What whattaya know…it’s almost Halloween! And since we’re fully aware of our target market of ghouls and goblins and witches and warlocks and slashers and sickos and other demented and deranged types–we’ve assembled not ONE but TWO very special "DELI-WEEN" playlists (branding!) for your delectation. The first of these is a video playlist (see below, duh!) chock full of 159 video clips including lots of holiday-appropriate music both new and old, plus lots of vintage horror movie trailers and other Hallow’s Eve ephemera. Plus, if you share the Deli’s viewpoint that "Everyday Is Halloween" (due credit to Uncle Al!) then you can enjoy this sick-in-every-sense playlist all the year round.

And btw the cover image above is taken from Surfbort’s recent single "Happy Happy Halloween" which just so happens to be the leadoff track of the video playlist below because Surfbort rules. 

 

As those late night informercials used to say…THAT"S NOT ALL because there’s also a whopping 113-song strong DELI-WEEN Spotify playlist that can be enjoyed by clicking on any of the highlighted words here. Likewise, this playlist is full of music new and old–and even more than the video playlist, it’s all-year-round appropriate given that only a smattering of the songs are explicitly Halloween themed–it’s more just a playlist of music that’s on the darker side of things, but all over the map genre- and sensibility-wise, with the songs ordered alphabetically by song title for your browsing pleasure! So maybe just pretend it’s the soundtrack to I Know What You Did 20 Summers Ago or something along those lines and have a good time listening. (Jason Lee)

In Richard Dyer’s classic 1979 book Stars (classic, that is, if you happen to be a Cinema Studies major) the distinguished British scholar considers how stars/celebrities provide a kind of psychological and sociological map to the culture from which they are spawned—kind of like how actual stars once served as maps, used to cross unfamiliar lands and strange seas. (of course today we’ve all got our omnipresent pocket computers and GPS apps to fill that function, and of course nothing bad ever comes from putting machines in charge…)

Anyway, Dyer goes on to unpack at length how these star-driven mental maps are formed through the art of storytelling—the TV shows and movies and long-form music videos and youtube makeup tutorials that the stars star in, and also in the many, many stories about the stars themselves that circulate in our society which can collectively be called “star texts” if you’re nerdy like that—stories that help to shape the collective belief systems through which we navigate our own lives in a celebrity-driven culture, a lot like how all those nutty stories about Greco-Roman gods captured the belief systems of Greco-Roman times—gods that provided the names for many constellations (names used to this day) which of course are made up of…STARS! (ok I’ll give the whole metaphor a rest now)

 Like the gods of ye olden times, modern celebrities appeal in large part because they’re both human and superhuman, both highly relatable and highly aspirational. Consider, for instance, how Glenn Danzig can be going out to buy kitty litter in one moment (highly relatable!) and bestriding the stage ike a buff little garden gnome the next (and later, he can go on to direct a straight-to-Shudder horror movie featuring three stories of surreal and bloody erotic horror and ginormous breasts.

In other words, we are all Glenn Danzig. And there can never be another Glenn Danzig. And if we can navigate this contraduction, we can maybe face down all the contradictions we face on a daily basis in normal everyday normal life

Another way to put it is that, when it comes to star idols and celebrity worship, we as fans get to live vicariously between two worlds: fantasy and reality. And this is one thing Teddy Grey seems to "get" given that this self-described purveyor of “the tastiest garbage on the market” has written and recorded an entire double-album telling the stories of 30 high-profile celebrity couple breakups–granted, taking significant creative license in playing these roles himself alongside a wide array of musical and vocal collaborators, and imagining their inner thoughts and everyday experiences–stories we can all likely identify with (that is unless you’ve never been through a messy breakup and if so bully for you) but which are also quite exotic and impossible to identify with (that is unless you’ve ever had your nose cave in from doing too much coke, or been elected to Congress on the basis of a popular ’70s TV variety show before skiing head first into a tree and expiring).

The album in question is called The Great Failed Romances of the Twentieth Century (Mother West) and it features songs with titles like “Everything Will Change When We Have Money (Lindsey & Stevie),” “Our Voices Aren’t Made For Duets (Sonny & Cher),” Popular Kids (Burt & Loni),” “Second Best” (Billy & Courtney)” featuring Blaise Dahl (Dahl Haus) as Mrs. Love-Cobain, and “Like I Mean It (Ike & Tina)” featuring Jack Colquitt and Brandeaux and opening with Ike berating Tina during a recording session ("It’s a love song, girl, you gotta mean it!”) before turning into a rollicking brass-assisted number with Tina imagining better times ahead: “When I imagine you gasping for breath on the floor / I’m giving up for another auteur / I can see my happy ending…someday you’ll be dead / better days are ahead" and anyway I think you get the song-naming convention at work here. 

Personally, I think my favorite song on the album is “There’s Nothing That I Love (But You Come Close) (Sid & Nancy)” because it so brilliantly punctures the over-inflated mythology of the junkie couple with a rock musical-ready arrangement and a number of choice couplets like “let’s make out on the toilet, fuck on the floor / I think we forgot to close the bathroom door” and “take me in your arms and hold me close / tip me on my side if you hear me choke.” Oddly enough, my second favorite track happens to be the very next song on the album, called “Provocateur (Serge & Jane),” which drops some deep knowledge of Serge Gainsbourg (“bad puns and lollipops / concept albums donning Nazi rock”) or it does for an American audience at least, even if Teddy’s Serge impression sounds more like Pepé Le Pew meets Jarvis Cocker meets Dracula for a breathy ménage à trois session.

“But what does the album actually sound like?”, you may ask? Let’s go right to the press release for this one: “Shimmering guitar pop, piano ballads, arena rock—even a 32 second hoedown detailing the 32 day marriage of Ernest Borgnine and Ethel Merman!” and really who can argue with a press release that evokes either Ernie or Ethel never mind both. I would also add that The Great Failed Romances of the Twentieth Century has a Broadway Cast Recording kinda vibe—which makes sense since if you Google the album title you’ll find a backstage.com public notice looking for guest singers/celebrity impersonators for the project, which also makes sense since Grey’s main collaborator on the album is one Michael Lepore, a singer-actor who’s in the cast of the upcoming Broadway musical Sing Street. And, finally, if you ever wished Weird Al would record a double concept album (let it be noted that "Weird Al" Yankovic is also quite the musical polymath) which also serves as the soundtrack to a Broadway rock musical, well, here’s the closest you’re gonna get so get at it! (Jason Lee) 

The debut full-length set by Furrows, called Fisher King, is basically the folk-rock-baroque-dream-pop version of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind because on this record Mr. Furrows (a.k.a. songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Peter Wagner) stares into a chasm and declares it sublime. 

