Noisey

Because the guitar-bass-drums-violin as well as the vocals aren’t so much subtle as mild, these seven love songs never work up the right pitch of emotional intelligence. But you still believe in your heart that John Elderkin and Joanna Sattin are a couple, because only a couple would notice these things? In the jocose “My Pre-Existing Conditions” Elderkin admits to two left feet, getting stuck in the past, needing to talk before bed, and there’s more. In the pained “Where Does It Hurt” Sattin is so sick with ennui she asks only that he still be there in the morning. And he will be, because elsewhere they stay in bed, miss each other when they don’t, and overnight a Christmas turkey on Amazon Prime so it’ll be there for the Fourth of July. B PLUS…READ MORE

 

Derek Hoke did not mean to write such a downer album, but once he realized how much he was holding in, he decided it was time to purge. Hoke, whose songs tend more toward a Hank Williams-inspired rockabilly than flat-out sadness, grew up in Brunswick, Georgia where, at least in his eyes, Garth Brooks was equal to Fugazi. “If I was on a therapist’s couch, this is what I would be talking about,” he tells me about Bring the Flood, his forthcoming album, out this Friday. While his signature rockabilly vibe is still here, this new album finds Hoke retreating into himself and his experiences. Inspired by long drives between shows while touring Southern Moon, watching towns that were once hotbeds of life now filled with ghosts and tumbleweeds go by. “I started feeling for these people who are feeling forgotten,” Hoke said. “I couldn’t do fun songs anymore.”

The songs may not be fun in the sense many fans have come to expect from the singer-songwriter artist, but they’re dark and pensive and Hoke as hell: he calls it “quietbilly,” a portmanteau of quiet rockabilly, a nod toward the rockabilly make up of his band and his quiet nature. “Just a Man” finds him reckoning with an inability to change. “So Tired” is a psychedelic plea for something, anything, to take a load off his mind. “When the Darkness Comes” is a sensual blues song, while “Heavy Weather” picks up a few gospel flourishes and ends with a very Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band jam. It’s clear the album was written in the time between the election last year and the inauguration a few months later. Coming to terms with the state of the world isn’t anything new for musicians, of course. Artists like Jason Isbell, the Drive-By Truckers, and Shovels and Rope have all, within the last year or so specifically, released albums whose central thesis seems to be reckoning either with personal privilege or the violence being perpetuated throughout society. It makes sense Derek Hoke is no different when it comes to stepping outside a comfort zone for the greater artistic message.

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A country artist with a serious set of pipes is nothing new, nor is rock-heavy country music with a psychedelic twist. Equal parts Dolly Parton and Jefferson Airplane, Hayley Thompson-King’s solo record Psychotic Melancholia is a poetic and measured critique of life as a woman in the 21st century, but don’t let that turn you off. There’s still plenty of rollicking on this record.

Psychotic Melancholia opens with “Large Hall, Slow Decay” a good-natured single focused on teasing a holy roller who’s found herself on a mission to save King from her sinning ways. With a guitar riff ripped straight from Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.,” the song is an energetic introduction to what Thompson-King has repeatedly called her “Sodom and Gomorrah concept album.” As far as a country record goes, that’s is a damn good place as any to kick it off.

Thompson-King was born and raised in Florida, the daughter of “an actual cowboy” (her words) who enjoyed horseback riding and had a knack for finding herself at church-organized events on a quest to figure out exactly what it would take to get sent to hell. At one point, she was a proud member of a group called “Clowns for Christ” an organization that is exactly what you think it is. Eventually she moved to New York, then to Boston, where she earned her master’s degree in Opera Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music. She didn’t start out doing the country thing seriously, as the band she helped form in 2012, Banditas, emphasized garage rock and gospel influences more than others. You can still hear some country in a few of the band’s songs, but they’re hidden enough to make Psychotic Melancholia feel that much more like a head-first dive into the genre than a gradual transition.

“I feel that what’s been done to perfect country [music], we could try and get as [close to] perfect as we can” Thompson-King says of the record’s sound, which heavily borrows inspiration from old rock ‘n’ roll and Opera alike, “but whenever I get into that mindset, no one likes it. It doesn’t work for me. So we went this other route with it where we just got really psychedelic.”

Going psychedelic doesn’t always fit on this record. A song like “Teratoma,” for example, where Thompson-King’s opera-trained voice seems restricted to a specific octave and forced to maintain a monotone voice in between each choral refrain feels restricted to the theme instead of enhanced by it, whereas her cover of Dolly Parton’s “Old Flames Can’t Hold a Candle to You” probably would have run wild and free with that treatment. “Dopesick,” which was written from Thompson-King’s personal experience of watching a loved one struggle with a heroin addiction, on the other hand, which begins in an eerily similar way to the Parton cover, ends itself with a guitar spot and a wild howl that hints at just how psychedelic this thing could become. It often feels like Thompson-King and company’s music is being reined in when it needs to be allowed to roam freely.

It’s not a record that’s all disappointment and no worthwhile pay off, though. Thompson-King ends it with an Opera song “Wehmut,” which is a German word for “wistfulness,” that’s totally out of left-field and absolutely not in line with the album overall, but Thompson-King’s vocals are so spectacular I’m willing to let it slide. And, as far as concepts go, there’s hardly a better one than Sodom and Gomorrha. They were just trying to have a good time, after all. READ MORE…

 

Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.

Karen and the Sorrows is Tami Johnson Karen Pittelman and Elana Redfield, and together, they make up one of the fiercest LGBT bands in the Northeast right now. They don’t just rewrite classic country music tropes in songs like their latest single “Take Me for a Ride,” they’ve created an entire community around them.

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Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.

Brooklyn-based country band Karen & the Sorrows are exactly what country music needs right now. Karen Pittelman, Elana Redfield, and Tami Johnson formed in 2011 and since have become a pillar in the local queer country music scene, continuing the work bands like Lavender Country began in the 70s. Their songs use traditional country tropes—love, loss, heartbreak, shame—but sung from the queer perspective. On paper, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal; a lot of the music we love these days is made by queer people. In country music, though, bigoted values and an outright phobic industry means that even one slight deviation from the norm can lead to one helluva world of pain.

That’s why bands like Karen & the Sorrows, or My Gay Banjo, Yva Las Vegass, DK & the Joy Machine and so many more that make up this community are so special. They sing about the ups and downs (and because this is country music after all, mostly just the downs) of life and love in just the same way you or I would, but when they come together, like they did at Another Country Festival, the result is so fucking radical it’s hard to wipe the smile off your face for even a moment. I caught them at that performance and in case you couldn’t tell, I’m still high off the feeling of watching tons of queer country artists play music in resistance to a holiday that felt extra fucked up this year.

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Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.