If we were still in the Myspace era with its penchant for musical mashups and and niche genres and all things “extreme” Elephant Jake’s Myspace page probably would described them as a melodic hardcore / emo pop punk / indie rock band so extreme they don’t just wear their collective heart on their collective sleeve…
…but instead rip that collective heart out of their collective chest and with it still beating and steaming just like in that notorious scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (good flick for for kids!) and then take a Bedazzler and a glue gun and transform the bloody organ into a gore-laden sparkly brooch and pin it to their gaping thoracic cavity for all the world to see because that’s what Elephant Jake’s music feels like with its mash up of lovely aching melodies and serrated musical textures and heart-rending lyrics…
…which could be a thing even today in the current TikTok age—call it the Bloody Beating Heart Extraction Brooch Making Challenge—an epistemological state established right off the bat by Elephant Jake on their first song (“Feelings About Feelings”) from their first album (We’re Movies) thus setting the template for a repertoire full of soul-baring songs about bad relationships and general aimlessness but put across in such a life-affirming, energetic fashion that there’s a sense of transcendence springing from all the emotional turmoil as if the songs are a form of Jungian musical therapy…
…but none of that’s necessary to enjoy Elephant Jake’s new single “Locked In” which in the span of less than two minutes moves from tense, minimalist post-punky guitars and declamatory, detuned vocals to a towering wall-of-sound of wailing guitars and keening voices brought to a swift end by a volley of drum fills and a quick fadeout with the song’s lyrics adhering to the band’s conversational and observational tone but adding a strong dose of sociological commentary (namely, working-class entrapment or so it would seem) to the relationship woes…
…so check it out if so inclined and finally when it comes to biography details about the band I don’t got much to offer except to point out that Elephant Jake hail from Orange County, New York which I didn’t even know was a place outside of America’s armpit state…
…but when it comes to Elephant Jake’s current locational status there’s more uncertainly (fitting for this band!) with their Bandcamp page showing them to reside in New York City while their Twitter account puts them in Philadelphia, PA so we’re just gonna go ahead and say “touché” and “well played” because as a result this entry is posted on both the Philly and NYC Deli pages which means double the pleasure and double the fun. (Jason Lee)
My only beef with Shybaby’s new single “Kiki Doesn’t Like It When You Leave Me At The Party” (“KDLIWYLMATP”) is that I wish it lasted a little longer at least because by the time Shybaby gets around to full-on caterwaulin’ and hollerin’ the titular phrase like a Lhasa Apso with its hair caught on fire the song is almost over, meaning we only get about 20 seconds of this glorious cacophony and having seen Shybaby perform live a couple times before I’m well aware cacophony is the band’s specialty…
…but don’t get it twisted cuz the song ain’t exactly Mantovanni up to that point (even tho’ Shybaby has a background as a violist!) instead it’s more an exercise in barely controlled chaos as Shybaby the band lays into the song’s main riff as if they’re the reformed Stooges recording take #78 of “T.V. Eye” as total delirium fully sets in, over which Shybaby the singular human being monologues in full-on Karen O Beast Mode about the pros and cons of polyamory (“I’d never had anyone stick around so long” versus “your glassy eyes, they looked right through me”) broken up by a couple earworm wordless hook sections that come off like a Gen Z-inflected millennial whoop…
…until finally all the built-up tension gets released in the final moments of “KDLIWYLMATP” as previously noted with the narrator realizing that something is deeply amiss when even her friend Kiki is taken aback at Shybaby’s poly paramour leaving her high and dry at the party they’d come to together to hit up an orgy with another member of the “polycule” instead, which is some Caligula-level chicanery right there but still who can’t relate on some level ammrite because like it or not whatever the flowchart of one’s relationship-related state of being happens to be, or not to be, we all just want to be loved in the end (didn’t mean it like that but…) or to at least not get our hearts broken for the umpteenth time…
…cuz whatever the risks, fears, or frustrations may be, who isn’t compelled to keep going back to the well again and again and the Shybaby song is like that too because you’ll find yourself listening to it over and over again just to feel the dopamine rush of its tension-release dynamic–and even if there’s quantitatively more of the former (tension) the latter still looms larger (release) in qualitative terms and plus its briefness only brings you back wanting more and suddenly I get why that last part is only 20 seconds long…
…and it’s all a little like getting locked inside an empty U-Haul truck while the driver goes for a joy ride, save for an old armchair, a giant bowl of Fruit Loops, and some other assorted party favors to make the ride more pleasant until getting unceremoniously curbed atop the armchair just like in the music video for “KDLIWYLMATP” co-directed by Molly Mary O’Brien and Grace Eire aka Shybaby herself. (Jason Lee)