Sounds like bullshite, you say? Well, mmmaybe, but I’m sure my high school English teacher would be impressed. Anyway, if you’re looking for a record that’ll help you to achieve a state of mellow euphoria, with more than a hint of longing to throw oneself into the abyss, and with lyrics overflowing with pastoral nature imagery like “shining suns” and stars and mountains and horizons and “skies receding out of sight” and “the sounds of the sea filling the air” and really all that’s missing is the “craggy ridge” that got Wordsworth so hot and bothered—then lucky for you because now you’ve found it. (note: even the word furrow itself refers to "a long narrow trench made in the ground by a plow" so it’s nature-adjacent at least)  

Given Fisher King’s immersive yet highly generalized lyrical imagery, it’s easy to let your mind drift away and get lost in the pure essence of the music and, fortunately, that’s where Furrows excels most of all. Assisted by producer Sahil Ansari, this is a record full of cellos and Mellotrons and tense synths and “delay wobbles” and “psychic spaces”—played over bedrock layers of delicately strummed acoustic guitars and gently shimmering electric guitars and a rhythm section (Mr. Wagner’s on bass, natch) that somehow maintains a steady beat despite all the sedatives they must’ve ingested before hitting the record button.

And sure, there’s some other bands from the past that have given off a similar eternal-golden-hour-bathed-in-a-meloncholy-glow impression ranging from the Chills to the Shins—but this is the present and Furrows’ music speaks to the present-day widespread state of generalized anxiety masked by numbness. (tho’ don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful album and you’re allowed to be happy while listening to it, you sick bastard!) Either way…we all need to take the edge off sometimes, no? Rest assured this long-playing rekkid will help you to do just that. But only if you don’t mind an uneasy undertow underneath it all which is, as Mr. Furrows himself puts it on “Grey Cities,” “unseen, but always there.” (Jason Lee)

 “Look, this thing of ours, the way it’s going, it’d be better if we could admit to each other, these are painful, stressful times.” — Silvio Manfred Dante

The Alchemist is something like the equivalent of a consigliere in the world of hip hop having worked largely behind-the-scenes for the past several decades as a super-prolific producer and beatmaker, providing dusty-groove beats for legendary rap kingpins like Mobb Deep, Nas, Ghostface Killah, Lil Wayne, Kendrick Lamar, Eminem and Freddie Gibbs—the latter of which released a full-album collab with the Alchemist in 2020 called Alfredo, an album-length meditation on being a Black Godfather, peep the album’s cover art, that’s been deemed “pretty much an instant classic”). 

For his latest project, the LA-based hip hop consigliere appears to have consulted his extensive Rolodex of close contacts and called in a few favors seeking guest emcees willing to collaborate on two EPs released under his own name (and more to come, one hopes) with the emcees ranging from established names to underground-up-and-comers but all equally skilled in performing verbal acrobatics.

The first installment of This Thing Of Ours (its title phrase the literal English translation of “La Cost Nostra”) dropped in late April with four tracks featuring the likes of Earl Sweatshirt, Navy Blue (see his previous Deli mag featured HERE), Pink Siifu, Boldy James, Sideshow, Maxo, and Tony Soprano—sorry to say James Gandolfini hasn’t been reincarnated, but his dialogue as the panic-attack-prone boss has been as sampled across a couple tracks here—resulting in a tight ten minutes of dizzying bars and euphoric, blunted beats (the inclusion of instrumentals for all four tracks stretches the running time to 20 minutes).

Released just over a week ago, This Thing Of Ours 2 (ALC Records) follows the format established by The Godfather Part II in splitting its action between two locales—except instead of New York and Sicily in this case it’s New York and the Motor City—with the opening two tracks narrated by two of New York’s finest young emcees, MAVI and MIKE (both are fans of ALL CAPS) and OK the former may have returned to his native Charlotte, North Carolina earlier this year but he’ll be back, we believe, because like Silvio Dante is known to say “Just when I thought I was out…they pull me back in.” Anyway the two emcees set a moody and mindful tone (but still with mucho energy) on the first part of the EP that musically and lyrically echoes the post-golden-age laments of latter day mafiosi and street-level scrappers alike.

On the opening track “Miracle Baby” (see the music video up top) MAVI bobs and weaves between multiple mood swings—equivalent to Michael Corleone in Godfather Part II caught up between triumph and tragedy—spitting lines full of bravado one moment (“stop taking so much seriously / I’m taking all that’s given to me”) and mournful sorrow the next (“a waiting fate there to sneer at me / I talk sometimes just knowing my phone the only one listening”) but always demonstrating total control with a masterful head-spinning flow (which is a perfect fit for the head-in-the-clouds “cloud rap” musical backing) built  on rapid-fire-machine-gun multisyllabic rhymes intercut with chopper-style-triplet-time-scat-rapping (“civilly, liberally…” etc.) all-the-while keeping it playful (“I just put my hoe through college, Lori Loughlin”) and taking no prisoners (“How we feel toward domestic terrorists? Prepared for them”). 

Track number two features MIKE on the mic (featured HERE in a Deli profile from back in June) who rides a loping, J Dilla type looped beat (RIP J Dilla, the Detroit-based godfather of soulsy lo-fi-hip-hop as you likely already know and if you don’t know, now you know) matching his flow expertly to the beat with the Alchemist laying forlorn female vocals and a distant lonely trumpet m over the top for maximum effect, and MIKE’s lyrics fully vibe with the overall vibe of course with lines that again sound like could’ve been penned by a depressed gangster.

"war on the rise, if you sure it wasn’t like us / born in the plight, we was torn from the right stuff"

"I used to take the 4 or the 5 to explore from this gauntlet / make sure we alive, it’s not a corpse I was caught in"

And speaking of J Dilla at this point the EP transitions over to Motown starting off with the posse track “Flying Spirit” featuring four artists on Danny Brown’s new Detroit-centric record label Bruiser Brigade with J.U.S., Fat Ray, and Bruiser Wolf mixing it up with Danny himself (J.U.S.: “it only take a knife to turn you to a flyin’ spirit, like Casper the Ghost / me and Brown on collards dumpin’ blunts in the ghost”) which comes across like a more demented “Scenario” (especially the closing verse by Bruiser Wolf with its breathless Busta Rhyme-ish manic intensity) and hey by the way “Bruiser Brigade” is a name taken from Danny Brown’s decade-old XXX (call it XL these days) easily one of the best hip hop albums of the last ten years in my highly non-authoritative book.

