Real Love (Totally Real Records) is the sixth LP by Beat Radio—a musical delivery mechanism for the “heartfelt, literate pop songs" of vocalist/guitarist Brian Sendrowitz with founding member Philip A. Jimenez returning to the fold to hold down drums/percussion in addition to synths, second guitar, backing vocals, banjo and a little bass guitar which I’m just gonna go ahead and assume he played all at once because overdubs are for wimps and then lastly-but-not-leastly Kathryn Froggatt brings some sweet vocal harmonies and bass lines and tambourine rattling to the musical table…

…painting an expansive canvas full of fog-shrouded chamber pop landscapes opening onto vistas of anthemic-yet-not-too-bombastic indie rock classique heavy on the churning mid-tempo rhythmic momentum and stately, stalwart melodies garnished with a dim sum banquet’s worth of musical condiments ranging from burbling, buzzy keyboards to backward-masked guitar to reedy saxophone drones to folksy fiddle interludes with the help of a guest player here and there which taken together reinforces the “downtrodden uplift” found in the lyrics…

 …not to mention how “Lowlands” and the title track rescue the banjo from its besmirchment by the likes of Dumbford & Sons and Matchbox Twenty-One, nimbly integrating the instrument into indie-Americana settings without it sounding like Taylor Swift crashing a Yo La Tango concert and perhaps not since the opening strains of Grandaddy’s Sophtware Slump has the banjo (erm, fake “banjo” but still..) been so perfectly incorporated into sad-dad-rock except with Beat Radio there’s no robots drinking themselves to death or interstellar space-colony miners placing long distance calls home to no avail with B. Sendrowitz & Co. keeping their emotive, plain-spoken songs more strictly earthbound…

 …which makes sense given that a chunk of Real Love was written in a “fever dream” state during early peak-period pandemic lockdown and indeed the songs read as “locked down” physically and temperamentally flipping between states of emotional devastation and emotional resignation and emotional disassociation which dovetails nicely with the juxtaposition of placid sonic surfaces and stormy musical microbursts with Brian clarifying that on this album “there was nothing to hold back anymore…I went all in emotionally in a deeper way than I was capable of before”…

…like on “Disassociation Blues" a song that confronts some pretty harsh realities head on (“I was hiding since I was child / and the storm was coming all the while […] golden age that never came / dreams that we let slip away”) while seeking to evade and avoid these harsh realities at the same time (“dissociation blues / I don’t even know what’s true […] emotionally detached / hiding all the evidence”) and here as elsewhere Beat Radio straddles the fine line between huddled-in-a-fetal-position-in-the-bathtub lamentations and cold-shower catharsis…

 …and besides it being a “serious relationship gone seriously wrong” record one could also read Real Love as an extended political allegory especially with it being released near the midterms and especially with all the nature-of-reality-up-for-grabs lyrical moments on Real Love (“I made my own creation myth / trying to prove that I exist” — “Solid Ground”) and in these election denying days but I digress…

…and ok maybe I’m overreaching seeing as the record could as easily be about your grandma’s lasagna as about the life of Brian especially in this post-death-of-the-author moment but either way if this sounds at all up your chimney chute and/or if you tend to enjoy the tremulous-yet-tempestuous poptones of The Tragically Hip, Los Campesinos!, Nada Surf, Fountains of Wayne, Waxahatchee and Sebadoh then you may very well enjoy Beat Radio too and finally here’s hoping “We Rise From Fire” in the days and weeks and years ahead… (Jason Lee)

–> LISTEN TO "THIS IS NOT A ROM-COM" ON SPOTIFY <–

Drive-In is a musical duo who in their own words “have come together to create a sonic experience that makes listeners want to dance and reflect on their life choices” and while their music provokes more the latter than the former response for this listener I’m not about to tell anyone they can’t dance to Drive-In because that’s a highly personal choice (plus their song "Impact" is indisputably danceable, see below) and heck if people can dance to the Grateful Dead’s music they can dance to anything even off their tits on hashish, acid, and/or shrooms all of which have proven conducive to noodle dancing at the very least…

…but rest assured multiple tabs of blotter acid aren’t required to enjoy Drive-In’s new EP This Is Not A Rom-Com with lead singer/lyricist Ally Rincon having penned “a collection of stories that narrate her experiences with relationships, with people and with herself, with a specific focus on how those relationships have effected her mental health” according to the official press release, a record that "shamelessly wears its heart on its sleeve."

