 19th-century Europe up to its armpits in mad genius sex-crazed pianist-composers roaming the continent like the polonaise-playing rock stars of their day…

…wantonly indulging in sex, drugs, and Rachmaninoff and not even the most shameful STD of the century could stop Byronic fops like Robert "Mad Bob" Schumann from writing some truly sick tunes (wordplay!) made only sicker by the syphilis-induced “hallucinations and horrors and psychological conflicts reflected in [their’] music” this according to an article entitled “Syphilis’ Impact on Late Works of Classical Music Composers” published in the July 2021 issue of International Journal of Urologic History which makes for great bathroom reading…YEAH I JUST WENT THERE SO F*CKING WHAT!

…and heck even well into the 20th century the piano was still pretty damn hip, take for instance the early-century rise of stride, ragtime, and boogie-woogie piano styles or the decades-long dominance of Tin Pan Alley which birthed the modern day hit parade by selling millions of copies of piano-based sheet music to the All-American masses ultimately displaced by the piano-pounding R&B shouters and early rock ’n’ rollers of the mid-20th-century…

…but this all changed somewhere between then and now and personally I’m inclined to hold Giorgio Moroder and Peter Criss of KISS responsible cuz in the first case when the Italian synth wizard teamed up with disco queen Donna Summer for “I Feel Love” in 1977 the synthesizer was transformed overnight—once the primary province of pretentious prog rock profligacy—into a booty-shaking, floor-filling miracle machine and why would anyone wanna play a dumb ol’ piano ever again…

…meanwhile a year earlier the fire breathing, blood spewing, all-night partiers known as KISS scored their first top ten hit with a piano-driven ballad called “Beth” featuring the band’s raspy-voiced, pussy-faced drummer apologizing (apologizing!) to his titular lady friend for staying out too late rockin’ out with the boys and at precisely this moment the piano became the antithesis of cool… 

…and don’t even get me started on Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (an easy target, I realize, but still!) with its self-regarding, pseudo-Dylanesque portrait of a “piano man” who despite being lucky enough to be gainfully employed at a local watering hole and to be much loved by its regular clientele (“it’s me they’ve been comin’ to see”) nonetheless looks down his nose at all the pathetic, self-deluded saps (“they’re sharing a drink they call loneliness”) who hang out at the piano bar…

…but never mind Billy Joel or Peter Criss or Donna Summer because this article is about SEAN SPADA (obviously!) and SEAN SPADA is the real deal, a hard-working, consummate-pro piano everyman who would never dream of insultingly patronizing the sad sacks at the bar because clearly he identifies with and counts himself among the sad sacks at the bar (“the world is too much, I’m not enough”) facing down life’s dead-ends and cul-de-sacs with steely resolve, fatalistic wit, and a clutch of jazz-laced seven- and nine-chords on his new album The Wild Ride…

…a record that’s not lacking for Leonard Cohen/Tom Waits type vibes like when Sean wonders aloud “am I lost? / am I found?” before conceding that “sometimes I just prefer to be / spaaaaacing oooout” which is a theme explored at length on numbers like “Spacing Out, Pt. 1” and “Spacing Out, Pt,. 2,” songs that are fittingly full of stereo-panned mindfuckery (theremins and vocoders and vibraslaps, oh my!) so pass the bong, yo…

…but it’s “Doppelgänger Jungle” that’s the biggest head trip of all, a six-and-a-half-minute epic tale of “shadow selves escaping from my dreams” glanced by our narrator on every other street corner, a paranoic but pretty rad fantasy matched to a soundtrack of planetarium-ready percolating synths and a whole entire part that sounds like a Steely Dan/ELO/Boz Skaggs mashup and finally an extended breakdown coda section with “breakdown” being the operative word that slowly-but-surely builds back up to a swirling vortex of sound before trailing off again with some airy vocal harmonies floating off into the ether like a puff of fog machine smoke in the corner of a run down piano bar…

…so needless to say it’s a wild ride akin to “Pablo Cruise in purgatory” (pull quote!) or if you prefer a cross "between Randy Newman and Huey Lewis" but either way it’s a ride that never flies off the rails thanks to the ever-present guard rails of Sean’s sensitive, skillful piano playing to the point where I’m moved to proclaim The Wild Ride the world’s first psychedelic piano lounge yacht-rock-run-aground rock operetta, a character study of a piano man who may be “Set Up To Self Destruct” but who’s nonetheless “Getting on the Highway” with predictable results perhaps but all the more stirring for seeing it coming…

…so in closing we recommend you pour yourself a double on the rocks and don’t forget the swizzle stick (because…stirring!) before dropping the digital needle on Sean Spada’s The Wild Ride and when he observes in the album-opening “When You’re Crazy” that “the only sane way to truly be yourself” is to embrace your own craziness you’ll no doubt slowly and sagely nod your head and raise your glass to toast the bittersweet poignancy of it all. (Jason Lee)

Admittedly I can be prone to taking band names a little too literally sometimes but with Two-Man Giant Squid I think it’s a fair opening gambit because even though they’re on the record described their band name as silly it nonetheless conveys the aura of TMGS’s debut LP Abyssal Gigantism and by the way that’s “abyssal” and not “abysmal” as in an an immeasurably deep gulf vs. immeasurable deep suckitude…

…because right from the opening moments of opening track “Don’t Make Your Presence Known” the band has a way with combining herky-jerky rhythms, twisty arrangements and “angular” melodies™ much like a lurching pantomime horse whose head and ass each have a mind of their own (i.e., two heads) which is both amusing and unsettling to witness…

…with the surreal subaquatic fluidity of a giant squid witness for instance the watery vibes of song #2 on the album “First (And Last) Time In Your Nightclub” which has been described elsewhere as the band’s “November Rain” and in fact I’d say the record as a whole continually plays off this same dynamic push-and-pull between teetering post-punk angularity and woozily soft-focus psychedelia, ergo Two-Man Giant Squid…