The EP finally comes to a close jury under a dozen minutes later with its two shortest tracks (each clocking at under two minutes) the first being “Wildstyle” by Zelooperz (a Bruiser Brigader not featured on the preceding posse track) who throws his voice like a demented ventriloquist so put this track on the hi-fi Halloween night to scare the crap out of trick-or-treating brats harassing you for free Pixie Sticks. 

And then finally it’s full circle back to LA (Compton, specifically) for Vince Staples’ “6 Five Heartbeats” and yeah it’s freakin’ Vince Staples so you know it’s good (even where short in duration and mellow in disposition) and I gotta at least the opening line “you had a blog, we had Berettas” (I don’t care what some fool posting on Genius says the lyric is, he clearly says “blog”)) with Vince going on to call out keyboard gangsters and other fakers (“How is every single rapper been a dopeman?”) before going on to pine for true love and true crime and don’t worry Mr. Staples I’m no consigliere (fake or otherwise) just a humble blogger writing criminally long-winded sentences. (Jason Lee)

photo by: Wyeth Collins

 

Over the past year-ish Kendra Morris has released one soulful-funky-R&B banger after another. And since we’re currently in the midst of a “singles round-up” phase here at DeliCorp (honestly these themes are chosen willy-nilly by our barbiturate-addicted CEO, the Colonial Clive Fowley, but we find a way to make them work regardless) it’s appropriate that we provide a round up of Ms. Morris’ recent singles output on the occasion of her recent 45-rpm release “This Life”/“Who We Are” (available on opaque red vinyl!) on the Dayton, Ohio-based Colemine Records (Dayton being the ancestral home to everyone from Bootsy Collins to Lakeside to Ohio Players and thus a fitting home to the Funk Music Hall of Fame & Exhibition Center) the A-side of which is laid-back, mid-tempo number called “This Life” which simmers at a rolling boil for its nearly-four-minute-run-time whilst utilizing a series of gambling metaphors (“I believe / if I lay myself on the table / just like an ace of spades / needs a queen to win / will you let me in?”) to describe the willy-nilly tossing of one’s heart across the Big Craps Table Of Life And Love And Everything Else. 

So yeah “This Life” is a great koo-koo kinda tune that one could easily imagine Frank Sinatra covering at his last engagement at the Sands (ain’t so far from “That’s Life” to “This Life” baby) but being a b-side kinda guy myself the real standout to my ears is “Who We Are” (both are co-written and co-arranged by Ms. Morris’ songwriting partner Jeremy Page) because it’s one of those burn-the-house-down-to-the-ground kinda songs that (unless you’re Peggy Lee) will lift you up to the heavens (peep those two-part harmonies around the two-minute mark) but then break you down again when the tune breaks down to a funeral organ accompanied by full choir that’ll have you sobbing into your Purell hand-sanitizing-wipe as Kendra repeatedly inquires “What is left to be living in?” and as the world disintegrates before our very eyes it’s a question on a lotta minds these days, baby, and most of all it’s that voice that puts the heavy emotion across and makes it appealing because Kendra’s obviously adept at belting it out to the cheap seats but with sentiments that are anything but cheap. 

But don’t get it twisted because Kendra Morris can put across sunnier material too with great conviction like slow-ride phunk of “Catch the Sun,” a single released a month ago in collaboration with “the world’s only synth and soul record label and production team” known as Eraserhood Sound with the sweetly nostalgic “When We Would Ride” as the b-side. and then nevermind the 2018 single just flat out called “Summertime” with a video shot at Coney Island.

And when you check out her repertoire it makes sense that Kendra got her earliest musical education from her parents’ Ruth Copeland and Chaka Khan records, but rest assured that what you see and hear above doesn’t cover all this lady’s capable of as made clear by her being the only artist ever to tour with/collaborate with/and be remixed by Dennis Coffey, DJ Premier, and Scarlett Johansson (please let them all collaborate one day as Kennis PreemoJo) so clearly she’s got some serious range. Oh and she’s got Wu-Tang/MF Doom connections too having contributed vocals to the Czarface Meets Metal Face and Czarface Meets Ghostface projects (plus Ms. Morris even animated and directed a music video for the former record) so just in case you think you’re cool Kendra’s ready to take you to school. (Jason Lee)

“Love Bomb” is a title utilized by musical artists ranging from N*E*R*D to Nick Cave (with Grinderman) from British-reality-show-girl-group Girls Aloud to Korean-reality-show-girl-group Fromis_9 which isn’t really that surprising because the phrase itself lends itself to a wide range of interpretations whether it’s used to say something like “I’m gonna bomb you with my love bomb, baby” which sounds like a Zep-era Robert Plant lyric if there were a few more baby’s added at the end, but then it could also be used in a song about bombing with an attempted romantic connection, or about how obsessive love can be a destructive force, or about how amorous feelings can fall from the sky seemingly without warning.

Or (stick with me here!) a “love bomb” could refer to how love has been weaponized by the capitalist-imperialist elite to subjugate and indoctrinate "the sheeple" who are compelled to pair off into nuclear family units (kinda like nuclear bomb fallout shelters!) thus helping to mitigate the threat of a collective uprising against the ruling class while also acting as the driving force behind capitalist structures of exploitation and continuous economic expansion (because if you’re truly in love you’re gonna rush out and buy that new washer-dryer set on sale at Best Buy!) but hey it’s just a theory.

But it’s a theory I feel like Phranque may be on board with (not to be confused with lesbian folk singer Phranc!) on his/her/their/its newest single called (wait for it…) “Love Bomb” which contains lyrics like “the greatest love ever known / re-wire the brain and forfeit the soul” and “turn the toxic swan song upside down / carve your favorite amputee / blast away the world we see / liquid metal heart / from your love bomb” and look I didn’t say all the lyrics make perfect sense but you get the gist of what Phranque’s maybe trying to say.

Lest you miss the subtleties in the lyrics, the music of “Love Bomb” gets across a similar subtext of capitalistic false consciousness with its shiny musical surfaces (the propulsive garage-rock riffage) acting as a sweet candy-coating for the darker stuff underneath like the spooky-sounding organ (perfect for Halloween!) and the doomy chord progression (the bridge section in particular!) not to mention the lyrics.

So just imagine if ZZ Top had suddenly gone goth in the ‘80s right in the middle of their MTV-friendly Eliminator phase and you’re in the ballpark at least. But even more than ZZ Top the band “Love Bomb” reminds me of most of all is Blue Öyster Cult because if you took out “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” from that one scene in the original Halloween (1978) where it’s playing on the car radio as Jamie Lee Curtis and that other chick are driving around and smoking weed before the latter gets turned into chopped liver by Michael Myers and replaced it with the Phranque song under discussion I think it’d work pretty well.