This Is Not A Rom-Com was produced by Ryan Erwin (Particle Devotion, Nice Dog) and on the musical side of things the EP is similarly introspective and emotionally direct or as guitarist/songwriting partner Mitch Meyer puts it: “I wanted this album to be a bit more reflective and a more grown-up way of looking at Ally’s lyrical themes, so rather than going full angst, we opted to bring in some folk and Americana elements [plus] a lot of strange guitar intervals and bends that kind of twist with the emotion. Quinn Devlin was a big help in realizing this aspect" all of which sounds pretty Dead-like actually…

…but what’s maybe a little less-than-direct with This Is Not A Rom-Com is how any one of these four songs could fit quite nicely on an actual rom-com soundtrack imho like how “The One Before” would be a great fit with Albert Brooks’ classic rom-com Modern Romance or how “Impact” sounds like it’s sung from the perspective of the Biscuit Woman in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster (“I am falling / and landing on concrete”)…

…or how “Overwhelmed” mirrors the self-delusion and mutual deception at the heart of The One I Love starring Elizabeth Moss or how “Narcissist” could soundtrack the, um, narcissism at the heart of Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story a movie that “brings rom-com energy to the agony of divorce” but still I had to turn it off after about 15 minutes due to the insufferability of the main characters not to mention the stilted acting, apologies to Adam and Scarlett because I know they’re reading this…

…so anyway you may have noticed the aforementioned films are all very much dark romantic comedies which no doubt is down in part to your humble reviewer’s twisted cinematic tastes but they do fit the Drive-In EP to a "T" with its songs essentially rooted in the hopes and expectations formed around normative heteronormative couplings and the various varieties of misery and insecurity potentially stemming from these normative hopes and expectations which falls outside your typical happy ending rom-com territory…

…but then again your typical rom-com depicts plenty of misery leading up to its happy ending cuz you gotta ratchet up the dramatic-comedic-romantic tension somehow so maybe the songs on This Is Not A Rom-Com could be rom-com soundtrack fodder after all (plus that’s where the big bucks are!) not to mention Drive-In have a knack for combining despairing sentiments with pleasant “gentle folksy indie rock” musical stylings which may likewise help land those movie placements—an amalgamation mastered by the likes of Snail Mail, Lucy Dacas, and Phoebe Bridgers among others—so if you like your rom-coms both sweet and sour then head to the Drive-In and get your groove on… (Jason Lee)

Yesterday I very nearly lost my credit card, my glasses, and my phone but there were “forces at work” that somehow saved me in each case and no I wasn’t hungover or anything along those lines in fact the night before I’d stayed in and even gone to the gym (!) and no I don’t think I’m going senile yet but still I left my credit card at a lunch spot but luckily discovered it was missing almost right away when I went to buy a coconut donut and a coffee at a well-known chain establishment and then later that evening I left my glasses on the seat of a subway car but thank the heavens realized it seconds later, jumped back into the subway car and grabbed them off the seat and jumped back off only a split second before the doors closed all Indiana Jones-style…

…and then most embarrassing of all I when I was coming back from the show I went to last night I jumped the turnstile at an unattended entrance (hey I figure if the MTA is gonna lay off booth workers and leave stations unattended then when should I pay to ride and how’s that for a justification?!) which really didn’t make sense since there was a homeless guy holding open the service door as a public service (and soliciting tips, naturally!) but instead I went the DIY route in skipping the fair but apparently when I leapt over the turnstile it caused my phone to likewise leap out of my pocket and onto the ground totally unbeknownst to me…

…which the aforementioned man not only retrieved but then he chased me down a couple flight of stairs and was probably calling after me but I had my noise-cancelling headphone on full blast of course and didn’t hear but still he managed to catch up to me on the platform and returned my phone at which point I felt like a complete idiot but also incredibly grateful to this most excellent Samaritan and gave him 20 bucks and sure I coulda saved nearly $20 if I’d simply gone through the door he was holding open and thrown him a little change in the first place but in the end it was worth the expenditure to feel the sense of immense relief I felt at that moment plus to see a rare glimpse of the best in humanity when a total stranger, and one who doesn’t have it easy to boot, saves you from your own stupidity…

..and yes I realize this is supposed to be a record review but here’s the clincher of it all because guess what I was listening to on my headphones when I jumped the turnstile and briefly lost my phone—and that’d be new EP by THESE PEOPLE titled In Place of Time (Green Witch Recordings / Parallel Division) and specifically its opening number “Forces At Work,” a song (and an EP) that in my reading is very much concerned with unseen forces at work in the universe even and especially when it appears that the universe (or planet Earth at least) is spinning wildly out of control or to quote directly from the song “a universe of empty space” that despite this emptiness “love[s] to get [a] reaction to test the Will of Man” and hey I’m not sure how I earned the good karma but I’ll take it…