Written and recorded over the past couple years and completed/released in late April of this year, Shilpa Ray’s Portrait of a Lady (Northern Spy Records) feels like it was created for this precise moment in time with 12 songs that come across like 12 chickens come home to roost in a world full of cocks—the portrait of an lady navigating a society fast backsliding into hypocritical quasi-Victorian morality and unrestrained Wild West-style savagery with a bunch of entitled-but-still-insecure straight cis white guys running the show or trying to anyway but then Shilpa Ray might rightfully reply that’s how it’s nearly always been…
…and this record could just as easily be titled Portrait of the Early 21st Century Crisis ofMasculinity and the Catastrophic Consequences For All Involved but that’d be an inelegant and needlessly defeatist title for an album that’s neither of those things and that moves from the personal to the political and vice-versa with elegance and determination across a series of character studies ranging temperamentally from a feral-level ferocity to blurry-eyed wistful resignation and from clear-eyed righteous fury to fuck-it-all gallows humor…
…like on the Shirelles-meets-Liz-Phair-meets-Beach-House classic-girl-group-worthy power-ballad-of-disempowerment not so succinctly titled “Heteronormative Horseshit Blues” which is kind of a "Subterranean Homesick Blues" for icy blonde Hitchcock heroine types who realize they no longer give a shit about the patriarchy, in other words it’s a vivid, heart-rending song featuring lines like “how I’ve dreamed of dropping my snatch in the Staten Island landfill / so I’d no longer be a slave to biology / though I could conquer the fate of a snatchless women / why must every move I make be a defense against you?” drawing upon bonkers imagery and emotional reckonings and simmering/sublimated musical backings to fully inhabit the mindstate of the song’s desperate protagonist…
…a song narrated from the perspective of self-willed alter-ego Doris Daydream and sung to another alter-ego named Danny LeDouche both of whom depicted by Shilpa Ray herself in the music video directed by Amos Poe with characters that appear to have walked straight out of a Cindy Sherman photograph but real-to-life in terms of the “power dynamics and conforming gender roles” at play in abusive relationships but which often hold sway in more “normative” relationships as well…
…and with the music carrying equal weight in bringing these vivid scenarios and emotional states to life through a mix of barbed slow-burn sociopolitical torch ballads and furious torch-the-joint rock-n-roll rave ups (see "Manic Pixie Dream Cunt" for an example of the latter) with no shortage of ’80s-style-sparkling-synth-driven-new-wavery-but-with-a-Lene-Lovich-level-of-edginess tossed into the mix too like all of the sudden you’re watching one of those artsy strip club numbers from Flashdance and if you don’t believe me just play “Lawsuits and Suicides” in tandem with the dance sequence above and tell me Shilpa’s song isn’t a Jennifer Beals-worthy bop, but a bop that acts as an exposé of male ego and mentally abusive gaslighting behavior which taken together may seem like more weight than a single song can hold but Portrait of a Lady is full of examples to the contrary…
…ranging from the glam-damaged, piano-led melodicism of the incels-in-training-themed “Charm School For Damaged Boys” to the pulverizing fury of “Manic Pixie Dream Cunt” to the Weinstein-and-Kavanaugh-eviscerating stripped-down-dream-pop balladry of “Straight Man’s Dream” (“spend your seed / across the houseplants / of some hotel bar”) to the Susan Collins-eviscerating lighter-waving-ballad-cum-dancefloor-filler “Bootlickers of the Patriarchy” and really you just can’t beat these song titles…
Historian’s corner: Curious what The Deli had to say about Shilpa Ray and her music back in late 2014 in an actual print issue of the magazine? Curious what the hell a "print issue" is? Back in the day Deli scribe John McGovern observed that "Shilpa Ray has one of those voices that is simultaneously haunting and beautiful [and] her music does not cower or sneer in the face of darkness. It is mature, valuing the truth over appearing hip, and jaded. And that complexity is equally striking in her lyrics. Her songs have some seriously hard-hitting lines of the kind that will make you re-evaluate your life" and the more things change…
95 Bulls come off more like 5 Tasmanian Devils on stage—in near perpetual motion, twisting and turning and thrashing about and headbanging and hopping in place, with Emily Ashenden in particular seeming to reside atop an invisible pogo stick shaking loose one guttural howl in the abyss after another from her compact frame, sounding not unlike a demon child in the throes of extended exorcism on songs like “Big Fight,” “Golden Tooth,” and “Big Fight” as heard below…
…meanwhile you got Kayla Asbell reelin’ and rockin’ over her keyboard like an exorcist coaxing malignant spirits out of her instrument and Zach Inkley thrashing his mop of dirty blonde locks in time to the beat forming a motion-blur halo like a guitar shredding Samson. And finally there’s the pummeling rhythm section of Dom Bodo and Zach Butler aka Butzz who together provide a center of gravity to the surrounding maelstrom, pushing the whole thing forward like a lurching kaiju monster stomping all over some unfortunate metropolis…