…all of which can now be tossed out the window because TMGS’s just-dropped single “Versechorus” throws the listener a curveball with its straight-down-the-middle verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge song structure and its loud-quiet-loud grunge dynamics not to mention its repetitive, self-referential lyrics (“I’ll probably just, like…write a bridge”) that otherwise concerns mundane topics like text messaging…

…which all makes sense once you realize the song is intended “as a tongue-in-cheek FU to modern songwriting expectation” or “a tongue-in-cheek spite-song that was written as an FU to a former band member who was not pulling his weight because the songs weren’t ‘verse-chorus’ enough for him to learn properly” which I wouldn’t have realized without the quotes above kindly provided by frontperson Mitch Vinokur…

…and the way I see it “Versechorus” could easily end up being TMGS’s “Song 2’ in other words a lean-yet-loin-stirring garage punk ripper by an art-damaged band who accidentally pen a future sports-stadia anthem that although intended sardonically at first is transfigured over time into a populist fist-pumping, adrenaline-boosting singalong of the masses (there’s even a subtle “woo-hoo!’ near the end) and if it actually pans out this way remember you heard it here first! (Jason Lee)

Imagine a TV show revolving around a Partridge Family style band but made up of three Venezuelan cousins known collectively as Joudy (pronounced ‘howdy’ for all you gringos) with hair easily as resplendent as David Cassidy’s or Susan Day’s back in the day and who instead of playing preternaturally perky sunshine pop while traveling the country in a brightly colored Mondrian-inspired school bus are more inclined to dress in black and they’ve traveled across multiple countries already having migrated from the lush valleys of the Chiapas Highlands (San Cristóbal more specifically) to the dense steel canyons of New York City owing to the dire economic and political straits of their native country…

…a country that’s witnessed nearly seven million of its inhabitants depart since 2014 which is (or was) around 15% of its total population but despite this staggering loss of human capital it’s been reported that Venezuela’s musical heart is still beating strong and what’s more the country’s already eclectic, expansive musical landscape now spans across the globe like never before with the diaspora absorbing new influences along the way and influencing those same locales in return…

…case in point being Joudy themselves with their restless, searching energy and eclectic musical tastes ranging from jazz to Black Sabbath to Massive Attack just listen to their latest single “Uneasy” which sounds like a pot about to boil over with its roiling bass line and porous guitar chords dissolving into the ether like water into steam not to mention the unsettled guitar melody that sounds like it’s searching note-by-note for a point of arrival but never finding one…

…but it’s an uneasiness that comes across more galvanizing than paralyzing to these ears, seeing as how I can’t see how anyone could manage to sit still to Joudy’s music—even the literally-and-figuratively-dark music video, directed by G. Duque, ends with a synchronized dance number as seen above—with the lyrics likewise compelling movement in lines like “the burning bush has been speaking loud and clear” which is an obvious call to action unless you think that speaking, sentient plants can just be ignored but we’ve all seen Little Shop Of Horrors haven’t we…

…and much as the sacred shrubbery that confronted Moses in the Book of Exodus was located in a mystical, liminal space between the divine and the physical worlds, likewise a band like Joudy occupies a liminal space which in this case is more between the Global South and Global North not to mention also between musical genres ranging from grunge and metal (doom metal especially) to psych and prog (e.g., occasional odd meters, intricate song structures, and trippy solos that conjure up Bill Ham light shows) plus hints of Krautrock, trip hop, stoner rock, Latin funk, post punk, and even gaita zuliana (Venezuelan folk music with no shortage of spunk) if you’re inclined to hear it…

…which makes sense given how each member of Joudy is coming from a different place musically which come to think of it is a big plus for our prospective TV show (for your basic sitcom format each character must adhere to a "type") and while their heavy real world circumstances may make for a hard sell to network execs it bears remembering that The Partridge Family had both a Black Power episode and an episode where they played at a prison during its four-year run…

…or it could be pitched as a prestige cable "dramedy" along the lines of a Venezuelan-American Reservation Dogs meets Stranger Things (we’ll soon see how monsters come into play) playing up the contrast between the band’s ferocity on stage and their mild-mannered demeanors offstage not to mention singer-songwriter-guitarist Diego Ramirez being a trained, working architect much like the patriarch of the Brady Bunch and that guy from How I Met Your Mother plus the many other fictional architects populating TV shows and movies whatever that’s about…

…a fact that I learned after meeting up with Diego one evening at Brooklyn’s Anchored Inn (the perfect name for a bar not just for Joudy but for all us non-native New Yorkers who’s dropped anchor in the big city) where he filled me in on some other relevant details like how he’s inclined to sometimes invent his own scales to be fleshed out in individual songs, so no wonder there’s a restless, exploratory quality to so much of their music..

…and also how Joudy formed as a five-piece a decade ago before going on indefinite hiatus and then unexpectedly reforming and honing their sound when 3/5 of its members ended up in NYC (and not all at once either) with Javier Ramirez and Gabriel Gavidia driving the relentlessly churning rhythm section (on bass and drums respectively) and with Diego blowing up his guitar parts to more and more cinematic proportions but also leaving more and more space where called for which is easier when you don’t have three guitarists…

…and also I got a sampling of Venezuelan rock and folk music to check out with Diego name-checking both Zeta and Lil Supa as musical influences—the former mixing post-rock and goth and grindcore and to face-melting effect while the latter is more like Mobb Deep lost deep in the Andes—and based on these and other encounters I gotta say that “face melting” seems to be the norm for Venezuelan music (including electronic music just check out this recent profile and interview with Venezuelan-American "hyperreal hyperpop" vocalist-songwriter-producer Slic) to the point where I’m not sure how anyone from this country has a face left at all…

…a country where even the folk music will make you wanna bang your head and wake the dead, and if you’re not buying it go listen to some gaita zuliana (aka “gaita”) or some joropo tunes or just about anything played on Venezuela’s national instrument, the uke-like lute called the cuatro (with four strings, natch) that Diego says influenced his own guitar playing…

…and now I”m starting to hear how Joudy take the cuatro’s breakneck strumming patterns, slows them down and stretches them out into heavy-but-nonetheless-restless riffs and rhythms while retaining their home country’s upbeat-accenting syncopations (go and listen to the drumming on “Uneasy” again) not to mention polyrhythms and polymeters…