And come to think of it some of their other songs remind me a bit of Blue Öyster Cult too because much like Long Island’s finest AOR rockers—BÖC are best known to the youth of today as an SNL punchline but back in the day they were cool enough to hang with Patti Smith—Phranque are not afraid to inject dark vibes and synthy textures into their sturdy rock tunes (check out “Mick & Keith Forever” off his/their last full-length 13 (La Cosa Nostra), or “Sea Winds” off Butcher the Scapegoat and peep those Blue Öystery vocal harmonies while you’re at it—nor afraid to inject some serious weirdness into the mix because Phranque’s albums are full of trippy instrumental interludes and other left-field touches. And hey maybe someday they’ll cover BÖC’s ”Joan Crawford” (1981) because that’s some crazy-ass shiz too but let’s just hope Phranque never becomes the butt of any cowbell-related future memes (stick to the maracas fellas!) featuring Christopher Walken. (Jason Lee)

As clearly indicated by its title, What’s Yr Damage (6131 Records), the debut LP by Philly-purveyors-of-psychotronic-rock Lovelorn clearly pays tribute to two iconic ‘80s bands—the first of which being Big Fun whose one-and-only Stateside hit came in 1988 with “Teenage Suicide (Don’t Do It),” the bombastic-dance-pop-with-a-social-message classic featured in the homicidal-high-school-rom-com Heathers (the second greatest movie ever made!) with its iconic catch phrase “What’s your damage?”; and the second of which being Black Flag, the iconic California hardcore-sters whose debut LP Damaged (1981) served as a paganistic paean to teenage alienation and craving (“Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie!”) with squalls of squalid guitar courtesy of Greg Ginn—which isn’t to dismiss the other influences at play here (industrial, shoegaze, dream pop, trip hop, who knows what else!) and despite being released two months ago it still sounds pretty darn good.

Across the album’s ten tracks the duo of Anna and Patrick place these disparate sonic fragments into close proximity like tectonic plates colliding and coalescing and forming into massive land masses and, I mean, just take a listen to the album’s second track “Sickness Reward,” which kicks off with an ambient Cabaret Voltaire-y soundscape (R.I.P. Richard H. Kirk) that’s soon overlaid with a massive industrial-disco beat and heavy synth, and then stripped down to a minimal electro-pop groove when the vocals first enter, and then built back up again but with a growing sense of sonic disorder seeping in around the edges (the manic guitar, the power-drill synth) and be sure to check out the music video too (dir. Daniel Fried) which opens with a flipped Cannon Films logo—the production studio that put out the greatest piece of cinema ever Ninja III: The Domination (don’t worry, it doesn’t matter if you’ve seen the first two) and I’m hoping the eventual sequel to this video sees the field-and-track athletes inexplicably attacked by a crazed ninja but I digress. 

Anyway, this is a record that really creates its own lane. And likewise for the lyrical content which addresses such serious topics as eating disorders, mental illness, and creating one’s own lane (shades of Big Fun again and yes I know I know) but which also captures pure desire in the starkest of terms (“Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie”) or as Lovelorn themselves put on it on "Tiger," the final track of What’s Yr Damage: “I justify what I want / I already waited too long.” (Jason Lee)

Months previous to the release of her debut full-length Chain Reaction (Born Losers Records), the first time I heard Catherine Moan’s music was with the song “Drop It!” whose refrain goes: “sway in time, it’s so sweet / drop down low and feel the heat / keep it down low / drop it, drop it feel the heat / drop it feel the heat, drop it feel the heat / drop it, drop it, drop it, drop it / drop it feel the heat” and I was immediately struck by how Ms. Moan had taken the sentiment behind Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot” (due credit to Lil’ Wayne) and removed both the simile and the spare, ultra-vivid production work—replacing it instead with a neon smear of pulsing analog synths and 80s-esque drum programming (“new retro wave” the kids call it) with the requested acts of “drop[ping] it” and “feel[ing] the heat” (not to mention “keep[ing] this fire burning / ’til the records stop turning”) framed as invitations rather than commands, supported by a bopping electro-lullaby vibe with the song’s only hint of conflict coming in the bridge: “now that we can finally breathe / c’mon and drop that ass / and dance with me.

It was the perfect summer jam and needless to say I was hooked, especially after witnessing the music video which simulates the feel of an ‘80s video dating profile. But then something funny happened. The more I listened, the more I detected a ghostly undertow to the song. Maybe it was the icy pinprick synths in the chorus. Or the airy dissociated-sounding vocals, like being seduced by someone when under ether (hello, Andrea True Connection!) or how the musical arrangement feels like John Carpenter wrote a major-key disco song for one of his soundtracks.

But far from detracting from the song this only deepened my appreciation because, for my money, it’s just this distinctively different kind of tension that makes “Drop It!” and the album it appears on now so oddly alluring—because over seven subsequent tracks Chain Reaction doubles down on the mood-altering mashup of ecstatic release and confining unease and emotional blunting a.k.a. “waning of affect” if you wanna get all postmodern about it (on the latter point, one song on the album revolves around the repeated phrase “I can’t feel a thing” while the chorus of another informs the listener “I want to feel nothing / I want to see nothing”).

And not that you asked but when it comes to cinematic associations evoked by Chain Reaction for me it’s Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner all the way. Because imho all these songs would fit perfectly at a Los Angeles discotheque and lounge circa 2019 as imagined in 1982 (natch!) perfectly capturing the retro-future sound of pop music in a society overtaken by rampant technology, alienation, and environmental degradation (but also, new methods of connection and new avenues of pleasure, so call it a draw!) which leads its citizenry to question what it even means to be “human” anymore (who could imagine such a place!) and where pop music serves both as a crucial mirror-to-society and escapist release (like how Harrison Ford reportedly loved singing “More, More, More” in his downtime). And then seeing Ms. Moan perform her first NYC live show on a rooftop on the first night that Tropical Storm Elsa brought torrential rains to the city (the Our Wicked Lady roof is covered, but still I’m surprised and impressed the show went on) really sealed the deal.

Plus on “Drop It!” in particular I get the feeling Ms. Moan is actually role-playing as a “basic pleasure model” replicant-as-pop-artist à la Daryl Hannah’s Pris character (who shoulda been in a goth band in the movie with her perfect punky raccoon look, or maybe they cut those scenes out) but a basic pleasure model who will gladly crush your windpipe between her thighs when the time’s right—plus you gotta admit “feel the beat / in your heartbeat” is a brilliantly cyborg-y song lyric but hey what do I know—while the other songs on Chain Reaction likewise bring to mind a distinctly “glowing neon signs reflecting off glass surfaces and slicked concrete streets of an urban dis/pleasure district”, with the next track “Wasted” upping the moody-pop stakes with a faded-in intro that could easily be a Vangelis outtake from the Blade Runner soundtrack.