…and THESE PEOPLE further drive the point home musically on the song and the entire EP which opens in medias res sounding like a music box winding down but soon a skittering beat kicks in over which waves of dissonant guitar guitar and textural keyboard ebb and flow like waves breaking on the shore and then pretty quickly the song establishes a more familiar shape but still with the lapping waves of sound underneath the surface and then about half way through there’s a breakdown part that goes on for a full minute with congas and tom tom fills and more waves of textural sounds and angular guitar…

…and overall I’m digging the crystalline, ‘80s-reminiscent production work on this EP and when I say “‘80s-reminiscent” I’m thinking specifically of records by people like Peter Gabriel, Todd Rundgren, and Adrian Belew at their most art-damaged and most off-kilter-pop inclined simultaneously and along these lines “Forces At Work” and the rest of the EP are full of crystalline chiming guitars and all sorts of other timbral sound-painting not to mention a logic-defying combination of head-bobbing funk and chin-stroking art rock and not to mention the philosophical yet semi-abstract lyrics at hand…

…and not to mention how the EP is both a bit chaotic sonically but also how air-tight controlled it comes across as when you really pay attention like a there’s a steady, invisible hand behind the seeming messiness on the surface which only gets amplified on the following tracks, the first of which truly does have “Levels” especially when it comes to the crazy rhythms unpinning the whole thing which slip almost imperceptibly (warning: basic music theory ahead!) between duple to triple time…

…and then next “Mind Reading” opens with some brief textural noise before a loping groove enters alternating between 5/4 and 4/4 and when the gently keening vocals enter it shifts into your basic triple time (3/4 or compound 6/8 meter if you prefer!) and finally on “Past Tense” we get treated to a chorus (mostly) in 7/4—for those who don’t know “time signatures” this is why it sounds off-kilter/left-of-center/angular—plus the vocal line is consistently sung ahead of or perhaps behind the beat (either way it’s “just out of time” but in which sense?!) so that the whole thing feels like a spinning top careening precariously, but somehow never tipping over, or maybe more like a hapless guy who keeps losing all his sh*t but having it handed back to him by the universe thanks to unseen forces at work and if it’s all “a great cosmic joke” then at least it’s a good one. (Jason Lee)

And here’s a little insider insight into the band should you want it…!

Official short Bio: These People is the solo project of Long Beach, NY producer and songwriter TJ Penzone. The project began after his former band Men, Women & Children (Warner Bros / Reprise Records) disbanded. These People has a constant rotation of musicians with the songs primarily written, recorded, and produced by Penzone, with additional instrumentation, production, and artwork by his brother Rick Penzone (Color Film, Richard Flesh). Soundscapes, and additional guitar by James Usher (Edison Glass, Heavy duty super Ego).

Quote from the Artist: I made the structure for "Levels" while I was trying to learn George Harrison’s “I’d Have You Anytime”. I just kept playing the first two chords over and over, changing rhythms, and adding more chords until it just evolved into its own thing. This one was incredibly fun / tedious to record and mix. -Tj Penzone

With spooky season culminating tonight it’s fitting to feature Dead Leaf Echo’s latest single “Boo” a song that’s equivalent to an audible shudder and thus highly Halloween-friendly—which let’s face it everyday is Halloween these days so you can keep listening to it after tonight—with lyrics about fear and loathing in a modern-day surveillance state and/or in the current state of modern-day relationships (“I know / they know / a thing or two / about boo / but I know they’re / gonna get to you”) with front-ghoul LG Galleon & Co. proving themselves adept once again at alchemizing Sensurround sounds bounced off multiple walls of reverb and digital delay, flange and chorus, tremolo and who knows what other forms of sorcery into headphone-hospitable majestic sonic sculptures that somehow don’t crumble to pieces…

…all of which makes "Boo" sound pretty serious but unless you’re a member of the undead army it should have you shimmying as much as shuddering since when you peel back the MK-Ultra-ready swirling psychedelic surface there’s an ass-shaking Madchester groove underneath driving the whole thing forward not to mention a galvanizing gospel-infused vocal hook written to satisfy a dare issued to LG to make a Hacienda-friendly Manchester type song that got transmutated over time into a tribute to the late, great Denise Johnson (RIP) who herself lent many a galvanizing, gospel-infused vocal hook to songs by Primal Scream, A Certain Ratio, New Order, and The Charlatans UK to name but a few…