…which not to go too "music theory nerd" on your ass here but quoting from an actual dissertation: “according to the Enciclopedia de la Musica en Venezuela, the joropo always superimposes 6/8 and 3/4 meters [where] the most interesting aspect of the superimposition is that these meters do not start at the same time” or to put it in layperson’s terms “it’s complicated” and it’s no wonder Venezuelan music makes the average person wanna get up and boogie to its entrancing rhythms like a puzzle waiting to be solved through bodily movement…

…and with "Uneasy" being the leadoff track on Joudy’s upcoming album Destroy All Monsters there’s a value inherent to swift and dextrous movement in depicting a kind of hero’s journey with our protagnist navigating from one difficult situation to the next like a modern-day Odysseus making his way between Scylla and Charybdis which today are maybe more like Nicolás Maduro and Ron DeSantis…

…or as Diego himself put it in an interview recently with another outlet: “Each album we’ve put out tells the story of where we were at the moment, and that’s what Destroy All Monsters is. We faced transmutation and the consequences of that can be felt in the songs of this album…through the lens of a mystical epic story [where] the main theme is overcoming the unexpected challenges we’ve faced through different cycles of life”…

…and if you wanna check out some of Joudy’s previous cycles you’re in luck because their two Venezuela-recorded LPs, namely La Bestia (2013) and Obertura (2016), have recently been re-issued and made available in the US for the first time by their US label Trash Casual thus allowing one to chart the band’s development from a Spanish-language Soundgarden of sorts…

…into multi-tentacled beast they’ve since become (but a heroic beast) and when it comes to those older records you may wanns start with the one-two punch of “Obetura” and “El Estigia" from Obertura because why not jump directly into the deep end and then you get to work on figuring out why every song one on La Bestia is a single word starting with the prefix “En“ and then finally you’ll wanna compare Joudy’s newly recorded "transmutated" versions of five of their older songs that they’ve put out the past couple years with the original versions…

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…and finally, finally, seeing as today is Bandcamp Friday (but maybe not Bandcamp Friday by the time you’re actually reading this so…psyche!!) you can go purchase Joudy’s entire recorded catalogue and not feel too bad about it in the morning and meanwhile I’ll write Netflix and pitch them on what’s sure to be the biggest immigration-themed hit TV show since Perfect Strangers debuted in 1986 and just wait until the members of Joudy move in with a trio of stewardesses next season! (Jason Lee)

One could easily see Dune Blue’s gentle psychedelic odes to groovy laidback-itude finding favor with tie-dyed-slash-Hawaiian-shirt types ranging from Deadheads to Parrotheads to Sublime stans (RIP Bradley) meaning that card-carrying punk purists may be disinclined to check them out…  

…but let’s face it, you probably got that dubious punk ID from a ad on on the back of a box of Cocoa Puffs cuz I’m guessing you weren’t hanging out outside CBGBs in 1976 or even in 1996 (more likely you were hanging out in your delinquent brother’s bedroom ripping bong hits while listening to his cassingle of “Santeria” on repeat if you were around in ’96 at all) not to mention Sonny the Cuckoo Bird is clearly a beatnik/burner type more inclined to Country Joe and the Fish than to Crass or Chaos UK but I digress… 

…the point being that every generation needs and deserves its own Edie Brickell and New Bohemians in other words a band that bring some needed edge and eccentricity to genres too often sanded down to a dull edge by lazy imitators and Dune Blue (led by one Roland Mounier) fits the bill perfectly seeing as how they infuse legit grit into their otherwise medium roast blend of pastoral psych, easy skanking reggae and no-static-at-all Steely-Dan-esque smooth jazziness…

…which first became apparent after catching Dune Blue live a little while back and now it’s become even more apparent with the release of their latest single “Breaks My Brain” with it’s dub-inflected, reverb-laden, hazy-shade-of-late-summer vibe that perfectly puts across the song’s title phrase with woozy, wah-wah-pedal assisted atmospherics where all the sounds appear to melt together into one eternal sound…

…not to mention the little saxophone squiggles lurking around the edges and the little pools of shimmering, reverberating runoff hovering around every sonic surface which I’m thinking may relate to the song’s lyrical content and its fixation on flimsy permeable surfaces (using my way through a cellophane scene / losing my touch / recognize no reflection / cracks in the surface of a membrane dream)…

…surfaces prone to breakage when they’re placed under too much pressure (keep it up in a rush / I’ll end up in pieces) but here’s the thing about “Break’s My Brain” it makes this breakage sound like not entirely a bad thing and maybe even a good thing if you believe that nothing ever gets fixed properly until it gets broken properly (what breaks my brain / fills the space) just like Marxists who subscribe to implosion theory…

…and it’s a lesson I’ve taken to heart lately in the midst of muddling through a major life transition plus the notion of “no cure, no blame” is an oddly comforting one so if you’re inclined give the good vibrations of Dune Blue’s “Breaks My Brain” a try not only because of intriguing nuances under the surface but also cuz the surface itself provides a measurable measure of solace in these turbulent times–just be forewarned you may take to wearing bucket hats and making statements along the lines of “excuse me while I light this spliff” if you listen for too long on repeat. (Jason Lee)

Interpolating from the artist’s own declaration of creative intention, Raavi’s “no bodies” is a song about the ontological insecurity not infrequently experienced by artist types who on the one hand seek self-actualization and authenticity by means of artistic expression and on the other seek some measure of ego-sustaining and career-sustaining public approbation and how these two goals can sometimes be antithetical to one another…

…or put into plain English it’s a song about “measuring one’s own worth” in cases where there’s a little voice in your head saying things like “If I’m giving everything to this music career (or whatever), and I’m not succeeding, then where am I? And what even is success?” and where reaching the top of one figurative ladder leads back to the bottom rungs of another ladder…

…thus making it “incredibly difficult to recognize where you are on your own path” in the words of band frontperson and primary songwriter Raavi Sita who as a self-described queer desi may know a thing or two about what’s it like not fitting into socially-imposed prefabricated categories…

