photo by Vincent Schaffer
It may be a controversial position to hold especially amongst all the One Directioners out there watching with growing dismay as Harry Styles racks up number-one hit songs and Grammy noms (and to think he was expected to be the next AJ McLean!) thus making a 1D reunion ever more unlikely by the day…
…but boy band stans be damned The Deli Inc. fully endorses the efforts of band-affiliated musicians who choose to explore side projects and/or solo projects seeing as how we can’t imagine a world without the Tom Tom Club or the Breeders or Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes’s criminally underrated solo album or George Harrison’s early solo work or the Postal Service or Run the Jewels (hell, even Dee Dee Ramone’s rap album had it’s moments!) and besides the more musical seeds sown the better the odds of a good musical harvest…
…and I’m guessing Maya Ruth concurs because despite playing guitar in the up-and-coming NYC outfit known as Homade (a band already featured in the Deli no less!) she recently put out her debut solo single “bell jar” (well, ok, she’s already released a short vibey instrumental “ditmars blvd” named after the Astoria thruway but this is her first full-on song) and whereas if “bell jar” were a Homade song I’d expect to be a whimsically-satirical-sing-songy-Seussian tale of a high-school classroom science experiment gone awry…
…but Maya Ruth instead goes full on possessed-by-the-ghost-of-Sylvia-Plath with lyrics about how “in our minds we scream alone” seeing as “ this is life and not a song / in life nobody sings along”…
and instead of Homade’s Au Pairs meets Slits meets Flipper meets Josie Cotten on a blind date with Avril Lavigne kinda vibe, Maya Ruth goes for more of a Superunknown-era Soundgarden meets Julie Cruise meets Dum Dum Girls meets Broadcast meets Elliott Smith out on a date with Alice In Chains in "Nutshell" mode vibe and I hope you’ll excuse my when-X-meets-Y-meets-Z Tourettes syndrome…
…so in other words we’re talking a heavy-psych-laced-melancholic-etherial-slow-jam with a pretty sweet outro solo that’ll have you doing your best face-grimacing air guitar routine and should Homade as an entity decide to go all in on the side projects I’m hoping they’ll “pull a KISS” and put out one solo album a piece all to be released on the same day (except with far less filler!) because if it produces even one “New York Groove” or heck even a head-scratching, left-field Disney cover it’ll all have been worth it. (Jason Lee)