To which you may rightly say: “Theories, schmeries! What does Catherine herself say about the record, her creative process and sources of inspiration?” Well, lucky for you, I asked and she answered, generously filling in some of the details and, no, Blade Runner was never mentioned. Ms. Moan describes her creative process thusly: 

“I write and record off of feelings and whims. Rather than going into a song with a planned idea it usually starts from a melody or lyric I hummed and came up with in the shower or on a walk. And from there it is a playful and chaotic binge of making all kinds of arrangements of sounds and melodies. I’ll sit there with my microphone and sing/speak/shout all kinds of quips and lines in different rhythms and styles until something clicks and it all falls into place. And this process goes on until I can’t stop dancing around my room until i’m out of breath. It’s a style of creativity that I feel is very true to my hyperactive and energetic personality…there’s something about spontaneity and randomness that I think can really bring ideas out of thin air and really tap into where I am at the moment.”

And ok none of this sounds very cyborg-like but instead more human than human which hey that’s a good thing and I’m just picturing this process unfolding with a song like “Body Work” as it builds from a reflective electro-ballad (“I get overwhelmed from the start”) to a bedroom-dancing-crescendo during the chorus (“I can’t feel a thing / ‘cause I’m over it all”) which all taps into one overarching theme of the album described by Catherine as “coping with an unnatural amount of alone time with yourself and your body and specifically the places my own mind went from being beside myself too long” which is all pretty damn relatable given the recent past. 

But when it comes to the creative tools she used to make the album I’m on slightly firmer ground given that the songs on Chain Reaction were created using a “tight selection of gear…using a KORG Minilogue, my pink Fender Mustang, a humble Shure SM58, and a handful of VSTs” and judging from a couple demo videos I viewed on the Minilogue it’s especially good at producing the ethereal, shimmering timbres favored by Vangelis and the Yamama CS-80 used on the Blade Runner soundtrack so there ya go. 

Moving from keyboard patches to skin grafts, on “Skin Graft” Ms. Moan elaborates her Cartesian thematics further on a song she describes as being “about [my own] frequent hospital visits and health issues” plus “reacting to a permanent scar I had just acquired on my chin from falling HARD off my skateboard,” but that also comes from “the perspective of elective surgeries people go through with to alter their appearance or ‘fix’ parts of their bodies they don’t agree with.” 

“The lyrics ‘scars on my face / stitches cut across / take them away…bind them down’ is a reflection on gender identity and a disassociation and conflict between secondary sex characteristics and androgyny. And more specifically the compulsion to want to change those things to find comfort albeit through drastic, painful, medical procedures like breast reduction [or] full on top surgery [whereas] the chorus ‘I want to feel nothing I want to see nothing’ is very self explanatory…an honest and blunt vocalization of the conflict and the wish to cease and desist any self hatred / body confusion” which raises an interesting if accidental parallel between the song and the movie because they both revolve around being in a state of ontological crisis—a crisis provoked when long-standing, dominant binaries (male/female, human/non-human) are violated and thus challenged which is a brave but risky thing to do—though at least this state of crisis is set to a catchy disco beat which makes for the best kind of crisis.

It’s all enough to make you wanna switch your mind and body onto autopilot (another running theme on the album!) which is addressed head-on in the album’s penultimate track “Lucky Lobotomy” (“Turn myself into the cerebral authorities. Lock me out, toss the key”) which is about how “all the privilege and agency that comes with having a sentient mind can be overwhelming because your thoughts will just go to such unhealthy and painful places that wind up hurting you and god forbid others. But luckily it’s a lovely track so you’re unlikely to suffer any permanent damage. 

In closing I’d say that Catherine Moan’s I-wanna-be-sedated-synth-pop bangers on Chain Reaction are perfect for turning off your mind and floating downstream (despite some heavy, heady ideas as inspiration) or for dancing madly in the middle of the street not giving a damn what anyone thinks because all these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. (Jason Lee)

“Afar” is the third advance single off from Xeno & Oaklander’s upcoming seventh album called Vi/deo which is slated to be released on 10/22/21 and if you’ve got all the math figured out on that then you can move ahead to the music video below and attempt to keep tally of how many identical-twin Liz Wendelbo’s appear in quick succession (meanwhile bandmate Sean McBride is inexplicably absent, unless perhaps he’s been assimilated into the collective by the Borg) or who knows maybe it’s just my brain glitching again. 

And once you’ve mastered the math then it’s time to brush up on your French proficiency skills because that’s the language the lyrics are in tho’ lucky for us the duo have shared a full translation free of charge on their Instagram page. Plus there’s some cognates in there which should help in cases like where “encens insencé” is translated to “senseless incense” which sounds quite lovely and poetic in either language. And did I mention Ms. Wendelbo does a convincing Vanessa-Paradis-meets-Jane-Birkin impersonation both sonically and kinesthetically (how do French people sound both bored and aroused at the same time? this must to be studied…) which must come naturally to a person of French-Norwegian extraction such as herself. 

What’s more “Afar” provides further evidence there’s just something about electronic music with sensual French vocals (especially on the more dark ’n’ trancey side of things like Coldwave, Minimal Wave, and EBM-Wave (Electronic Body Music)) that works in a big way when it’s done right—which may have something to do with the language itself having such a natural sense of flow and élégance—and it’s done right by X&O on this track with a musical backing that likewise captures the so-cold-it’s-sizzling-hot Gallic vibe that very few English-language artists pull off convincingly with Boy Harsher being one exception that comes to mind.

“But nevermind all that,” you may say, “what was the inspiration behind the song and the upcoming album?” Well I don’t know how or why you’d expect me to know but fortunately for all involved Xeno & Oaklander have revealed the answer on their Bandcamp page: “Inspired by ideas of synesthesia, scent, star worship, and obsolescent technologies…Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride began conceiving the blueprint of Vi/deo while sequestered at their Southern Connecticut home studio during the pandemic. The context of isolation, streaming, and remote dreaming seeped into their chemistry, manifesting as both homage to and meditation on a certain cinematic strain of technicolor fantasy: the screen as stage, distance disguised as intimacy, where tragedy and glamour crossfade into one,” and I gotta hand it to these two because this artfully constructed statement-of-purpose makes me think maybe they should be the ones writing this blog.