…and granted you’re not gonna get all this from this lyrics which are more evocative than explicit and bully for that—although lines like “you hear what / they say bout me / off-kilter / the f#ck that mean?” put across an overall sense of lack-of-fit and thus insecurity not to mention the song’s title which playfully plays off from the anxiety of being “a nobody” crossed with denial of bodily autonomy routinely applied to The Other as in "no bodies for nobodies" or maybe I’m reading into it too much—but it’s the music of “no bodies” that puts across the theme most clearly to these ears…

…with the pleasingly off-kilter (whoops, sorry!) melodic hook and a song structure that moves from earthbound to ethereal and back with gritty guitar tones set against celestial harp-like harmonics, sustained crystalline syllables combined with vocal hiccups and pitch bends; reflective and musical repetitive verses set against sublime interludes soaring off into the stratosphere—and if this is what ontological insecurity sounds like then it’s got its good points at least…

…and right about here it’s probably relevant to mention “no bodies” was produced and engineered by Justin Termotto and to also mention that Raavi’s rhythm section is comprised up of James Duncan (bass) and Jason Block (drums)…

…and finally also that “no bodies” is the latest chapter in the Hardly Art Singles Series of 2022 with the acclaimed Sub Pop sub-label (check out some of their many fantastic current signees) celebrating 15 years of existence with 15 singles curated/commissioned from some of the label’s favorite artists which should help to bolster anyone’s ontological security we hope. (Jason Lee)

Maybe some of you remember seeing a show called Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies (JHMB for short) for the first time back in the day or remember just hearing the name of the show for the first time—or who knows, maybe you’re a toddler-through-tween who knows Muppet Babies from its recent reboot on Disney Junior—but either way I bet when you first stumbled upon JHMB you simply thought “yaaaaas” to yourself…

…because the concept is total perfection—cuteness and nostalgia mixed with the Muppets’ trademark snarky humor (for a kids’ show, at least) but no less sincere for it and overall rough-hewn charm (not to mention the DIY-style felt puppet construction) plus I’ll bet that any one of the Muppet Babies could kick Baby Yoda’s ass all the way to Dagobah and back like Lou Groza on a good day and, I mean, Gonzo or Animal or even the Swedish Chef would probably inadvertantly rip the little backwards-taking, fortune-cookie-quoting green globule to shreds which would keep both of Jim Henson’s hands very busy.

But I digress. The real reason I’m bringing this up is because there’s a good case to be made for Teenage Tom Petties (TTP) being basically a modern-day equivalent of JHMB to the point where the band could legit be renamed Jim Henson’s Gen X Grunge Babies except I do like the mental image of Tom Petty’s lanky frame, center–parted hair, and hangdog face in adolescence with a mouthful of braces and a face full of acne bleating out “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” with his laconic voice breaking on almost every syllable alongside a similarly adorable Teenage Stevie Nicks back when she still had a septum. 

But I digress. Much like Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies, Teenage Tom Petties was hatched from the mind of a single individual, namely, Tom Brown of Rural France fame, who despite the Gallic name are actually from rural England. And if you’re asking yourself “why are a bunch of Britons being featured on the Deli NYC page, and why aren’t they at home sobbing quietly whilst laying a wreath for the Queen?”

Well it’s because the TTP’s are on the road and they’re gonna be playing the first Deli Delivers™ show ever on 9/30, the one and only New York City appearance by the now fully fleshed-out band making their first trip across North America, playing alongside a coterie of cool local NYC acts (The Planes, Holy Tunics, and Kira Metcalf!) at the East Williamsburg EconoLodge (EWEL) but again I digress.

According to their Bandcamp page TTP is a home-recorded garage punk project serving as a semi-autobiographical account of a 90’s teenager, growing up in suburbia, written by someone who was there looking back years later. Quoting directly: “TTP bristles with the excitement of teenage life—the discoveries, the obsessions, the failures, the mundanity—cut through with the lo-fi indie rock sounds of early Lemonheads, Dinosaur Jr and even some Descendants [personally, I’d add Guided By Voices, mid-period Sebadoh, and late-period Replacement to this list not to mention Tom Petty perhaps?] capturing the grandness and smallness of teenage life.”

So ya see we’re talking nostalgia, we’re talking rough-hewn textures (felt puppets in musical form!) and fuzzy sweetness, all mashed up together DIY style just like those Muppet Babies. Take the propulsive “Boatyard Winch” for instance which opens TTP’s eponymous debut record a song that’s either about sailing winches or watery tarts—I can’t make out all the lyrics over the racket which is intended as a compliment of course…

…or the strutting “Lambo,” a song about the narrator’s sweet sweet ride or more likely the Lamborghini poster scotch-taped to his wall as a teenager (is it snarky? is it sincere? is there a difference?) with an accompanying video proving you don’t need anything more than an old VHS copy of Cannonball Run II and a green screen to create art.

Meanwhile, “Boxroom Bangers” is indeed a banger with it’s mounting tension-and-release dynamics while “Last Starfighter” is fittingly anthemic with it’s repeated “I don’t care if you love me” refrain. So, yeah, speaking of refrains I’ll refrain from spoiling the back half of the album for you but rest assured Teenage Tom Petties fully live up to their name and then some with music that’s half math club geek and half shop class greaser—like a faded ‘90s high school yearbook distilled into an airy mist and sprayed into your earholes and here’s hoping their latest single “I Met A Girl In America” proves prescient on tour. (Jason Lee)

“Narcissus” is the new single by Brooklyn-based alt-rock duo Drive-In and true to its title the song deals with the topic of excessive self-regard which is relevant to music bloggers such as myself seeing as how (let’s face it!) music critics can be just as prone to self-mythologizing as musicians (call it the Cameron Crowe Complex!) a tendency that’s only been encouraged in the Internet Era with the rise of blogs and nudes shot with selfie sticks (which we’re fine with!) and rampant oversharing in general…