…and yeah I just mixed about a half-dozen metaphors and similes but so fukking what-a’ cuz all these literary devices are in service of forming a tenuous order out of chaos (the music blogger’s mandate!) and “forming a tenuous order out of chaos” is an apt description for the music 95 Bulls whether encountered live or on their debut album GO HOME made up of nine hurricane-strength songs that’ll have you feeling like Dorothy after she got sucked up into the sky by a badlands tornado with only Toto to hold onto until she finds her way back home…
…and if you don’t get what I’m getting at just listen to “Trichotillomania” and tell me it’s not like getting caught up in a dizzying two-minute monsoon powered by gale force riffs and torrential rhythms and squalls of dirty guitar rampaging across your cranial cavity as Emily sing-shouts about “tearing all my hair out / tearing all my hair out / everything inside / is starting to wear out” and it’s no wonder she wants to go home…
…or skip to 2:17 on the album-closing “Your Dad’s Watch” with its tipsy spinning top vamp that sounds like music you’d expect to hear emanating from a haunted merry-go-round ride or loop around to the opening track “Loud Mouth” with its piston-driven drumbeat and whirligig main melody (first heard on bass guitar) that sounds like it’s about to jump the tracks at a certain point (namely during the guitar solo) but keeps chugging ahead in circular motion until you’re woozy for the centripetal force and this is how so many of 95 Bulls’ songs hit me like a series of derelict funhouse rides where the greasy, gas-huffing carny keeps pushing up the speed to potentially dangerous levels…
…which is not to mention the calliope-like organ tone with Kayla at times sounds like Ray Manzarek on Mandrex or the Three Boys In The Band who may or may not work as greasy, gas-huffing carnies in their off hours or Miss E’s carnival-barker style vocalization—part blues belter and part punk shouter—like Big Mama Thornton meets Poly Styrene and hey I just made an Emily simile (!) which is a perfect vocal quality for songs about sweaty-palmed anticipation and sweaty-palmed anxiety and getting caught up in a vortex between these and other conflicting impulses and attempting to work out the contours of it all as described below by Emily herself after the jump…
“I think GO HOME is about the process of building boundaries. “Your Dad’s Watch” is an example of a story that, looking back, demonstrated this tendency to avoid uncomfortable situations for fear of “tapping out” or not amounting to some version of myself that would be able to handle it. I think all 5 of us play Chicken with ourselves a lot. In both “Trichotillomania” and “Young Love” there is a similar message of impatience. I’ve had a lot of recent frustration about where I am/my addictions messing up opportunities and that “loss of time” causes me to want to skip ahead, as fast as I can, to the end of almost every situation. Obviously, I keep learning that’s not how things work! “Trichotillomania” is about how that feels internally and “Young Love” is the struggle to try to softly communicate this similar frustration in a relationship.”
…so best test out your seat belt and upper-body harness and settle in for the ride because with 95 Bulls at the controls it’s bound to be a doozy of a journey wherever they end up heading next…. (Jason Lee)
In light of the long history of Earthbound musicians who’ve claimed to be from outer space or possessed by aliens or made records role-playing as bisexual aliens and bisexual androids I wouldn’t blame you for being skeptical about Abbie From Mars being from, you know, Mars, but I believe it. Abbie’s latest record My Second Debut Album has convinced me, and not only because she often sounds like a space alien trying to make “human” music with a “human” sounding voice and not always succeeding at it and thank goodness for that.
Because if you’re a Martian living on Earth and who hasn’t subjugated the entire planet or blown it to smithereens yet then you’re probably here to do two things—to pass as human and to study humanity—so it makes sense the first track off My Second Debut Album, “Following Your Lead,” is about exactly these things (“you do the things I wanna do / so I made off with several tricks from you”) a song about aspiring to mimic Earthlings ("I’m watching all the ways that I act more like you / you said I get to to be an asshole someday too") as a means of participant-observation data collection.
Clues also abound in the music of “Following Your Lead” which opens with a synthesized five-note melodic motif (anyone ever seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind???) played over a syncopated beat and bass line to appeal to human ears and asses before dropping in some glitchy Martian riffs over the second verse with the ends result being a groovy interplanetary musical fusion.
The following track “Kittens Will Bite” shares some of Abbie From Mars’s research findings (“don’t touch the kittens / the kittens will bite”) and describes some of the difficulties in adapting to a carbon-based mammalian physical form (“I am trying to exhale but / you’re still touching me”) once again accompanied by glitchy electronics and butt-shaking rhythms with a nice fat funky guitar line provided Worst Sumo aka Andy Ciardella (more Martian collaborators!)
