Whatever your current circumstances and station in life there’s sure to be a certain number of things and situations that are hard to swallow which is precisely why this world is in such dire need of not-so-safe-spaces to help one to cope and to help compensate for the steady stream of bullshittery and calamity and idiocy doled out by said world with seeming impunity cuz there’s perhaps no better antidote to life’s more hard to swallow bits than to turn the tables and take a hard swallow not only of something brown and bitter but also to drink fully of this existence’s more bitter “hardcore” qualities and to thusly in theory inoculate oneself by savoring and even celebrating life in a cold, indifferent universe made slightly less cold and indifferent for a few moments by some spirited dive bar camaraderie and by actual spirits of course…
……and where it’s come to coping, compensating, and celebrating between the years of 2015 and 2023 in New York City we’ve collectively been lucky to have a bar literally named The Hard Swallow that it’s pretty amazing even existed in a “cleaned up” Manhattan as recently as last year but which miraculously managed to materialize like a ghost ship in the night—walls painted black with only the neon-hued beer lights to guide us with a jukebox serving as a sonic alter to the likes of Iggy and Lemmy and a small cadre of foxy sideshow escapee go-go dancers—due in large part to its impressive pedigree…
…a watering hole formerly owned by Tom McNeil under various names such as Cheap Shots, Spanky and Darlas—one-time proprietor of such storied dives as the Village Idiot, Hogs & Heifers and Doc Holliday’s—rechristened upon its sale to Leroy “Big Lee” Lloyd, a bouncer-cum-doorman-cum-head-of-security at such storied venues as Coney Island High (the St. Marks Avenue epicenter of everything cool about NYC in the ‘90s), Wild Spirits (the best metal bar ever to grace the upper Upper East Side) and Hogs & Heifers (back when the Meatpacking District was still the wild wild West of the West Side)…
…with Big Lee being a man who’d had some hard pills to swallow himself from early on in life like as a five-year-old finding his father slumped over a toilet ODed on heroin for instance who soon grew up to be an imposing adolescent with a hulking 6’3” frame and IDGAF attitude which led to an early career providing “protection” for local pimps and pushers in his Coney Island neighborhood but a man who in later years came to be widely known to be a teddy bear to his clientele once you got to know him or even if you didn’t so long as you didn’t do anything to justifiably piss him off cuz then it wouldn’t matter if you were an off-duty cop or a 9/11 fireman or what-have-you he’s gladly throw you thru a plate glass window if suitably and repeatedly provoked nonetheless…
…but the Hard Swallow was hardly a solo operation instead being borne out of Lee’s partnership with Maria “Sasha” Lloyd (alongside silent partner Mike “Durgy” Durgavich) whom he met when Sasha came to apply for a job at Wild Spirits with the pair becoming soulmates at first sight cuz here was another native New Yorker who’d pulled herself up from the gutter thru sheer force of will and a determination to avoid passing along generational trauma after surviving a suicide attempt a year or so after her son was born and having herself been raised by an abusive if sporadically nurturing junkie mom who ended up as a resident of Rikers Island thus leaving Sasha to roam the pre-gentrification Lower East Side as a sporadically homeless ‘90s hardcore punk rock kid…
…with Sasha thereafter playing Nancy to Big Lee’s Sid and vice-versa if that iconic couple had managed to survive their mutually assured destruction that is and gotten their shit together enough after moving to the Chelsea so as to not end up face down in pools of blood and vomit respectively and to open a bar instead catering to their fellow urban misfits, punk rockers and metalhead alike but not exclusively, a home away from home for functional and not-so-functional fuckups that by rights should’ve been landmarked before it closed late last year…
…landmarked as a living museum of 70s/80s/90s New York dirtbag culture with “dirtbag” spoken affectionally, a culture without which the very phrase punk rock would be utterly meaningless today, seeing as someday this country’s millennials and Gen Z’ers (not to mention “Generation Alpha”….the horror, the horror) will wish they had more living relics to observe of the Gen X’ers/Slackers they’ve so ceaselessly stolen, erm, borrowed from when it comes to musics, fashion, etc. and in their natural beer-soaked, whisky-besotted habitat no less…
…but I digress given that the point of the preceding for our purposes here is not some generational tit-for-tat but rather to provide context for how a man named Ben Carmichael came to form a band called B.A.B.E.S. (and no I don’t know what it stands for, if anything, and haven’t asked) and to record an EP called Losing Touch, with a bunch of compatriots and collaborators foremost among them being co-guitarist and co-singer Tianyi Zhang with Ben being a guy who the author first encountered online (of course!) approaching the Deli to book some emerging artists at The Hard Swallow (granted they’d have to play sans drums given the bar’s tight quarters and asshole neighbors) a bar where he and Tianyi along with Clift Arden on bass and a rotating cast of drummers first woodshopped the songs that appear on Losing Touch, as well as some that didn’t, at a monthly residency during 2022 and ’23 with the support of Sasha and Lee…
…but tragically the Big Lee passed away shortly thereafter in July 2023 of hypertensive cardiac arrest at the age of 51, with the bar itself going the way of the dodo bird not more than a few months later, a tragedy for his loved ones obviously but for NYC’s nightlife culture too, only driving home the point further of how we as New Yorkers we need to do everything possible to support and maintain every last remaining “bastion of low-down, timeless degeneracy” like they were dodo birds and despite Ben being a New Jersey-based degenerate versus than a New York-based degenerate the Deli booked his other band, Trash Executioner, at the venerable NYC tiki bar Ottos Shrunken Head (est. 2002 and we’d venture to say the Hard Swallow’s closest spiritual cousin) on a cold, rainy Monday night earlier this year alongside Subway Rat and Mag Electric which had a surprisingly robust (and enthusiastic) turnout given the meteorological conditions….