…plus given the difficulty of translating music into words—"writing about music is like dancing in your underwear while reading Architectural Digest” or something like that according to one overused quote—it only further encourages music writers to fall back on their own biases and fixations and points of reference and personal anecdotes so that "reviews" such as this one risk being more like a self-absorbed, overly referential reflection of the author’s own record collection than an unbiased take on new music…

…which reminds me that I spent a good chunk of yesterday organizing and shelving eight boxes of records recovered from my parents’ attic recently seeing as they were kind enough to store them for a couple years when they moved from Tennessee to South Jersey but now they’re moving back and one record I happened across in the process was Having Fun With Elvis On Stage (1974) about which it’s been said that “hearing it is like witnessing a car wreck, leaving onlookers too horrified and too baffled to turn away” over the course of its 37 minutes of between-song stage banter recorded live at Presley’s early ‘70s concerts (but with no actual songs!) edited together collage-style into a postmodern montage of rambling self-regarding incoherence with Elvis reveling in the screams of horny middle-aged women while doling out sweat-dabbed scarves to concertgoers…

…which just goes to show nobody knows narcissism like jump-suited, bejeweled superstar musicians (except for maybe music bloggers!) and so it’s fitting that artists ranging from Alanis Morisette to Róisín Murphy to Napalm Death have grappled with the classical myth of Narcissus and applied its lessons to shitty romantic partners and presidents alike (Róisín Murphy’s take on narcissists is actually rather sympathetic!) with the latest installment being Drive-In’s “Narcissus," the first single from the band’s upcoming coming-out EP this is not a rom-com set for release on 11/4/22…

…a song that seamlessly blends modern guitar-based indie rock stylings with an aching 1950s/early-60s style chord progression thus providing the perfect sonic backdrop for Alessandra Rincon’s swooning lead vocals (Ally moved from Baton Rouge to NYC to attend grad school in 2017) and also for guitarist Mitch Meyer’s breathy 10cc-style backing vocals (Mitch is originally from Chicago and first met Ally in 2019) and if I were one of those record-collection fixated type of critics I’d probably describe the song as something like Ronnie Spector crossed with Regina Spektor as produced by Phil Spector but that’s too narcissistically clever by half…

…not to mention the song was produced by Ryan Erwin (Particle Devotion, Nice Dog) who to the best of my knowledge is not a murderer with bass tones provided by Quinn Devlin and together they evoke a gently-swaying winsome innocence that makes it feel like you should be listening to "Narcissus" on a car radio circa 1953 while consuming a hamburger and strawberry malt at a drive-in diner on your way to meet a blind date at the drive-in movie theater which makes the band’s name quite apropos but then again the song’s opening lines are “you’re such a fucking narcissist / I can’t believe it came to this” which I don’t think you could get away with in 1953 and nevermind having a Tik-Tok account…

 …but it’s the song’s chorus that really breaks down Narcissistic Personality Disorder with great acumen (I don’t wanna be your echo / don’t wanna stroke your ego / don’t wanna be second best to your reflection / cuz last I checked I’m a person) with backing vocals echoing the lead vocals (clever!) while offering a four-point plan for identifying narcissism and guarding against its deleterious effects across four lines which in turn address the narcissist’s insatiable desire for affirmation, their fragile ego, how they tend to turn everything into a competition and to dehumanize anyone who comes into their orbit. So here we have a song about self-care in relation to those who care only about themselves and let it be a lesson to selfish future frenemies and romantic partners and music bloggers everywhere. (Jason Lee)

To be fair I’m not really sure if Slic’s EP 2Real is really “minimalist hyperreal hyperpop” but it sounds real good in the headline and either way the EP is making is official debut for reals right here on the DELI blog plus it’s really Bandcamp Day (woot woot!) and there’s really an official release party on 9/23 on the rooftop of 99 Canal St. (woot! woot!) so let’s not waste time splitting hairs between reality, surreality, and hyperreality mmmkay.

The title track of 2Real opens with the lyric “I can’t shake this feeling now it’s all too real” sung in airy elevated tones over low synthetic rumblings and radio static but soon the song settles into a unsettled groove of pulsing quasars and it’s revealed in the second verse that “everything I love is from another world” and these two statements taken together get at the heart of Slic’s art with it’s galvanizing, glitched-out interplay between visceral and etherial realms and who’s to say which is really more real?

Likewise, 2Real’s four songs (all production, performance, and writing by Slic; mixed by Tobias (2real, new green), evy (animal), and slozza (world on ice), mastered by slozza) play off the contrast between bright, shiny melodic surfaces and tense, itching, squealing, squirming, fevered interiors full of timbral and textural intricacies that become more apparent upon each re-listen like low animal cravings dressed up in high fashion accessories.

And from whence do these compelling dynamics derive and from whose fevered mind are they produced? Well, far be it for me to play the psychoanalyst, but The Deli did manage to conduct a sit-down interview with Slic a.k.a. Cami Dominguez a couple days ago (really more like a rambling, highly-pleasant conversation about Venezuelan memes and getting lost in the creative process and current Mexican shoegaze bands and baffling early ‘70s porn parodies—whereupon insights were arguably gleaned. 

For instance I learned that the multi-layered dynamics of 2Real’s leadoff track “Animal” are likely be traceable back to the song’s backstory—a song written for an erotic writing assignment where after failing to come up with an original story for that week Slic instead wrote an instrumental composition, basically an indirect erotic expression of frustrated direct eroticism translated into the IDM meets EBM meets musique concrète aesthetic of “Animal" and much of the rest of 2Real.

And it’s a fitting aesthetic for a song about “crawling out of my skin” that crawls out of its own skin repeatedly coming across at first like a lost demo for "page 3 model" and libidinous dance-pop diva Samantha Fox with its catchy keyboard melody and sultry vocal solicitations. But then almost right away it frays at the edges letting in glitchy squiggles and ghostly whispers and plinky toy keyboards running low on batteries all overlain with shifting layers of reverb and echo alongside Slic’s animal cries of “wild! wild!” dissolving into a swarm of skittering digital insects interrupted by a small choir of breathless VR angels singing about how “now love multiplies”…

…and indeed love does multiply in the shifting array of queer desires and post-gender identities depicted in the lyrics which are something like “a femme-top’s version of ‘Closer’ by Nine Inch Nails” (Slic’s own description!) that projects dominance one moment (clawing at your face just to get a taste) and submission the next (act up just so you pull at my hair) as witnessed also in the music video featuring Slic enfolded in the arms of Afro-Indigenous Boricua burlesque artist Maria Milagros and I’d recommend that you go over to Slic’s official Bandcamp page to watch the unedited version instead of the bowdlerized version embedded from NoBoobs directly above.