“But wait,” you may say, “this is an electronic group so don’t they stare at screens all day long whether there’s a pandemic going on or not.” To which an omniscient voice from the sky may reply: “Au contraire, mon pear, because X&O are all about using self-contained vintage analog sound modules that have lots of buttons and knobs and spaghetti-like piles of patch cables threading in and out of assorted orifices in their various electronic doo-dads (sorry for all the technical language!) all of which is designed to be played live—for proof check out their set above from Vox Sinistra’s weekly Strict Tempo broadcast on Twitch which opens with an electrifying performance of “Afar”—so instead of starting at screens they’re constantly in motion with all kinds of button-pushing, knob-twisting, and cable-switching much like an old-school telephone switchboard operator which means there’s a real sense of physicality to their live sets, plus a palpable sense of liveness on their recordings" and boy is that omniscient voice long-winded!

Speaking of recordings, namely the upcoming release of Vi/deo, you’d be smart to go ahead and pre-order that puppy because special-edition colored vinyl goes fast even when it’s a recording of Sherpa sheep herders (cool stuff, actually) and don’t be a tightwad either because for an extra couple dollars you can get the record album with a special scented paper insert (read above: “synesthesia and scent”) which I’m guessing should be at least as fragrant as John Water’s Polyester scratch-and-sniff cards with exotic olfactory sensations matching the groovy moody synth-pop reverberations within. (Jason Lee)

“Pastel Colors” is the name of a single released this past weekend by self-described “90s girl” Jamythyst, self-described creator of “DIY electromotional pop jams,” and it’s an interesting choice of title because this ‘90s girl is clearly drawn to day-glo tones and darker hues elsewhere—both visually and musically—just as the Nineties itself is known for its fluorescent pop and abrasively dark rock and goth and hip hop. (Mariah meet Metallica! Hanson say howdy to Hole! N*SYNC nuzzle up to NWA! Etc. Etc.) And while Jamythyst’s music falls squarely under the pop column, tracks like “Witches in the Woods,” “Scary Movies,” and “Masochist” show that she’s also into exploring her darker side. 

So where do pastels fit into this color scheme? When placed next to electro-bangerz like “Flip Me Over’ and “Melt My Face” with their cheeky entreaties to “be your hourglass / if you flip me over” or to “drop the needle, drop the bass / rock my world, melt my face,” “Pastel Colors” is indeed more subdued, something like a mid-80s Howard Jones joint with its mix of airy synths, percolating sequencers, and reflective lyrics.
 
 
Lyrically, the pastel colors in question seem to imply both a childlike sense of wonder (“carousel in the middle of the city / gets me every time the colors go by”) and a spellbinding sense of risk (“I can’t help myself / I jump off the carousel every time / getting dizzy on the pastel colors”) as represented by the faded fiberglass horses of a mesmerizing merry-go-round going around and around in circles (just like the swirling echo effect at the end of each vocal line) or as Jamythyst puts it “it’s an electro-pop bop about being a commitment-phobe who just wants to have fun” which is perhaps another kind of going in circles. 

So we’re talking about losing control and re-asserting control here, being lured by the pastel blur of the carousel but then jumping off when things get too intense. And if this song is in fact at least implicitly about control issues (stick with me here!) then it’s obviously also an homage to Janet’s Jackson’s “Control” because that particular song from 1986 (and the whole Control album!) was a turning point in the history of dance pop, not to mention an assertion of artistic independence by Ms. Jackson (if you’re nasty!) and thus a precursor to artists like Jamythyst.

All of which makes me wonder if our featured artist’s stage name is in fact an homage to the production team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis who helped shape Control and thus strongly impacted much of the dance pop, R&B, and rap that came in its wake (not to mention the whole “New Jack Swing” phenomenon) and certainly Jamythyst reflects all of this “control” both in spirit—as a self-contained singer, songwriter, and producer who makes bedroom dance pop—and in terms of sonics with her proclivity for jacked drum machines beats and phat synth-baselines and angular in-your-face sampling (with the caveat that other influences obviously come into play such as early Madonna, Sylvester, Robyn, Prince, and other single-monikered artistes.

And when we look at the bigger picture, isn’t so much of pop music (and dance pop in particular) fixated on control issues—whether control over one’s own bodily and sexual expression, control over one’s own artistic expression and public image, or control over fate itself in the aspirational pop of the Idol era, not to mention the inverse loss-of-control and sense of transcendence sought on the dance floor—which is probably one big reason why marginalized groups in society are so often at the forefront of pop music’s innovations.

 

Sadly, after an astounding ten-plus year run of hits, control was taken away from Janet Jackson when the reigning queen of self-assertive pop (and a highly LGBTQ+ friendly reigning queen at that) was essentially accused of being a witch and burned at the stake by a raging mob of pigskin fans (and gossip mongers who could care less about the Super Bowl) because they were briefly distracted from Tom Brady’s ass-hugging shiny pants due to the sudden and unwelcome split-second appearance of Janet Jackson’s nipple on national TV courtesy of a former Mouseketeer. Yet, the sound that Janet Jackson and Jam/Lewis continued to refine on albums like Rhythm Nation 1814 and The Velvet Rope has continued on, often in service of “straight” artists ranging from boy bands to gangsta rappers. And so, speaking of control, it’s reassuring to happen upon a local artist, and one who just started producing her own music during the pandemic at that, digging into the roots of dance pop and re-asserting control on behalf of femme- and queer-identifying artists past and present. (Jason Lee)

 

 

You may recall a review posted in this space a few weeks ago about Nihiloceros’ third and final single “Dirty Homes” from their upcoming “concept EP” Self Destroy (Totally Real Records) or hey let’s be generous and call it a full-blown concept album because six songs is pretty much in-between an EP and an album and anyway it’s all revolves around an end-of-the-world scenario and that fact alone makes it monumental enough to deserve full album status, even if, as singer/lyricist/guitarist Mike Borchardt describes it, it was never planned to be an actual concept album, but the through-line took shape organically as the album was worked over and re-worked again during lockdown which was very conducive to brainstorming dystopic concept albums.

Well, anyway, I hope you didn’t forget about Nihiloceros in the meantime (or Dre! never forget about Dre!) because the record just came out this weekend and obviously you need to clear 20 minutes from your schedule asap to give it a close listen. And hey just be thankful this is no Tales From Topographic Oceans or 2112 (RIP Neil Peart, yes we forgive you for the whole Ayn Rand thing and have the utmost respect for any sticks-man who owns a drum set with 23 roto-toms and then actually uses them all) because who has two spare hours to spare sitting inside on a nice weekend trying to figure out why the heck a cabal of malevolent Priests hanging out in the Temples of Syrinxs would choose to outlaw creativity and individuality or how they would enforce such drastic measures. 