And speaking of butt-shaking rhythms, Abbie has developed a greater appreciation on this album for the art of the groove compared to her first album, Quick Universe Leap, which overall leaned more towards stuttering difficult-to-dance-to rhythms and sometimes no beats whatsoever (maybe that’s why the second debut is framed as a "do-over" that’s more avant-pop than pure sound art) but on the new one you get plenty of propulsive stripped-down grooves alongside the more experimental moments:
Abbie: “Oh oh oh. Oh boy. I love rhythms. I love percussion. Can you tell from this album that I’m a tap dancer? This song has a lot to do with breathing. I like to think the drums evoke a pounding heartbeat, or something. Rhythms and addictive. They’re easy to fall into, hard to leave.”
And no I didn’t steal Ms. Mars’ field notes for the quote above but rather it came from her official Album Release Experience event held at the Ridgewood Presbyterian Church’s Stone Circle Theater and who else but a Martian would hold an avant-pop LP release party at a church tucked away in residential Queens although it’s true they’ve got some great programming at the theater like the Afrofuturist science fiction ensemble Organic Sounds of the Black Mind held over this past weekend which makes me think maybe the entire church is in reality a Martian temple (these Martians are everywhere!)
And here’s the other relevant thing to know is that the My Second Debut Album launch event was also an exercise in Martian data collection with attendees given a small booklet and a pen upon entering with the booklet containing not only track-by-track liner notes (very cool) but also research queries relating to each of the 12 tracks with blank spaces left to write in responses with queries including:
“What’s the last dream you achieved—and thus lost?” “Please list a bunch of cool things you want to do over the next several weekends!! Weekends are extraordinary useful!” “There’s a thing you want; there’s something in the way. What do you do? How do you interact with that barrier?” “What’s the last sabotage you performed, and what did you do it for?” “What makes sex with you totally unique from sex with another person?”
Head on over to the Deli’s IG page at @thedelimag for a full reproduction of the liner notes and audience queries if you’re so inclined (hey, if they study us, we can study them!) but either way I’d say you can rest assured it’s mostly pretty benign stuff so we’re hopefully talking about more a gentle ET type vs. that nasty thing from The Thing so that’s good news for humanity at least (we could use some!) for however long Abbie’s still hanging out on Earth and saving up to buy a new booster rocket during these tough inflationary times.
And what’s more, we’re talking about a tap dancing Martian here and how many evil tap dancing aliens can you name? In the liner notes for “Tap Dance Interlude” (track 11) Abbie From Mars notes that “Ayn Rand (lol) wrote that tap dance ‘cannot express tragedy or pain or fear or guilt; all it can express is gaiety and every shade of emotion pertaining to the joy of living’” and indeed it’s a joy watching Abbie break out into a little soft-shoe during her live performances, deftly weaving her amplified dance moves into the rhythmic textures of the music, and you may be tempted to do the same.
And when you think about how any Martian planning to visit Earth must get to choose and/or design their own Earthling suit, could it be a coincidence that Abbie herself somewhat resembles 20th-century tap dancing legend Eleanor Powell who starred in a clutch of classic MGM musicals. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Martians in general consider Ms. Powell to be one of the more highly evolved exemplars of our entire species, especially compared with this devo-lutionary era, and plus tap dancing must hold a certain fascination for residents of Mars due to its gaseous surfaces and lack of music and Martians’ own lack of external limbs.
So here’s hoping Abbie From Mars hangs out on this planet a while longer and writes, records, and produces a third debut album (btw this second debut album had a little mixing advisement courtesy of one Coff E. Nap, another obvious Martian pseudonym, but was otherwise entirely performed, produced, and mixed by our lead alien)…
…because not only does Abbie make some cool off-kilter songs, but she’s also a DJ who hosts a weekly three-hour radio show called Radioactivity at midnight every Saturday night on Jersey City’s WFMU—aka the “freeform station of the nation” aka the best radio station on Planet Earth—a show where Abbie not infrequently forgets to attempt to sound human which makes for interesting DJ segments, not to mention all the otherworldly music and other assorted hazy cosmic jive she sends out over the airwaves and into deep space no doubt for the benefit of her interplanetary brethren. (Jason Lee)
Song intros! You’ve likely heard of them! Did you know one estimate says that roughly 92.7% of songs actually begin with “an intro”? It sounds fucking mental, I know, but it’s true! And as any motivational speaker will tell you…you only get one chance to make a first impression! That is, unless you have a rag soaked in chloroform handy! But most people don’t! Or shouldn’t! So yes! Song intros!
Bearing all those exclamation points above in mind this column is hereby dedicated to the "Top 5 Song Intros" from the past week, or month, or year, as a means of promoting Greater Song Introduction Awareness before it’s too late. So now with no further ado…
05) Kissed By An Animal “Be”
First off, any song that starts off with a certain mid-tempo bass drum and snare rhythm (you know the one!) as in the one that makes you think you’re about to hear Joan Jett’s “Do Ya Wanna Touch Me” automatically makes the Top 5. And that’s not to dunk on Kissed By An Animal either because this is a cool song otherwise too—cool enough that I’m not even mad when it doesn’t turn into “Do You Wanna Touch Me”—with an intro that builds layer by layer with bass and guitar and the whole thing is a fun rock ’n’ roll journey. “So” can be heard on I Don’t Have To Explain Myself To You, an album released exactly a week ago.