…which isn’t to say that dread and dance are mutually exclusive cuz there’s nothing like a shiver up the spine to make you wanna cast your demons out onto the dance floor and I haven’t heard it done like it’s done on "Boo" since circa the Cure’s unveiling of Wish in 1992 which saw the Batcave-dwelling Backcombed Boys in Black augment their late-to-mid-80s goth-pop mastery with an infusion of baggy beats (think Happy Mondays or Stone Roses), Britpop whimsy (resulting in a future karaoke staple) and disassociative “Wall of Haze” shoegazery all of which was ascendent at the time and if you were to refer to the resulting hybrid style as “boo-gaze” we wouldn’t hate you for it…

 …but rest assured you need not be into Clinton-era deep-cuts by the Cure to be into DLE’s “Boo” by any means—for instance one could draw a closer contemporary parallel with Dirk Knight’s Hamburg-based SEASURFER project not to mention Dark Orange—but either way if you’re sympathetic to “atmospheric guitars, distinct percussive momentum, cathedral inspired vocal harmonies and dramatic build-ups” (quoting directly from a Deli writeup on DLE some years ago) then you should be into their new one too as long as you don’t mind some new wrinkles, or if you don’t know old from new you may wanna peruse this deep historical dive or read brief pieces on a couple of albums here…

…and here at the Deli we don’t mind wrinkles new or old which we feel bodes well for the upcoming Boo EP slated for release in early 2023 and speaking of new wrinkles DLE’s most recent EP Milk.Blue.Kisses.And.Whalebone.Wishes from earlier this year had plenty of them too but less in terms of race-ready grooves and more in terms of free-floating-blissed-out-but-with-underlying-animating-anxiety ambient soundscapes…

…with lead guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter LG noting that the previous EP was a by-product of the extended peak-period COVID isolation with tracks laid down in LG’s home studio with remote contributions by bassist Steve S and drummer Kevin K and if you wanna check out a track-by-track listeners’ guide why not consult with our good friends over at a rival blog by clicking on the preceding link…

…but sticking with my self-regarding frame of reference I’d lay claim that if “Boo” is akin to a Wish album track then the six tracks that make up (five of them instruments0 M.B.K.A.W.W. is more akin to a collection of Wish-era B-sides widely mythologized by fans as specimens of etherial otherworldly beauty hidden away from all but b-side fanatics—check out “Twilight Garden" and “Play” for starters—and could it be mere coincidence that the Cure are releasing a 3-CD expanded edition of Wish this November including all four tracks from their fanclub-only Lost Wishes cassette in digital remastered form for the first time I think not…

…and while it’s possible I’ve devoted too many of my brain cells to Cure b-sides there could be a larger point to be made here about how dreampop and shoegaze are all about exploring interior mental-psychological states in sonic form (consider how both genre names are meant to evoke a dreamy disposition) spaces that are strongly shaped by memory and imagination…

…and just to take it one more level the name Dead Leaf Echo itself steeped in long and memory being taken from a passage near the end of Nabokov’s Lolita with Humbert-Humbert professing his fondness for a distant but yet still vivid memory, a memory that can’t be recreated but only recalled, but which reverberates all the stronger now even if it’s original animating force no longer exists…

 

…but enough of my blah blah blah. Rather than straining to make out distant echoes kinda like it feels like I’m doing now why not instead hear directly from the source with “the source” in this case being LG and what he has to say about Dead Leaf Echo and creativity and lockdown and the tribute to Jinsen Liu (RIP) from 28 degrees taurus that he helped put together a little over a week ago and luckily I got to speak with LG a little before the show in question and here’s some of what he had to say rendered to the best of my abilities. (Jason Lee)

****************************************************************************

LG from Dead Leaf Echo: In 2008 or so we were booked for the first time ever in Boston on a show with 28 Degrees Taurus and they were very friendly. We ended up doing three of the Deep Heaven Now festivals that Jinsen Liu (from 28 Degrees Taurus) put together. They super fun with a bunch of good bands. Brief Candles from Milwaukee are now dear friends.

The festival started in the ‘90s under different producers until Jinsen revived it. It features psychedelic, shoegaze and indie rock bands from all over the Northeastern Cast and Midwest. We’re made a lot of friends from different scenes and played more shows as a result.

We never got to do a Deep Heaven in New York City so as a tribute to Jinsen we set up a show with Footlight Presents at the Windjammer with both Brief Candles and Ceremony (Ceremony East Coast) on the bill. Ceremony are a two-piece who both just joined A Place To Bury Strangers last year. The next night we’re playing a Deep Heaven Now bill in Boston with a couple other local bands on the bill. Anna Karina [from 28 Degrees Taurus] booked that show and I organized the one here.

