There’s a well-known adage about the middle chapters of film trilogies being the darkest, weirdest, weightiest installments of said trilogies that often proves true with The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and The Dark Knight (2008) serving as two of the best known examples…
…but for our money the most messed-up middle chapter of a film trilogy has got to be Big Top Pee-Wee (the 2016 Nexflix produced Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday served as the belated final installment) which coming on the heels of Tim Burton’s whimsically wacky Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure…
…bizarrely transformed its seemingly asexual, highly eccentric protagonist also known for starring in a classic Saturday morning TV show into a TOTAL HORNDOG AND TOTAL ASSHOLE who attempts to dry hump his virginal fianceé girlfriend on lunch dates and demonstrates clear evidence of a hair-pulling fetish and yes this is a family movie…
…finally cheating on his fianceé with a beautiful trapeze artist played by the sultry Valeria Golino and there’s a make out session scene between the two that goes on for an uncomfortably long time and the whole thing is so weirdly off-brand and off-kilter that Paul Reubens getting busted a few years later for masturbating in a porno theater should have been totally predictable…
…and likewise the April 2023 DELI DELIVERS playlist acts the middle chapter in a “Rites of Spring” March-April-May trilogy of playlist and true to form it’s the darkest/weirdest/most discordant of the three and Scout’s honor we promise not to be a month late with the May playlist tho’ to be fair this one’s been previewed on the Deli Instagram page already…
…so yeah we’re talking retrospective “April showers” in musical form and while it’s not easy to give a single sweeping characterization of 103 songs there’s a bunch of swirly hallucinatory weirdness to be found plus noisy art-damaged punk, off-kilter kaleidoscopic pop, psychedelic soul and goth-laced hip hop and damn we’re eating it up…
…from the opening ambient sepulchral strains sets to martial drum machine rhythms of 79.5’s “B.D.F.Q.” (which stands for “Bitch Don’t Fucking Quit” in case you were wondering) leading directly to the cosmic fever dream of Magdalena Bay’s “EXO” leading directly to the American Gothic fantasia of Wednesday’s “Got Shocked” leading directly to the the rapturous electopop of Father Koi’s “Promise Ring” (feat. Sofia Zarzuela) which sounds like a Venusian courtship sung by a helium-sucking autotuned cherub or maybe that’s just us…
…and heck that’s just the first four songs nevermind the Arthur-Russell-meets-The-Raincoats drone-groove of cumgirl8’s “Cicciolina” about the titular Hungarian-Italian pornstar-cum-pop-star-cum-politician who advocated ridding the world of nuclear weapons and ridding the world of war by offering to f*ck Saddam Hussein nor the other 97 songs on offer…
…until concluding at last with Glüme’s dreamy cover rendition of Metronomy’s “It’s Good To Be Back” which perhaps serves as the perfect transition out of the dark, murky waters of the middle-chapter April playlist into the musical flowerings of May coming soon to this blog page… (Jason Lee)