And hey I don’t wanna dwell on Joan Jett too much here but if you’ll humor me just compare the two versions of “DYWTM” below and tell me the Top Of The Pops version isn’t much superior to the "official" music video because the video makers had the nerve to lop off the iconic drum intro part which completely ruins the whole thing I mean wtf were they thinking?! (but at least this nicely illustrates my argument re: song intro importance…)
04) Joudy: “El Renacer”
This New York-via-Venezuela three-piece has the right idea on their single “El Renacer” (released a few weeks ago aka “The Rebirth” if you’re a gringo) thrusting the listener directly into the most pit in medias res (Latin for “throw the baby into the deep end”) with the thrashing triplet guitar that’s actually the chorus to the song so you see how Joudy pulled a “She Loves You” on us except of course it’s an instrumental version of the chorus here.
Joudy recently signed with Trash Casual which is a pretty groovy record label so good on them. And take it from me, these gents are totally sick on stage so wear a mask if you "catch" them tonight (7/15) at Arlene Grocery
03) Monarch “The Risk”
Ok, you seriously didn’t believe you’d get through this list without any wind chimes did you? HELL NO! But wind chimes are in short supply these days in Brooklyn thanks to the global supply chain crisis so it’s lucky that the instrument/patio decoration is native to Hudson Valley which means we get this charming track by Monarch who return to play NYC on 8/26 at Pianos.
“The Risk” opens on a sustained guitar chord and a swell of everything else (including wind chimes!) and yeah I know this intro may only last for three seconds but that’s what makes it work—it wipes the sonic slate clean with a quick smear of sound before launching into a “Blue Moon” progression with vocalist Sarah Hartstein sweetly intones some linesw about the night sky and the mysterious interconnectedness of the universe. Also, check out the soaring choruses and a very active bassline played by Jesse Hartstein.
02) Pan Arcadia: “Leaving Paradise”
Released last week or thereabouts, this is what’s known in the industry as a “statement song.” And as for the six rapscallions who make up Pan Arcadia they’re here to tell us they wanna rock and dammit if I believe ‘em because this song slaps. Which isn’t to say these six gents haven’t always rocked, but this is a more raucous affair than they’ve committed to tape before (live I’ve seen ’em rock to this level maybe but that’s another story) and they assert this new rockatude right from the first microsecond of the intro (crucial!) which opens with a peal of feedback and a gliss down the guitar neck and then a Crue-worthy riff and a Who-worthy power chord/feral scream and would somebody please remind me when they’re leaving for the tour with Aerosmith again?
In the meantime, Pan Arcadia will appear at Bowery Ballroom tonight (7/15) opening for Quarters of Change. Apparently it’s a mostly if not entirely sold out show but a small clutch of tickets will reportedly be released at the door early this evening. Plus rumor has it they’re been cosying up with a former Rolling Stone editor lately so here’s hoping they remember the little people when they hit it big.
01) Johnny Dynamite & The Bloodsuckers “The Last Ones”
“The Last Ones” has been billed as being for fans of The Cure, M83, A Flock of Seagulls, and MGMT. And if you’re bold enough to propose such an esteemed musical familiy tree then you better get your song intro game on point son and boy did Mr. Dynamite nail it on his new single released just yesterday called "The Last Ones".
And when it comes to this particular musical demi-monde it’s the achievement of the perfect chiming, twinkling, crystalline reverb-laden guitar arpeggiation tone and texture that’s absolutely crucial if you even plan to aspire to be in a band with a fighting chance of getting a song placed on Stranger Things Season 5 andpeeping the music video above for “The Last Ones” with its neon hues, pretty young things and graphic bloodletting makes me think this was maybe Johnny’s plan all along—a plan that now seems entirely plausible after hearing “The Last Ones.”
And yes it’s true that JD&TBS have already nailed the arpeggiated guitar intro once before with “Can’t Stop My Love” with its well-honed admixture of acoustic guitar and electric bass but still I think the new intro potentially nails it even more (even if it’s shorter) because it sounds like a glass menagerie in sound and more Cure-esque to boot, especially vis-a-vis the guitar line in the intro to The Cure’s relative obscurity “To The Sky” or at least to my ears (don’t worry Johnny, I won’t sic Robert’s lawyers on ya!) and truly I could write a whole ‘nother article on Cure song intros because well I mean many of their song “intros” are more lengthy than the actual "song" (i.e., vocal) portions of thee songs themselves and just go listen to Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Meif you don’t believe me. Song intros!! (Jason Lee)
I’m just gonna say it right off the bat. The new album by Queen Kwong (aka Carré Kwong Callaway) under the title Couples Only (Sonic Ritual) is an instantly worthy entry into the pantheon of classic "divorce albums" seeing as how it takes elements from past divorce classics like the bittersweet melodicism of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, the sexy psychotherapy of Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear, the heartbroken lyricism of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, and the harmony-laden fatalism of Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out The Lights and remakes them in Queen Kwong’s own image.