Me and Jinsen shared a love for music and for finding exciting new bands that we may went to tour with and thanks to knowing him and to Deep Heaven we’ve been able to network with bands from Boston and to see those bands and set up shows.

Right now I’m finishing up a record that was originally supposed to come out 2020. Everything’s just now getting back up to speed. I’ve got a new song [“Boo”] and music video coming up, and then hitting the West Coast in December. Lockdown was tough but on the other hand it helped a lot of artists and creative people even if it hurt in other ways.

I saw how it damage a lot of relationships around me. Saw other people suffer for it. Me personally, I thrived. Being a creative person—devastated by not touring, album being dropped by label—but I could at least use the extra time to create more. Any creative type found it useful in some way. It put me on a very set schedule. New York City is a very busy place and your time’s so valuable. And not having anywhere to be is a privilege.

That’s when the last EP [Milk.Blue.Kisses.And.Whalebone.Wishes] was made. It’s a concept album. All the albums are concept album. And collective—working with outside designers, musicians who come into the band, creating a total package of art. Milk.Blue.Kisses is built around themes of winter, isolationism, and the basic idea of not selling yourself short of your full potential. I have a more minimal setup at home compared to a professional studio, but it made me up my game. I used pandemic relief money to save up and get equipment, a much better mic for vocals and a new interface.

“Boo” is a bit more dealing with surveillance, paranoia. Coming out of the pandemic, the residual effects of it on the psyche.

It’s like a weight being lifted off our chests, after over two years. Playing live is a big part of it. Working in the studio and playing live and like the two sides of the brain musically, left and right brain.

Speaking of touring we got to tour Latin America for the first time this summer—visiting Mexico for second time but then to Guatemala, El Salvador, and back to Mexico City. We’ve been to Europe four times, it’s a whole different scene. Latin America isn’t saturated with this type of music. It’s a whole new style and people are really excited for it, It’s like an event with something new coming into town. You could feel it at every show. It also helped with upping my very basic Spanish a bit, and we got to meet lot of bands we’ve never heard of before.

The Deli: And finally, also speaking of touring, come December you can check out Dead Leaf Echo touring the West Coast (including a date in Vancouver, BC) plus a 11/12 blowout at the Polish Club in Phoenixville, PA and an early January 2023 date ushering in the New Year at TV Eye in Ridgewood, Queens…

 

photo by Vincent Schaffer

It may be a controversial position to hold especially amongst all the One Directioners out there watching with growing dismay as Harry Styles racks up number-one hit songs and Grammy noms (and to think he was expected to be the next AJ McLean!) thus making a 1D reunion ever more unlikely by the day…

…but boy band stans be damned The Deli Inc. fully endorses the efforts of band-affiliated musicians who choose to explore side projects and/or solo projects seeing as how we can’t imagine a world without the Tom Tom Club or the Breeders or Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes’s criminally underrated solo album or George Harrison’s early solo work or the Postal Service or Run the Jewels (hell, even Dee Dee Ramone’s rap album had it’s moments!) and besides the more musical seeds sown the better the odds of a good musical harvest…

…and I’m guessing Maya Ruth concurs because despite playing guitar in the up-and-coming NYC outfit known as Homade (a band already featured in the Deli no less!) she recently put out her debut solo single “bell jar” (well, ok, she’s already released a short vibey instrumental “ditmars blvd” named after the Astoria thruway but this is her first full-on song) and whereas if “bell jar” were a Homade song I’d expect to be a whimsically-satirical-sing-songy-Seussian tale of a high-school classroom science experiment gone awry…

…but Maya Ruth instead goes full on possessed-by-the-ghost-of-Sylvia-Plath with lyrics about how “in our minds we scream alone” seeing as “ this is life and not a song / in life nobody sings along”…

and instead of Homade’s Au Pairs meets Slits meets Flipper meets Josie Cotten on a blind date with Avril Lavigne kinda vibe, Maya Ruth goes for more of a Superunknown-era Soundgarden meets Julie Cruise meets Dum Dum Girls meets Broadcast meets Elliott Smith out on a date with Alice In Chains in "Nutshell" mode vibe and I hope you’ll excuse my when-X-meets-Y-meets-Z Tourettes syndrome…

…so in other words we’re talking a heavy-psych-laced-melancholic-etherial-slow-jam with a pretty sweet outro solo that’ll have you doing your best face-grimacing air guitar routine and should Homade as an entity decide to go all in on the side projects I’m hoping they’ll “pull a KISS” and put out one solo album a piece all to be released on the same day (except with far less filler!) because if it produces even one “New York Groove” or heck even a head-scratching, left-field Disney cover it’ll all have been worth it. (Jason Lee)