Another cool thing about talking with the artist was finding out how “Animal” got its start with a synth line that Slic kept pitching up until it took on a more percussive quality bringing to mind the traditional gaitas rhythms heard in their native Venezuela and if you listen to the track directly below I think you’ll hear some parallels with “Animal.”

Plus it’s perhaps telling that “Animal” fits so neatly with so much immigrant- and outsider-based music in expressing a sense of restlessness and constant movement with looping grooves repeated broken down and built back up and formed into new configurations, not unlike the deconstructed and reconstructed identities of immigrants and other social outsiders.

But I digress. Having spent early childhood in Caracas, Venezuela, Slic’s background is more akin to a second generation Venezuelan-American versus a native which only raises the "restless" stakes having been raised in Florida on the border of human civilization and wild swampland (watch out for crocs in the backyard!) surrounded by a familial pan-Latinx community while making frequent road trips to legendary underground Miami nightspots like Grand Central and Electric Pickle with the help of a fake ID whose photo was so egregiously fake that Slic sometimes felt the need to role-play the part of a 27-year-old Irish club attendee, before more recently relocating to Western Massachusetts and then to Brooklyn, all of which lends resonance to Slic’s unsettled, ever-morphing musical style that nonetheless makes you wanna shake your butt.

 

And finally before wrapping up this writeup I should mention how the subsequent tracks continue to explore new ear candy offshoots whether sour or sweet or melted into a congealed blog of sonic weirdness like in the sexy road trip depicted in “World In Ice” (the rental is a rari) or the title track “2Real” or the electro-pastoral fantasyland of “New Green” (left this city I let that ship sink / now I see palm trees when I fuck / summer forever light it up / new green new dream new crew new plug) and when played alongside other adventurous Latinx releases of late such as Ana Luisa & Seb’s techno/gaitas fusing Tumbo EP (a recent favorite of Slic’s that’s embedded above) I think we may have a new electro neuva cancion movement on our hands. (Jason Lee)

They’re ghostly. They’re funky. Their finely-honed-brass-and-woodwind-enhanced musical arrangements are "orchestral." 

Of course I’m talking about Ghost Funk Orchestra (GFO) a group that’s one of the leading purveyors of “ghost funk” today and if you think I’m in the habit of making up genres willy-nilly based solely on a band’s name I say to you au contraire, mon square because “ghost funk” has been around since at least the early ‘70s and it’s long been overdue for a revival and an update…

…a revival/update that’s taken off over the past decade with ghost funk group like GOAT, El Michels Affair, 79.5, Say She She, and of course GFO–the latter having just re-released their inaugural pair of "extended play” records (Night Walker and Death Waltz, both released in 2016 on Brooklyn-based King Pizza imprint Ramble Records) in newly remastered form on Loveland, Ohio-based Karma Chief/Colemine Records available for the first time as a single disc.

Fronted by musical polymath Seth Applebaum, GFO started as a auteurist studio project but soon blossomed into a full-on, well, orchestra—a crackerjack live unit who this past Friday melted off most of the faces of those in attendance at their Bowery Ballroom concert opening for Pacific Northwest-based pastoral-psychedelia folk-rock dream-poppers La Luz (we strongly advise you dive into their 2021 eponymous LP asap if you haven’t already).

But what exactly is ghost funk, you may ask, and where did it come from? A classic example of “hey you got your peanut butter in my chocolate!” type amalgamation–given that ghosts are etherial undead creatures inducing dread and fear, while funk is down ’n’ dirty, highly corporal music inducing joy and sexiness–once these two elements were brought into perfect alchemical balance in the early 1970s the result was such post-peace-and-love haunted funk classics such as Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On, James Brown’s The Big Payback, and Lafayette Afro Rock Band’s Malik…

…which is not to mention all the ghost funk offshoots that soon followed ranging from Fela Kuti’s revolutionary Afrobeat anthems to Lee Perry’s haunted Black Ark dub sides, or from Teddy Lasry’s ambient "funky ghost" jazz-funk Gallic instrumentals to, yes, Austin Robert’s funky bubblegum ditties as heard in all the "running from the ghouls but really it’s just a guy in a mask" chase scene in the original run of Scooby Doo. All of which work their way into GFO’s sound at one point or another and when it comes to the latter the live-show fronting vocal duo of Romi O. (PowerSnap) and Megan Mancini (The Rizzos) do arguably put across a Velma and Daphne dynamic on stage.

But I digress. The first of the two Ghost Funk Orchestra EPs, Night Walker, opens on a ghostly faded-in ambient soundscape featuring the ghostly sounds of a train entering a station (full of ghosts, no doubt!) joined to a slow-paced, echo-laden ghostly groove that slowly fades out leading up to the next track “Brownout" which serves as a heat-hazed serenade to steamy bedrooms and sleepless nights in the midst of a power outage (always a ghostly experience!) sung in sultry Spanish tones.

But despite the five mentions of "ghosts" in the paragraph above it’s the third track “Dark Passage” which most indelibly gives up the ghost funk with its wet-reverbed, dubbed-out drum groove and rubbery bass and ping-ponged, fuzzed-out electric guitar and Chakachas style “Jungle Fever” stop-start dynamics minus the cowbell and Dutch moaning, all overlain with a John Barry worthy spy theme melody (see also: "Death Waltz") plus a couple funked up solos (on guitar and groovy flute) and if you were to happen across a funky ghost floating down an abandoned late-night side street I’d be surprised if they weren’t listening to this track on their headphones.