Because Couples Only doesn’t sound like any of those albums but it does take some of their broad contours and rearrange them into a modern sonic architecture like on the opening track “I Know Who You Are" which is a glitchy, twitchy, glam-damaged ride into the emotional heart of darkness that beats to a clattering, martial rhythm and a pulsating two-note bass groove overlaid with waves of fuzzed-out guitar and squealing feedback and withering dissses.
The next track “EMDR ATM” opens with hovering horror movie strings laying a tense foundation for layer after layer of sonic embellishment that builds to a crashing wave apex matched by lyrics that go from hushed epiphany (“you nearly had me convinced / that I am to blame for this shit”) to caustic taunt (“play your violin / say I’m a mean bitch”) to full-throated fury (“GIVE UP MY BABY AND THE HOMEWRECKER WON”) and it’s kinda like watching an A24-style situation-spinning-out-of-control movie unspooling in someone’s head.
But here’s the probably more relevant point of comparison when it comes to indie films and Queen Kwong’s album and that’s the quasi-"method acting" process undertaken to create Couples Only, quoting here from the press release:
"Couples Only was entirely improvised and recorded on the spot—nothing was pre-written lyrically or musically. For three weeks, Carré and longtime producer Joe Cardamone (The Icarus Line) crafted about one song a day, which would eventually be whittled down to the final 11 songs. A primal scream of freestyled lyrics that contain the anger, fury, frustration, and sadness that was dealt to her in a quick succession of events that started with a diagnosis of cystic fibrosis in 2018, the dissolution of her marriage two months later that left her exiled with nothing but a suitcase and two guitars. “I was homeless for nearly a year, just living on friends’ sofas, and I’m still in the process of rebuilding my life," she says, “but it’s reassuring that we can survive things that feel unsurvivable.”
So, first of all, WOW, it’s no wonder this album is so full of rage and remorse and gallows humor but don’t worry Carré seems to be doing quite well now and speaking of gallows humor, the next track is a Leonard Cohen-esque number called “Sad Man” that takes satirical aim at the kind of aging hipster who may be prone to lamenting “I’m too old for this shit / paying rent by selling guitars / and DJing shitty bars” with no bigger ambition than being "another sad man in a sad band.” (blog reader, know thyself!)
The next number, "Death in Reverse," is dare I say the most sultry track on the album, in the vein of early Porthishead perhaps, that fills in some of the backstory of the still in-love lovers ("nothing was planned , nothing rehearsed / with the lights off it was death in reverse") while copping to some co-dependency ("we were floating / I felt complete / your chemical imbalance / balancing me")…
…and from there, dear reader, I’ll leave the rest up to you to explore but not before mentioned a couple interesting twists-and-turns like the Twin Peaks Season Four featured(one hopes!)“On The Run” and the major-key dream-pop closer “Without You, Whatever” and not before filling you in on the album’s musical personnel with Queen Kwong "assembling a notable cadre of contributing musician friends including the Cure’s Roger O’Donnell, Swans’ Kristof Hahn (lap steel), and Blood Red Shoes’ Laura-Mary Carter (backing vocals) who appear on assorted tracks, Carré worked closely with friends and allies, including Joe Cardamone of The Icarus Line, and Tchad Blake (Arctic Monkeys, Elvis Costello, Fiona Apple), who mixed the record." (Jason Lee)
Having witnessed a couple live sets by the Brooklyn-based three-piece Pamphlets recently there’s one word that comes to mind to describe their songs and their stage presence and that word is “urgency” because here’s a band who instill every note and every syllable with an urgent sense of, well, urgency, that makes you feel like somehow you should be doing something about the desperate state of the world, or the desperate state of your soul, or heck maybe they’re just trying to remind you that you left the oven or the iron on at home. But whatever it is, it’s damn urgent and you better take care of that shit right away.
It’s a general vibe that’s very much in keeping with these urgent times, times equivalent to a dumpster fire being doused with a tanker trunk full of gasoline (expensive gasoline!) and Pamphlets are like the “End Is Nigh” street corner guy who thrusts a pamphlet into your hand where “every ounce of passion is calling for a reaction” and here I’m quoting from Pamphlet’s new single “Somehow” which is put across with a Gang of Four (Gang of Three!) level intensity and urgency by vocalist/guitarist Jeremy Marquez, bassist Ben Griffin, and rhythmatist Daniel Pemberton.