Readers’ note: If you’re inclined to skip straight ahead to the interview with Ana Karina Dacosta from 28 Degrees Taurus then by all means scroll down a few pages and you can’t miss it. Otherwise, The Deli invites you to enjoy the following misty-eyed reminiscences… 
********
Glasslands. Death By Audio. Cameo located behind the Lovin’ Cup Cafe. Cake Shop. Goodbye Blue Audio. Trash Bar. If the names above ring a bell it probably means that you were a live music junkie 10-to-20-years ago forever looking for a fix on the mean streets of turn-of-the-millennium Williamsburg and Bushwick and maybe even Manhattan’s Lower East Side and East Village…

…and while your average schmuck on the street today may have very well read Meet Me In The Bathroom and be able to tell the Strokes from the Interpols, Vampire Weekends from Moldy Peaches, it still doesn’t mean they’re experts on that particular chapter in New York City music history and I’d ask the nameless schmuck a couple questions like these as a litmus test: Did you see 28 Degrees Taurus when they played with You Aren’t My Mother and The Soundscapes at the Trash Bar on 11/19/2006? Or did you see them when they played with June Moris and Quiet Loudly on 10/28/2007 also at the Trash Bar?  

I’m guessing the answer’s "no" and not to humble-brag too much but I was at both of those gigs and that’s why I’m paid the big bucks to write for the Deli instead of some schmuck on the street who probably doesn’t even have a real name but I digress…

…with the larger point being that the bedrock of New York City’s indie-rock aughts salad days was less rooted in familiar names that anyone would know and more so rooted in names that are long forgotten or never on the radar. I mean, just consider the hundreds upon hundreds of bands and other musical artists who play NYC venues week after week, month after month, at glorified dive bars like the aptly named Trash Bar…

…a bar known for its adventurous and/or simply anarchic booking practices and its ratty basement couches and its glistening tater tots served up fresh out of the deep fryer from behind the bar and…suddenly I’m flasing back to the time I watched a highly inebriated woman assume a reverse cowboy position over a men’s room urinal at the Trash Bar and take a long, no-doubt satisfying piss without a single drop hitting the floor and that’s about as "indie sleaze" as it gets isn’t it…

…and while I don’t pretend to be any better at remembering names than the next functional alcoholic—somehow or other I’ve managed to retain a few of them despite partaking in a few too many "5 Jägermeister shots for 10 dollars" drink special at the Continental (talk about your trashy bars!) back around that same time—I do clearly remember Strange Things Done In The Midnight Sun and Coyote Eyes and 28 Degrees Taurus with 28dt being a personal fave around the years 2006-09, a Boston-based duo with rotating drummer and occcasional additional collaborators, that played up and down the Eastern Seaboard on a regular basis…

…not to mention how 28dt played on bills with one or two bands that my own band "back in the day" also played with which is pretty cool and all (apologies for all the not-so-humble bragging) but the point here is that I’d be willing to wager five Jäger shot that a few of you or more are less than "six degrees of separation" away from 28 Degrees Taurus too…

…seeing as how the band’s main songwriter/guitarist/multi-instrumentalist/backing vocalist/record producer Jinsen Liu is someone who knew lots and lots of people and who was positioned as a central node attached to some of coolest of musical entities and events across New England and beyond but he was never one to brag or even to humble brag about it…

…and when it comes to the actual music 28 Degrees Taurus has been described as “explosive, intense, dreamy, ultra romantic neo-psychedelic/ambient/indie rock walking the thin line between darkness and light” with live shows described as “loud, ultra high energy, psychedelic, chaotic freak out session usually done on mass quantities of alcohol” but whose recorded output occilates to the other end of the shoegaze spectrum with “dreamy, intimate and romantic influences including 60s pop, Japanese noise, the Jesus & Mary Chain, Cocteau Twins, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, Slowdive, and The Bee Gees” as described in what I’m guessing may have been their old MySpace band bio… 

…but plagiarism aside if I had to guess how 28 Degrees Taurus got their name I’d say "Taurus" reflects their Taurus-like embrace of warmth and earthiness and sensuality, but then there’s often an underlying chill, or even a haunted quality, that also frequently present what with all the woozy near-ASMR vocals and the eerily chiming guitars…

