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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

photo by Leon Farrant 

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

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

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

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

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

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

photograph by Sydney Tate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the creative process and band/record personnel: 

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

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

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

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

photo by Daniel Weiss

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

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

—> CLICK HERE TO HEAR “EGGSHELLS” <—

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

—> CLICK HERE TO HEAR “SALLY” <—

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

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

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

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BONUS CONTENT:
MORE SONGS ABOUT SECRETS!!!

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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)

photo by Alex Howard

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)

photo by Ebru Yildiz

 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 of Masculinity 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…

…so if you’re looking to get your fix of a contemporary artist who’s something like Lou Reed meets Lydia Lunch meets Asha Bhosle meets Billie Holiday meets Patti Smith meets Nick Cave meets Pirate Jenny but for the 2020s (I’m making this all up as I go along of course@) then you’re in luck and btw Shilpa Ray just played a show with Lydia Lunch so there ya go (not making it up!) so check out Portrait of a Lady if you haven’t already because that’s what it’s all about. (Jason Lee)

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…
 

photo by Joel Henderson

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)

photo by Dari Malax

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)

photo by Ada Chen

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 and peeping 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 Me if you don’t believe me. Song intros!! (Jason Lee)

The Cure long intro: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCure/comments/ib0m76/what_is_the_best_super_long_intro_to_a_cure_song/

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