And hey I’m not even gonna try to interpret “Somehow”’s lyrics minus any input from the band because that’s beyond my pay grade but safe to say there’s plenty of intriguing lines about redlining and polished politicians and defiling palms and submissive gods and “taking medicine to ease myself from all of your relevance” which come across equally acerbic and anthemic as underlined by the spiky-as-a-porcupine postpunk sonics guaranteed to get your heart pumping even when they slow things down like on “Flowers.”
So check it all out and then check out Pamphlets live if you’re able to cuz they’re really something in a setting where their livewire energy comes across most directly and luckily you’ve got two chances to do just that in the coming days since the three gents are slated to appear at Bushwick’s Hart Bar on Friday and then out on Rockaway Beach on Saturday as part of the Rock! Away! Summer Fest so get up and boogie down with urgency! (Jason Lee)
As this music-loving blogger’s birthday fast approaches I’m drawn to a couple songs—one new and one from 2017—both by Black Light Smoke, aka Jordan Lieb, a Chicago-to-New-York transplant who’s been billed elsewhere as a “producer, songwriter, and Daytime Emmy Award winning film and tv composer [who] spans house, techno, minimal synth and post punk” and yes I’m pretty sure this is the Deli’s first ever blog entry about a Daytime Emmy Award winner.
Staring with the older song first, “Take Me Out (Tonight)” which features Léah Lazonick on vocals, is something like a disco-nap-wet-dream built around a conversation between two horny dating-app bots that captures that perfect mix of anticipation and desperation that’s likely to spawn a memorable night out that you won’t remember in the morning.
In other words, the perfect birthday song. And the remix by Cabaret Nocturne ups the ante further with a propulsive coldwave beat that’s something like the dead-eyed seductive stare of a vampire as she/he/it slowly caresses your neck whilst sizing up your carotid artery. So check it out, yo.
The newer song is “Work” and it’s the leadoff track from Black Light Smoke’s new EP of the same name. This one has more of a rigorous house music meets electro feel with no shortage of synthetic 808 hand claps and features the same Brooklyn-based Léah Lazonick mentioned above who sternly declames lines like “I don’t have time for other people’s shit / I don’t have time to listen to your DJ mix…get to bed wake up and work / keep the baby ‘cause I work” etc. etc.
And seeing as there’s nothing like a birthday to make one realize one needs to get one’s shit together (all due respect to Tommy Wiseau) "Work" actually feels just as B-Day appropriate as “Take Me Out” does if not more so. And so…now I must get back to work. But don’t worry I will find time to listen to your DJ mix/mixtape/new single/rock opera because that’s kinda my job. (Jason Lee)
More than once I’ve seen Beau’s music described as “cinematic” and it’s an apt descriptor but with their most recent clutch of singles they’ve upped the ante even further, moving past the merely cinematic all the way to being flat-out “Bondian” to the extent it wouldn’t be surprising to learn the duo is on a secret quest to get one of their songs placed as the oepning theme song of the next Secret Agent 007 opus…
…because their recent material is fully imbued with sense of the “epic grandeur” one expects from a good-quality James Bond theme (plus, Beau is likewise a single-syllable four-letter name starting with the letter ‘B’ so maybe this has been their game all along) with their three most recent single in particular starting off as slow-burning torch numbers before building and building to a point of emotional intensity that’s likely to tap into whatever’s caused your heart to ache lately or not so lately…
…but with any potential pain overlaid with an equally intense pleasure, given the duo’s way with a swooning, sultry hook like the one that arrives 37 seconds into “Even If You’re Gone,” before building up to an epic crescendo and riding off into the sunset with a final soaring chorus that easily outdoes any Bond theme written in the 21st century thus far so put that in your pipe and smoke it Adele, Billie, Alicia, Jack, Sam, Chris (RIP) and Madonna…
…and it’s the gosh dang truth that I just now googled the song title and came across a Beau profile posted just yesterday by American Songwriter focusedon “Even If You’re Gone” in which Beau’s Emma Jenney (the other half to musical partner/childhood friend/fellow lifetime New Yorker Heather Golden) reveals that the song’s working title was “The James Bond Song” which is something I honest-to-Allah had no knowledge of before starting this writeup so hey I feel vindicated even if it means The Deli got scooped by another publication oh well…
…but my point stands that “Even If You’re Gone” is hardly the only wistful, pining, seductive, hyper-emotive, fetchingly melodic song addressed to a seemingly mysterious, elusive, magnetic, hypnotically alluring one-time loverman who may or may not prefer his martinis shaken, not stirred, the duo have put out lately—just listen to “Hardly Breathing” and, well, “Loverman” above, the latter of which is especially sublime and can be found on Beau’s Forever EP from earlier this year and later released in remixed form…
…and if you’re so inclined you can play Beau’s songs in tandem with the Bond opening credit sequences also handily posted above with the sound muted on the latter and tell me they don’t fit perfectly with the montages of silhouetted hotties and phallic gun barrels which is not to overlook that Beau’s own music videos which are already suitably cinematic with the video for EIYG in particular being an epic-in-its-own-right short film directed by one Alessandro Zoppis who even just by his name alone sounds like the next Albert Broccoli to me.