And Nihiloceros realize this too because they’ve distilled the most powerful bits of those albums into a concentrated paste of rocking-your-face-off, and what’s more they don’t go all pretentious about it with a fold-out gatefold design that if you stare into it long enough the whole album suddenly “makes sense." Because instead the whole idea, according to Mr. Borchardt, is to “cut the legs out from under any grandiosity” by placing the listener into the brainpan of an average schlub facing down the apocalypse and over the course of six songs working through the five stages of grief (binge-watching The Wire, stress-eating, suddenly conrtracting hives and dropsy, more stress-eating, and just being generally unpleasant) so put away that bushel of ‘shrooms because you won’t need ‘em sorry to say.

Btw speaking of weekends and monumental things, Nihiloceros will host an album release party tonight (Sat. 9/18) at a mysterious location known as EWEL (probably an acronym for East Williamsburg Exploding Lo-Fi Inevitable but don’t quote me on that) with both Desert Sharks and Kissed By An Animal on the bill as well so hell yeah that’s gonna be an epic time.

AND THAT’S NOT ALL!! Because if you really wanna “self destroy” you’re advised to buy one of the album bundles that’ll soon be available (in the next week or two) because one of the bundles comes with an exclusive limited edition “Halfway Human” hot sauce mixed up especially for you in Mike’s bathtub which (the name says it all) which includes ingredients such as habanero peppers, grapefruit juice, Allspice™, chile de árbol (also known as bird’s beak chili and rat’s tail chile, yum!) and some secret ingredients just so you don’t try to sell the recipe to Taco Bell or somebody. A couple bottles will reportedly be available at the show tonight so…

And if the sauce is too strong for your weak-ass taste buds to handle (lay off the tofu why don’t’cha!) you can always use the stuff to strip the paint off your father’s ’67 Ford Fairlane because it could use a new coat anyway and boy won’t he be surprised. Anyway it’s a highly appropriate name for a hot sauce because just listen to how the song it’s named for starts with a single anticipatory note then with a subtle little melodic bit sneaking in before exploding into a skull-stomping riff about 15 second and that’s what it’ll feel like when the heat hits about 15 seconds after you swallow the stuff.

Or, if you’re one of these guitar playing people, you can get the Self Destroy album bundled with a guitar pedal or three custom-designed by the band’s bassist/backup singer Alex Hoffman who in his down-time works as a structural engineer in the “power industry” and I’m not sure how you get better credentials for being in a power trio than that. Each pedal is named after a song on the album (and used on that song natch) so if you had a notion to form a Nihiloceros tribute band well it’s your lucky day because now you won’t need to mess around with about 100 pedals trying to get that perfect Nihiloceros tone nailing every subtle timbral variation on every song.

I had a little phone convo with Alex the other day and he walked me through the creative process of pedal-making which entails getting your hands on some blank circuit boards and wiring and other components, not to mention the enclosure topped off with primer, spray paint, clear coat enamel, and (wait for it) glitter so you can make the thing look cool enough to take on stage with you. And so yeah, while you were spending days trying to bake your own bread during the lockdown, then inevitably giving up and drinking a quart of gin instead, Alex was busy teaching himself the fine art of pedal-construction and designing three of t hem on his own which frankly makes up all look pretty shabby in comparison so thanks a log Alex (he insists, however, that anyone can pull off making pedals from scratch with the help of online tutorials and some pre-printed circuit boards with the help of small businesses like Small Bear Electronics catering to the budding stompbox enthusiast).  

The first one of these pedal is called “Dirty Homes” named after the first song on the album and it’s sort of a clone of the classic Small Clone pedal but with with an MN3007 chip with "a depth knob instead of a switch and an added vibrato/chorus toggle" because we all like nice things don’t we. To hear what this pedal sounds like just check out the intro of “Dirty Homes” and focus on the underwater-sounding tremolo effect (BTW you know you’re dealing with a serious pedal-head band when you can’t tell at many points if you’re hearing a standard electric guitar or a bass guitar at any given time) which is a distinctive timbre heard on chart-topping songs by chart-topping bands of today/yesteryear like The Police, Crowded House, and Nirvana (see the video above for evidence).  

The other two custom pedals are heard on the following couple of songs: “iamananimal” (eponymous pedal) and “Mammal Science Fiction" (the Velvet Elvis) which is along the lines of an “Acapulco Gold [pedal] modded with an added gain control” and a “Nihiloceros version of a big muff with a mids switch and a diode bypass switch” respectively as described by Alex himself. And hey why not pour some “Halfway Human” sauce (next song on the album!) on those diodes because no telling what kinda crazy sonics you’d get from that. 

But really nevermind all the hawt sauces and hot pedalboard action because the real secret ingredient on this record is the two musical collaborators who appear on four of the six tracks (two a piece!) that being Shadow Monster’s Gillian Visco and Desert Shark’s Stephanie Gunther—who also receive one songwriting credit a piece, because as Mike describes it, their contributions (in addition to the sweet harmonizing and hollerin’ they bring to the table) were so crucial that they changed the very fabric of the songs as they were still being completed—and then you also got drummer extraordinaire Carlo Minchillo (The Planes, Murder Tag, Brooklyn Drum Collective) contributing theremin on one track.

And so with the release of Self Destroy we got a true All-Stars record on our hands despite all of these talented individuals being beat out by underdog Fiona Apple for “Best Rock Performance” at this year’s Grammy Awards, but I think you know where the best rock performance will be happening tonight. (Jason Lee)

photo by @brooklynelitist

 

You gotta give it up for a band that lives up to their name right out of the gate (no knock on Brian Wilson but he was more into backyard sandboxes than actual beaches and sadly the one “real Beach Boy” in the group drowned—choose those band names wisely kids) and so you gotta give it up for The Silk War, a band that even on their debut album (Come Evening) have already got the whole “dialectical opposites” thing down cold.

Because “silk” and “war” are two things you don’t expect to go together (which is basically true of "war" and anything nice like silk or doilies or Swiss watches) but here is a musical collective that dives fully into their moniker with abandon and not in the obvious sense of depicting “bedroom conflicts” aka "silk wars" to which the real Silk War would say hold my martini (quoting directly from their frontperson: “Heartbreaks don’t really do it for me. Not like a lot of people who think that, you know, I need that and now I’m a poet. If someone doesn’t wanna fuck me anymore, it’s not bad.”) because over the course of 11 songs they delve again and again into the Freudian construct of Eros and Thanatos and some of the forms these two core conflicting-yet-codependent drives can take and translate them into toe-tapping orch pop and dark indie rock songs that combine dread and desire in equal measure.