…not to mention 28dt’s frequent use of Eastern scales and Medieval-like parallel intervals, basslines that chase the guitar’s shadow and lyrics that are tap into a guile-free immediacy, so with all this in mind I figure the “28 Degrees” part of their name could be a reference to the body temperature (measured in Celsius) that’s the lowest you can go without catching hypothermia so in other words it’s chilly…

…but a little chill never deterred the Taurus-like perseverance of 28 Degrees Taurus who released five full-lengths plus a remix EP over the course of a dozen years culminating with 2019’s Lost & Found singles compilation but then in March 2020 Jinsen Liu tragically passed away at 42 years of age which besides being an unfathomably terrible loss for his friends and family and for longtime bestie-bandmate Ana Karina Dacosta, is also a terrible loss for the the Boston music scene and beyond…

…in light of his unyielding work (though I doubt he ever thought of as "work") supporting emerging artists, booking shows, and generally acting as a hub of Boston’s local music scene, and I haven’t even mentioned Deep Heaven Now yet, a a multi-venue festival and meetup that Jinsen instigated and curated in 2010 (and also in subsequent years with later editions) catering to psych/shoegaze/ambient/experimental artists not only from Boston and Massachusetts but also from across the Northeast and Midwest regions and the whole thing was a tribute of sorts to similar gatherings held in ’90s Boston that helped shape Jinsen’s own musical tastes and his hyper-local perspective…

…but on Friday 10/21 it’s Jinsen Liu’s turn to be on the receiving end of a musical tribute taking place at the Windjammer in  Ridgewood, Queens as presented by The Footlight Presents, and despite the tragic circumstances that led to the show it’s sure to be a barnburner because that’s how Jinsen would have wanted it…

…with producers and participants looking to put on a raucous celebration of Jinsen’s life, because rumor has it that his life was pretty raucous at times but in the best possible sense, and it’ll feature the music of 28 Degrees Taurus as performed by Ana Karina with special guests (in keeping with the band’s collaborative ethos) plus a stacked lineup with sets by Dead Leaf Echo, Ceremony (the East Coast Ceremony) and Brief Candles visiting all the way from Milwaukee so here’s your perfect chance to get caught up on what was happening at the Trash Bar in 2006 and ’07…

…and one last piece of sliver lining to this dark cloud is that I got a chance to speak to Ana Karina, Jinsen’s partner and collaborator in 28dt across its entire lifespan, so check out the transcription below where A.K. was kind enough to share some compelling memories of Jinsen and 28dt…

…and in closing The Deli offers our deepest condolences to Jinsen Liu’s loved ones, and raises a glass for all the great music he created and facilitated, not to mention all the lives he touched and enriched, and we hope that at this very moment he’s looking up some old contacts who’ve likewise passed over and planning his next musical blowout in that great DIY space in the sky, but until you get a chance to check one of his Deep Heaven Afterlife shows we say "get thee to the Windjammer" for a sneak preview… (Jason Lee)

 

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Ana Karina Dacosta: I have the best memories of driving around in Jinsen’s shimmering pastel green Honda Civic listening to the Bee Gees , and a lot of other music he loved or was currently working on. A lot of his friends remember doing the same thing with him as well, it was a real era! It was definitely some of our personal best times, Without fail it always built up to us driving aimlessly listening to "Alone." We shared this deep and ridiculous respect for how undeniably cool Barry Gibb sounded in the opening lines to that song and all of the songs he sang….."I was a midnight rider on a cloud of smoke, I could make a woman hang on every single stroke"—like, what kind of badass says that?? A lot of our bonding came from overanalyzing Bee Gee’s lyrics.

That era was also spent at a lot of house shows and open mics, consistently and possibly the most fruitful was the All Asia (RIP) on Wednesday nights, where he made so many true friends, it’s hard to describe how many but a huge core of his life were friends he made there.

In our first iteration we were called Red Skies, Let’s Die with me on cello playing through a reverb/delay pedal. They were all instrumental songs. Eventually we had a keyboard player named Dan, who was brilliant on keys, and Alyson on drums. She was and still is an amazing drummer and percussionist,and a lot of our later songs carried over that sound. 

We could only get shows with the local Goth community, who were all of these amazing people and bands Jinsen had followed or knew from some place or another. We made a lot of meaningful friendships during that time, such as Kris Thompson who is an anchor and beloved scene captain and musician in Boston with so many bands I would need to make a loooong list!! We played all over the place as Red Skies. I’d nearly forgotten but we were pretty active. 