Beau’s next EP, Life Twice, comes out in September 2022. (Jason Lee)
CLICK HERE to hear the brand new Deli playlist Bans Off Our Bodies and read on for more deets…
Over the past 1-3/4 years you may’ve noticed that yr humble musical servant and scribe, who happens to possess one Y chromosome. has been oft inclined to write about music featuring strong, uncompromising female voices (caveat: some of whom may not identify as female)…
…which is less by design and more b/c of all of the kickass indie/underground music routinely produced by those who are “marginalized” by entrenched power brokers due to whatever set of factors one of which of course being gender…
…factors such as the SCOTUS ruling on abortion which stripped roughly half the populace of bodily autonomy, a right to privacy, and a good measure of human dignity or at least attempted to do so…
…which is beyond infuriating and beyond this writer’s ability to fully comprehend in terms of the sheer horror show this must be for those most directly affected…
…and so as always I turn to music, which isn’t going to directly fix any of this but which at least is one of the best salves for trauma out there, not to mention a potent source of inspiration, a motivator for action, a path to understanding, a means to express fury and grief and all the feelings…
…ergo the 73-song playlist (over 40 of which have associated music videos, keep scrolling below!) which isn’t made up of “protest songs” per se (not mostly, anyway) but rather songs that could be helpful in the aforementioned ways. Or hell maybe you just need to rock out for 4 hours solid so please enjoy and thanks to all the brilliant musicians. (Jason Lee)
Yaya Bey is a Queens-bred, Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter/storyteller/poet/producer/multimedia artist of West Indian descent whose newest record Remember Your North Star (Big Dada) is a manifesto of sorts but rendered in the most unassuming, intimate, least-manifesto-like voice imaginable.
Structured as a series of 18 musical miniatures stitched together into a musical suite—individual tracks clock in on average at at about two-ish minutes but range from 16 seconds to nearly four-and-a-half minutes—the album comes across as a collage of spectral mood pieces, like channel-flipping inside the mind of its narrator, resulting in a psychological portrait where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Musically, Remember Your North Star is notable for its artfully stripped-down, lo-fi production style that draws upon a woozy mélange of post-soul, neo-jazz, Jamaican rocksteady (check out “Meet Me In Brooklyn”), South African amapiano (check out "Pour Up" below featuring DJ Nativesun), progressive hip hip, and modern R&B—the latter of which could stand for either “rhythm and blues” or “riddim and blunted” with more than a couple lyrical references to the chronic heard throughout—all feeding into a dizzy, mellow ambience that doesn’t entirely mask a persistent underlying tension underlined by the album’s constantly morphing and mutating loops, beats and flows (“I can do this cool shit here all day / switchin’ up flows here all day”) like the ground underfoot is never entirely stable.
This episodic quality reflects a recurring lyrical theme of “just trying to get over/get by/get off” one day at a time (recent statistics show 64% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck so if you can’t relate consider yourself lucky) with Ms. Bey seeking solace, significance, fulfillment, even joy (“Oh baby pay attention to the bassline / yea baby there’s a party at my waistline”) when not simply trying to survive if not thrive under an oppressive capitalist shitstem of hand-to-mouth subsistence (“I done worked my whole life and still ain’t rich”) and a sexual politics dictated by male ego and misogyny (“you lay your hat on the next bitch’s shoulder / then hit my line like baby come over”).
And it stands to reason that even in 2022 America (or make that especially in 2022 America) these themes can’t help but be rendered through the looking glass of race and gender. As explained by Yaya Bey herself: “I saw a tweet that said, ‘Black women have never seen healthy love or have been loved in a healthy way.’ That’s a deep wound for us. Then I started to think about our responses to that as Black women. So this album is kind of my thesis. Even though we need to be all these different types of women, ultimately we do want love: love of self and love from our community. The album is a reminder of that goal.”
So drop the needle on the record and if you do you’ll likely be entirely sucked in by the time “Intro” is over—a title that’s more than just a rhetorical flourish seeing as it deftly sets the tone for the entire LP in 76 seconds flat—where over a moody isolated Fender Rhodes (sounds like it anyway!) Ms. Bey declares you better “keep your head up…cuz the rent’s still due baby / I’m livin’ out the life that I choose baby” going on to drop a couple more multisyllabic rhymes (“groove wavey,” “shoes baby”) that perfectly illustrate how the album combines surface-level straight talk with underlying complexity, a track that seamlessly segues its organ line into an identical guitar line underlying the subsequent 29-second miniature “Libation” about the societal erasure yet enduring divinity of Black Girls and you’ve got the beginnings of a hazy hip hop inflected summertime soul banger long player with substance. (Jason Lee)