And then next we get the noir-drenched shimmering slow-gaited strut of “Night Walker” and then the even more literally noirish “Demon Demon” with its Dashiell Hammett book-on-top style recitation (as shadows lengthen in the asphalt homeland / the city winds down / the once vibrant streets / are now a home for ghosts) over a shimmying rhythm section and ghostly guitars treated with heavy echo and trembling tremolo and it turns out that even in the midst of the metropolis demons live off from fresh flesh so be careful when you’re out there carousing after midnight looking to get funked up.

And hey I could walk you through every track on Night Walker / Death Waltz and it’d be fun and all. But I got other things to do plus as I was putting the final touches on this writeup Ghost Funk Orchestra went and dropped a brand new song and music video called “Scatter” (video above directed by Greg Hanson of King Pizza Records, see how we’ve come full circle here!) which is the first advance single off their upcoming third full-length A New Kind of Love slated for release on 10/28 just a few days before Halloween and how ghostly is all of that, zoinks?! (Jason Lee)
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Ghost Funk Orchestra is currently on tour in the Land of the Great Lakes hitting Detroit tonight (8/30) and Grand Rapids on Thursday (9/1) with dates soon thereafter in Burlington, Virginia; Saranac Lake, New York; and Ridgewood, Queens.

photo by Leon Farrant 

SIZZLE is an EP by the artist known as Floated recently released on Totally Real Records and it’s just the sort of synth-stained downtempo dreamwave planetarium soundtrack rolled up in a tangerine swisher with marmalade skies projected on the dome’s ceiling that you didn’t realize you needed until you heard it and realized that you need these five crystalline tracks in your life designed for floating high above this beleaguered blue marble of ours for the duration of 12 minutes and 2 seconds or for even longer if you put the EP on repeat.

Either way, David Maine a.k.a. Floated has got you covered from the opening ambient wash of lead-off track “3AM Intro” (an ideal hour for giving SIZZLE a spin!) which soon envelopes the listener in slow-motion-placid-on-the-surface swirling amniotic-cosmic sonic afterbirth alongside ricocheting lo-fi beats and vinyl surface noise and disembodied seraphic voices…

…to the record-closing “End of the World Outro” a mellow best-case apocalyptic scenario that sounds something like if Claude Debussy rose from the grave and gave his 1909 piano miniature “Voiles” an upgrade with sub-bass tones and chiming guitars ostinatos and Air-esque blunted vocals the latter of which being an appropriately Gallic reference point for the undead Debussy.

And then finally there’s the penultimate track and single “Me and My Cat Are Busy TTYL” (see above for a WORLD PREMIERE sneak peek at the music video!) a chilled out track that perfectly captures the feline grace of a tuxedo-clad tabby chilling out in the chill-out room coming down after a full day of pogo dancing to happy hardcore for hours on end after snorting crushed MDMA pills off the teats of a hard partying puss in go-go boots even though the video for the song (directed by Floated, edited by Brendan Dean) depicts a more innocent domestic scene.

And at long last just in case you’re curious about this enigmatic “Floated” character and would like a snappy biographical profile here’s the skinny quoted straight from the Totally Real press release: "Floated is the Brooklyn-based project of producer & songwriter David Maine. A classically trained pianist and multi-instrumentalist, Maine was previously the bass player for the band Frankie Cosmos who he toured and recorded with for four years, often alongside his brother Aaron Maine (of Porches).

In 2018, Maine began refining his voice as a solo musician in his bedroom studio. Floated is his outlet to cultivate an imaginative and focused sonic world, capturing snapshots of his life in music and coloring them with inspirations, spanning from vaporwave to grimy upbeat electronic-RnB.” (Jason Lee)

photograph by Sydney Tate

To see Big Girl play live is to be sucked into and enveloped by the band’s immersive mix of glitter-encrusted glam-rock-ish grandiloquence mixed with unguarded singer-songwriter-ish intimacy—with a notable flair for theatricalized self-presentation that makes the smallest dive bar feel like a Phantom of the Paradise style amphitheater—but not lacking for a light touch where called for nor an overall sense of unbound joy, as personified by band-fronting vocalist-guitarist Kaitlin Pelkey who commands the stage resplendent in her trademark neon orange-red jumpsuit like a flamboyant fighter pilot (or a long-lost member of The Clash?) who just happens to compose rock operas…

…flanked at all times by her two backup-singer assistants (although hardly “assistants” in the sense of remaining in the background!) a duo whose soaring harmonies and choreographed gesticulations and perambulations about the stage are musically and visually redolent of the Shangri-Las crossed with Divine-as-Babs-Johnson taken both the gum-snapping sass and the operatic dramatics of said entities and dialing them up to “11”…

…all of which sits atop a solid musical foundation laid down by a band obviously skilled at making seamless transitions between fever-pitched face-melting musical passage and more dialed-down ornate Baroque pop and pastoral folk passages all of which is pretty fantastic live but which begs the question whether Big Girl can translate their theatrical musical pageantry to the sound recording medium and as it turns out the answer is “yes” based on their brand new single “Summer Sickness” released hot off the griddle today…

…which serves as a sneak-peak teaser to the band’s upcoming debut LP Big Girl vs. GOD but which all on its own serves as a fitting introduction to the full expanse of the Big Girl musical universe over its five-minute running time, a song that should please both adherents of Led Zeppelin III and Led Zeppelin IV in equal measure not to mention fans of immaculately constructed indie pop (e.g., Warpaint, Band of Horses, Angel Olsen) and/or fans of mind-bending psychedelic-tinged hard rockin’ rock (e.g., Death Valley Girls, Pond, Ty Segall)…

…and if you’re into the latter just check out the sick coda of "Summer Sickness" which in actuality takes up the entire last two minutes of the song and all I gotta say is that I’ve already added the track to my songs with sublime endings playlist what with the overall sublimity of the escalating, extended manic panic wall-of-sound outro and then there’s the music video too which is sublime on its own term with its pastoral-psychedelia vibes and synchronized dances performed in a forest clearing and btw if you hadn’t notice the video’s embedded multiple time above so as to be accessible no matter which paragraph you’re currently reading…