And maybe right about now you’re thinking “here we go with the overreach” but rest assured everything written here is based on direct empirical evidence because not long ago I met up with Silk War’s singer/lyricist/acoustic guitarist and co-songwriter Alexandra Blair (the other co-songwriter in question is guitarist/producer James “Jimmy” Mullen) for a chat and she verified the broad contours of my theory and described how her songwriting is galvanized by a “circadian rhythm” of revelry and despair—with the sense of transcendence of a proper S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y Night on the town soon followed by S-U-N-D-A-Y Morning Coming Down doldrums so there’s your Eros and Thanatos interplay right there no matter the actual days of the week, not to mention the closely related notion of creative destruction or destructive creativity whichever you prefer.

And here in our conversation Ms. Blair references the Orson Welles “cuckoo clock” speech from the Third Man which is highly apropos—not to mention her mentions of Bukowski, Nabokov and Sartre at other points and her love of literature in general—so be forewarned there’s a reading list involved if you wanna fully get onto the Silk War Wavelength.

[[Before going any further I should mention any quote here from Alexandra that is sans quotation marks is paraphrased on my part because I used a voice memo app to record our talk and of course it picked up all kinds of ambient noise and nearby conversations, and using a transcription app didn’t help much either because it had me replying to the statement above with “Cool madness better. Right. Chickens, crazy” and while I wish I’d said that it seems unlikely because I wasn’t that many beers in yet. Still, I’d like to think Alexandra really did say “The vicious alliterates, but also like the tender Fucking drama” at some point and yes the phone app capitalized “Fucking” for some reason because why not.]]

Come Evening opens with “Little Souls” which sets the stage for the dialectical musical materialism (!) to come, a song that’s by turns somber and stirring, Apollonian and Dionysian. Fading in on some dour church organ tones, soon a faraway phoning-it-in voice informs us “our barbaric ritual can begin” (finally!) before a quick reverse-fade suddenly snaps us out of our reverie and we’re thrust into a new musical texture with a driving rhythm section and crisp acoustic guitar work and melodic electric lead, but never losing the downward spiral organ chords with Alexandra declaiming, “There’s a dark wet side of things / crystallized in perfumes / masqueraded with rings” which right away lays out the stakes of shape-shifting "dark wet" primal desires and fears (the perfume here may be crystallized, but soon it’ll be dispersed into the ether again) that make our narrator want to be swept away but at the same time wary of getting a little too swept up in this twilight world where we’re all “forgetting our need to sleep” and “breaking windows for the beauty of it” and there’s your creative destruction right there.

In “Little Souls” we also get our first exposure to another dialectical relationship in a singing style that alternates between half-sung-half-spoken “recitative” at one extreme and more melodic “aria” sections on the other extreme (especially when it comes to the hooks). And yeah I realize recitative/aria are terms from opera, but it’s not a total stretch given that A. is well versed with these terms as a formally trained singer because she majored in Vocal Performance at NYU after moving here from Chicago.

And oh yeah “Little Souls” includes one of my favorite images from the record which doubles as a fashion tip (“I’ll paint my nails black to cover up / all that New York dirt”) which also supports A.’s contention that this is a true New York City record and which also supports my contention of Eros/Thanatos lying at the heart of Come Evening. Because really any truly great city like NYC should be hellbent on killing you (Thanatos) but if it doesn’t kill you it’ll make you fall in love with it (Eros) not despite of it’s murderous intent but (perversely, you pervert!) because of it. Or as A. puts it: “Have you ever biked through Bushwick? You get dirt in your eyes! It’s disgusting. You have to wear sunglasses. You have to be able to withstand it. And at the same time absorb it, and love it. And fucking hate it. By becoming yourself and wearing [inaudible] with whatever you feel on the outside and creating something out of [inaudible]” and well you get the idea despite the omissions. (for those with too much time on their hands: if you wanna read up on the Marxist dialectics of modern urban living and New York City specifically then I’d highly recommend Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air which is still entertaining and enlightening nearly 40 years after its initial publication…)

The next two songs on Come Evening keep riding the dialectical rails with “Barcelona” being about a man who sabotages his present by confusing it with his past (and probably a half dreamt-up past at that) and again the beginning sounds like you’re waking up from a dream before launching into a catchy piano-driven baroque-pop number with a video shot inside a Brooklyn church interspersed with shots of Alexandra walking into the sea all Kate Chopin like (and oh yeah I should have mentioned the music video for “Little Souls” is modeled on Maya Deren’s 1944 short film At Land for all you aspiring cineaste avant-garde types). And then the next song “The Blue Hour” (as befits its title) explores the liminal state between night and day, sleep and waking, dreams and reality, where they’re all not so easy to distinguish and you think to yourself, “I’ve been awake for a long time / I’ll sort it out.” 

And then and then (in no particular order) there’s the deceptively upbeat dance-pop of “Slender Slander” which deals with gun violence; and “Lark Mirror” which uses a bird hunter’s decoy mechanism as a metaphor for delusion but in string-swelling, spine-tingling form especially when it gets to the line about “not wasting my youth on you”; “New York (You’re My Religion)” has a nice glam-pop swing to it and the title’s pretty self-explanatory, while the stately closing waltz of “Sylvia” is less self-explantory but now you know it’s about Sylvia Plath; “Agoria Phobia” opens with a slinky, stop-start groove that most bands would not hesitate to build an entire song around. But Silk War are good about not repeating themselves, or at least only repeating themselves with variation, and this song completely changes after about a minute never to return to the intro part again.

And then and then “Second Age” opens up with a Joy Division beat and some doomy chords but ends almost six minutes later sounding like the song is soaring to the heaven even though the lyrics stay sick throughout; “Velvet” uses the veil as a metaphor for imperfections both hidden and exposed (those dialectics again!) while the penultimate “My Familiar” represents the demonic doppelgänger of its title with an epic eight-minute arrangement that starts with a witchy mystical sounding opening section and then makes it way through a whole serious of ebbs and flows before arriving at some Pink Floyd-worthy ethereal keyboard arpeggiating and psychedelic guitar wailing before ebbing and cresting one last time with a triumphant declaration of autonomy. 

And did I mention this song comes off impressively live? Because when the Silk War appear in person they really amps up the Dionysian side of things with Alexandra stalking the stage (and the audience!) like a test-tube fusion of Siouxsie Sioux and Stevie Nicks and Wendy O. Williams’s DNA but with the band holding down the Apollonian side of things with ornate musical arrangements precisely rendered as seen in the video above I took of them at the recent Come Evening album release party. And no the sound quality’s not perfect because this was recorded on a phone but it turned out a hell of a lot better than the interview and should give you enough incentive to see them live which like a waking dream you can never quite recapture afterward but you know it was damn near perfect when it happened. —Jason Lee

photo by John Burgundy, Berlin Under A, 08.26.21