When 28dt was forming, Jinsen had recruited his "Gemini friend" from High School in Andover, MA, Erika, to play bass with him. He said astrologically it was perfect and that she was maximum rock’n’roll which she really is. I just happened to be at his parents house on the first day they were supposed to practice. The night before though, at a 28 Degrees Taurus show, she’d met a guy named Dan who later became her husband. So for obvious reasons she blew off the rehearsal! I said I would try to play along since I had played the cello and it had four strings, how bad could it be?!

When we transitioned to 28 Degrees Taurus I’d never been the singer in a band before so he would play the demos and I naturally altered my singing voice to mimic his. He loved to sing, but also just wanted to play guitar and come in and out of singing. It’s funny how truly haphazard it was in the beginning. He didn’t really set expectations and as far as I remember–never gave much advice or directives on how I or anyone should play anything, EVER! 

I really loved doubling his guitar parts on bass which made me feel very heavy metal, and Jinsen loved Black Sabbath and lots of multi-metal genres which is probably why he never said anything. The band was never just the two of us because we always worked together with drummers and with other collaborators sometimes, although I would say it was all him running the show. But he would always say it was me. The truth is it was really whoever was drumming for us at the time. 

It was always the drummers who kept the band functioning, shaped the sound and kept things moving in all ways. Every single one of them. Barry, Kyle, Greg, Ian….Max. Who else? Has to be more! I only wanted to take over drumming for Lost & Found, since Jinsen used a drum machine to record all of the drum parts and there was no bass on it. Chrissy Prisco, aka Chris Face, is legendary in our history as well. She went everywhere with us for years and was a huge part of the band dynamic. Our sister for sure. It was always her and the drummers who kept the band moving forward. We were so lucky 

And the words you hear in a lot of lyrics were just things that Jinsen would say like “ “I wanna party! I wanna drink! I wanna feel like this forever. I don’t wanna fuckin’ think!” but with a big hint of humor. These were just his thoughts rolling off his tongue. Another person may’ve said “we need to rework these lyrics,” but we would just laugh at the thought and keep going with it. 

Jinsen was such a social butterfly, so it was easy for him writing from experience. He loved being out at night. He loved to pretend he was a werewolf! He loved meeting new people. He was a local nightlife icon, he called himself the Paris Hilton of Allston, MA for a long time, it was funny!

There are a lot of endearing and wild stories with Jinsen. One night he stayed out for the entire night in New York City and when he finally came back to where we were staying he’d lost his glasses and told us this whole story aboutI hanging out with some new friends and losing his glasses, getting lost and feeling his way along the curb and finally passing out and getting bitten by a rat which elated him, like it was “a great night out in New York” by anyone’s standards!! 

And then he revived the ‘90s Boston psych-rock fest Deep Heaven, with the name tweaked to Deep Heaven Now. He Jinsen was always inspired by watching and observing other people and how they, went about supporting the scene. And he was nostalgic for the people who had guided him along when he got into playing. Jinsen was very sponge-like, always taking in information and inspiration from others, with a mind like a trap for retaining information and remembering people. He must have had a mental Rolodex the way he could keep so many people’s names in his brain. 

It was really impressive and admirable how many people he communicated with in his life and how he could instantly remember the name of an old online friend he made on GeoCities Chat in 1996.It was a valuable skill to have when a lot of music was being shared between people on physical media all over the place, sending CD’s through the post office to each other. Remarkable!

He organized all of our tours and lots of other tours. He made all our records. There’s all these Midwestern bands that I am sure would give him credit for the group of likeminded bands and a whole scene that came out of meeting at Deep Heaven Now. Speaking of which, Brief Candles from Milwaukie will be playing the Brooklyn show.

It’s hard for me to say it, because I feel so close to him still and I know his many many friends do as well. I feel in my heart that he would not live a life with any guard rails. He always told me that we have to accept people for who they are and how they live. He was not afraid of dark waters. He worked hard to be a spiritual warrior despite any demons, and he was exceptional at his core essence. He was quite magical.It was the only way for him. Jinsen had a lot of seasons in his life and that will be visible at these shows. But it won’t even do him justice because no one else could possibly be another Jinsen and I love him for that. Even when we weren’t getting along, we loved each other and the music too much to consider ending 28dt.

If he didn’t have demons, and didn’t confront his demons head on, Jinsen probably wouldn’t have made the music he did. And we all wouldn’t have had the intense relationship we had with him and with each other as friends. A lot of folks call me when they’re thinking about him. I love that. I feel lucky that I knew him. I didn’t even mention how metaphysical Jinsen was. He read people’s charts all the time. You can hear it in the music. He thought we were all here to teach each other and to learn from each other. 

At his memorial in 2020, the bar tab for his wake came to $666. He would have loved that!

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…

=

…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)