…but still you may ask yourself “what’s it all about?” and “what could possibly inspire such inspired music?” and hey far be for me to speculate, but lucky for us Kaitlin Pelkey herself was kind enough to provide some revealing personal insights (on short notice, no less!) into the lyrical content of “Summer Sickness” and re: the song’s emotionally intense genesis as well as the creative process behind its construction and the musical personnel who brought it to life. So read on, dear reader, as all will be revealed after the jump… (Jason Lee)

The release show for "Summer Sickness" happens this Saturday (8/20) at The Broadway (Brooklyn) presented by our friends at Booked By Grandma

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EXTENDED CODA SECTION / EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
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Kaitlin Pelkey: I wrote “Summer Sickness” in July 2020. Sitting in my backyard early in the morning I think it was like 6 AM on a Friday. I couldn’t sleep and at the time I was going through a lot, the world was still in quarantine and earlier that year January 2020 my mother experienced a very serious brain hemorrhage.

It changed her life and my life forever. She went from living a totally independent life to losing all of the abilities that made her independent. Talking, eating, walking, voluntary movement, everything. This was all happening parallel with the pandemic when people all over the world were getting incredibly sick and dying. 

It was the most challenging thing I had ever gone through. To experience all of that grief and hardship with my family while navigating this rapidly changing world… it was like being on the moon. Nothing was familiar. Meanwhile the rest of the world was going through this kind of parallel traumatic experience. 

"In this year’s division / suffering is a season / but when the wind is blowing / I feel it die" 

When writing it, I thought of summer sickness as a spell for forgiveness. I was really angry at the time with the injustice of the situation that I was going through personally and then also the injustices happening all over the world. I was trying to find a way to contain the experience – my mom’s illness felt totally enveloping and overwhelming and the metaphor of a season was comforting. In a way it was like an inside joke only I understood — "call it summer sickness" *shrug*. 

If suffering is a season, the intensity and heat of the moment is temporary, necessary. A rare cool wind signals the possibility of release. Death. Freedom. I was trying very hard to admit these difficult truths and find solace in them. 

My mom spent a lot of time sleeping when she was sick. At moments she was in and out of a coma-like state. Often medically induced. I imagine her dreaming a lot and wondered what she would dream about. Before she had her stroke she also loved sleeping and she told me that she would she knew she was really happy in her life when she would have dreams of flying. 

I would imagine this approaching autumn wind, sweeping her up and carrying her to a place of freedom where her body was her friend and she could fly just like in her dreams. Freedom for her and for everybody. I imagined her flying over mountains and skyscrapers and oceans. The big operatic ahhs in the chorus of “Summer Sickness” are the sound of her flight. 

On the creative process and band/record personnel: 

Kaitlin Pelkey: We recorded the core guitar (Crispin Swank), bass (Elizabeth Sullivan), and drums (Liza Winter) live at a studio in Brooklyn in April 2021 with engineer Phil Duke. We later recorded lead vocals at our old rehearsal space in Ridgewood. Crispin set up the microphone and protools session and sat on the floor outside the studio door while I cranked out several vocal takes. I worked in the dark and oscillated between dancing and sitting while envisioning myself singing from the top of a mountain. 

Christina Schwedler of Elee Pink and Melody Stolpp of Sweetbreads added the additional vocals — namely the soaring operatic ahhs in the chorus. 

Summer Sickness was produced mainly by Big Girl’s guitarist Crispin Swank who is responsible for the lush and prismatic guitar arrangements that weave through this song. This was the first song we worked on with mixing engineer Justin Pizzoferrato (Dinosaur Jr, Pixies, Speedy Ortiz) who would become our very close collaborator and co-producer for the rest of the album. 

We figured out a lot about the record by working on Summer Sickness. The production in Summer Sickness set a precedent for the deep and intricate layers of guitars that ended up being definitive to the sound of this album. 

photo by Daniel Weiss

The cat’s out of the bag. Homade knows your secret. 

This fact is made abundantly clear in the opening moments of the foursome’s new single “Eggshells (I Know Your Secret)” with the parenthetical phrase repeated enough times for you to get the point. And while soon it’s revealed that they’ll keep your secret (phew!) they’ll only do so “so long as you do just what [they] say” (d’oh!) and what’s more not until they’ve got you walking on eggshells and kissing their collective feet so clearly we’re not dealing with good faith negotiators here.

—> CLICK HERE TO HEAR “EGGSHELLS” <—

Granted that latter threat may serve as enticement for some but either way Homade clearly relishes the opportunity to hold the revelation of said secret over your head, erm, feet, as indicated not only by the song’s not-yet-tea-spilling lyrics but also by the coy, teasing Bratz Doll tone of their delivery and also by the music itself because if ever a song sounded like it was taunting you while taking devilish delight in doing so it’s this one.

—> CLICK HERE TO HEAR “SALLY” <—

But here’s the thing: Homade has a way of making your potential ruination sound alluring, maintaining a delicious musical tension throughout that’s only bolstered by the song’s lack of release in both musical terms and secret-keeping terms. Plus they clearly have a knack for morality tales with sing-songy vocals and grunge-encrusted-yet-etherial musical aesthetics because “Sally (Live At Holy Fang)" which is the other half of the double-single they released concurrently with “Eggshells," also ticks off these particular boxes—a fractured fairy tale about a girl who “fell down a well [and] went right to hell” recorded live that ebbs and flows enticingly over the course of nearly five minutes. 

And for further confirmation you should also check out Homade’s debut single “Blue Fish” which sounds like it was literally recorded underwater with its slithering bass line and shimmering pointillistic guitar bubbles percolating to the surface and if this all sounds like your particular cup of tea (spilled or non-spilled) or maybe your “cup of cuttlefish" sticking with the aquatic theme here then by all means give these songs a listen. (Jason Lee)

Homade play the Holy Fang "Animal Home" festival on August 20, 2022 with an all-round amazing lineup of performers…

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BONUS CONTENT:
MORE SONGS ABOUT SECRETS!!!

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