…and if I had to describe Ben’s presence in his Trash Executioner guise I’d say just imagine if the Replacement’s Bob Stinson hadn’t worn out his body and his heart, dying at the age of 35 in 1995 from too much hard living, or make that too much hard swallowing, but instead lived for at least a bit longer and moved to Jersey City and teleported forward in time to the year 2024 which isn’t to imply anything about Ben’s lifestyle about which I know next to nothing about but I do know that onstage he’s a coiled ball of manic energy, exhilarating and a bit menacing too, much like our man Bob and other rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle lifers…
…ready and willing to dive to the dirty floor of a small dive bar and go batshit insane during a guitar solo all in the name of rock ’n’ roll, a go-for-broke attitude that’s entirely fitting for a band who specialize in dirtbag odes to various dirtbag-related topics (e.g., polyamory, black lung, pigeon cock) like a hard rock Cramps or something, a band who by the way have written indisputably the world’s best ode to autoerotic asphyxiation (you need a lemon wedge / to bite down and take you back from the edge / if you drop it on the floor / then you’ll be carried out the door) that quite appropriately name checks both Michael Hutchence and “that guy from Kung Fu: The Legend Continues”…
…but B.A.B.E.S. to our surprise is a wholly different beast and good on my friend Ben for defying expectations cuz far from being a band, however galvanizing, that has a pretty immediately perceptible sensibility, B.A.B.E.S. to us feels more like a “bar band” in the sense of a band ready to play for and entertain fans of all sorts of different persuasions and sensibilities with each of the six songs on Losing Touch coming off like a distilled shot of liquor, each of them quite different, like taking a shot of CÎROC vodka followed by a shot of Jäger followed by a shot of Bulleit Bourbon and so on…
…with EP-opening “Don’t Worry Babe” coming off like an outtake from, well, Juliana Hatfield’s Hey Babe (in our humble opinion Juliana’s finest LP, alongside the underrated Only Everything, but these recent album-length tributes she’s being doing lately to the likes of the Police, Olivia Newton-John, and ELO have been intriguing too) with a sweet little guitar hook played over a fuzzy, jangly backdrop and a shuffling drumbeat or to put it another way it’s fresh and smooth but a little tangy too like a shot of CÎROCvodka with Tianyi Zhang imploring the listener “don’t worry babe / go celebrate / like it’s your birthday” in a sweetly woozy voice over echoey backing vox and thank you very much we will…
…with the following Ben-led track “Dreamgirl Nightmare” featuring buzzy droning synths alternating between chunky chords and meandering melodies over a Casio disco beat and a guitar solo that sounds like a bike tire slowly deflating with Ben singing about the titular character “burned into my mind like a burial shroud“(1) and indeed this track sounds like a demo Trent Reznor might have written for Pretty Hate Machine-era Nine Inch Nails after taking five shots of Jägermeister in quick succession…
…leading directly into the folksy intro of “Let The Day Get Away” which drifts by a like a wafting summer breeze (“wake up to the sound of my favorite TV show / which you’re playing in the background / whiskey on your skin mixed with salt air in the room / pour some sugar in my coffee”) which lyrics and music combined clearly evoke the gentle spiciness and sweet oak aromas of Bulleit brand bourbon which after the pastoral intro and a chorus about “let[ting] the day get away / in your eyes and sunshine rays” (and apologies if I’m getting a word or two wrong in the lyrics here) and when the distorted guitar comes in during the second verse it’s like the gentle burn as the sweet bourbon hits your insides…
…and look we’ll let you figure out the equivalent liquors for the remaining three songs but suffice to say “Waking Up Is Hard To Do” especially at five-past-two (spoken like a true blue barfly who slinks home at dawn) and indeed it’s good to be “careless what you wish for / you might just fall in love / you can call me hardcore / I’ll love you even more” (“Careless”) with the EP closing out with a little piano-led ditty called “TMI Love You” but far from feeling like too much information the EP is disarming with it’s playful, oft-shambolic sense of emotional intimacy which perhaps just goes how to show how an alleged den of inequity and degeneracy like the Hard Swallow is at one and the same time one of the warmest, most welcoming spots you could find yourself ensconced within in an otherwise cold and hard city like New York City…
(1) We initially mis-transcribed this lyrics as “running through my mind like a burial shroud.” The Deli regrets the error. Ben was kind enough to clarify that the image “burned into my mind like a burial shroud” is akin to “Christ’s mysteriously superimposed image on the shroud of Turin.”
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Losing Touch EP released on 7/7/2024
produced by B.A.B.E.S.
“Don’t Worry Babe” engineered and mixed by Terry Edelman at Space Jam
Tracks 2-6 mixed by Stefan Moessle at Secret-Sounds, mastered by Stefan Moessle
Ben Carmichael — guitar, vox, synth, programming
Tianyi Zhang — guitar, vox
Clift Arden — bass on tracks 1,3,4
Terry Edelman — drums on tracks 1,3,4,5,6
Jay Morales — background vox, bass on tracks 5,6
All songs written by Carmichael/Zhang except track 1 written by Carmichael/Cassin/Zhang