Last month the band Scam Avenue unveiled a long-playing record titled Scam Avenue and maybe you know how the whole self-titled thing is often shorthand for an intimately-revealing-or-even-autobiographical record which appears to apply here. At the very least, Scam Avenue is a marked departure from the pair of EPs they put out in 2015 and ‘16 (Mercury and Sailor, respectively) comprised mostly of hook-laden-lushly-produced-yet-minimalistic-coldwave-infused-electropop-with-a-guitar-peeking-through-every-now-and-again-songs-suffused-with-a-playful-sense-of-sensuously-inclined-tightly-coiled-sexual-tension which just happens to be a verbatim description of my favorite niche category to be found in the CD bins of Tower Records back in the day when physical media and highly-hyphenated genres ruled the roost.

In the intervening years Scam Avenue released but a single single—a song called “Jailbird” with lyrics about “the history you now disown” and “a crisis of your very own” (so long, flirtatious electropop!) featuring some of the moodiest saxophone interludes (played by Stephen Chen of San Fermin fame) to be heard this side of Tears For Fears' early repertoire, played atop a downbeat, descending chord progression and a skittering breakbeat style rhythm, culminating in a tremulous upper-register sax cry sustained for the better part of 30 seconds that all taken together could lead even Roland Orzabal towards a call to check in and make sure you’re doing ok—a song that (as it turns out) served as a fitting precursor to the new album and which is fittingly included on said album.  

So it’s no surprise to learn that the band’s principle-but-not-only-songwriter-plus-producer-guitarist-synthesist Laurence Kim had been through some stuff in the preceding years (and hey haven’t we all!) which he himself describes with admirable candor on the band’s Bandcamp page: “I had been in a relationship with someone and it came to an end. That was the inspiration for about half of the songs on the album. In addition, I had already been working on some other songs, which were in various stages of completion. So the album wasn’t conceived as a break-up album, but it could be viewed in that way. Each song can be seen as an expression of some aspect of that central theme.” 

So there you have it and kudos to the band for not putting out any music in the interim because who really who wants to hear a bunch of I’m-so-happy-and-fulfilled-in-my-current-long-term-stable-relationship songs. Scam Avenue has instead admirably jumped straight from the coy, flirtatious phase of romanic infatuation depicted on their initial EPs to the post-breakup-baroque-electro-indie-rock cri de coeur statement of their debut full-length, a worthy new entry to the canon of classic break-up albums like Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak, and Kermit the Frog’s Unpigged. And hey, I bet you didn’t know that the birth of the LP format as a medium for popular music owes its existence to a certain fedora-wearin’ mafia-lovin’ artist’s desire to explore and express the various facets of post-separation bereavement and if you don’t believe it I recommend you watch the enlightening video below.

Back to Scam Avenue, you can tell that this album’s gonna be a a melancholic headtrip from its very opening moments when “Fevers Fade” fades in on a burbling, circling synth arpeggio complete with knob-twisting timbral warping (*insert joke here about romantic withdrawal and knob-twisting*) which I’d say is musical semaphore for “help I’m stuck deep inside the folds of my own grey matter but hold up it’s not so bad in here and not so bad retreating from the world at large and just tripping out on my own emotional fluctuations and whatever else I got laying around” (the track’s duration is exactly 4:20 if you get my gist and I’m guessing that you do) an impression only enhanced with the layer-by-layer entrance of Nate Smith’s dead-eyed disco beat and Julie Rozansky’s goth-funk bassline and singer Devery Doleman’s airy falsetto haltingly reciting the opening lines (“blood / in the water / falls / like a flower / feels like fate / fevers fade”) after which even more layers of swirling synths and choppy rhythm guitar and plinky piano melody and bass guitar lead parts are introduced before the song folds back in on itself, ending back where it started with the isolated arpeggio line.

It’s really quite the low-key tour de force so it was a wise sequencing decision on Scam Avenue’s part to follow it up with the floaty-retro-dream-poppy ballad “To the Quick,” a song that’ll make you wanna go Julee Cruising Into The Night and maybe I should mention here the highly-relevant fact that Devery and Julie also play together in a Twin Peaks/David Lynch-themed band called F*ck You, Tammy (if you've seen Twin Peaks: The Return you’ll get it) which seems to have strongly informed this song because it's got some strong Roadhouse vibes for sure. 

And here’s a fun fact you probably won’t care about but I’ll share it anyway—the first post-Covid lockdown gig that I attended was seeing F*ck You, Tammy in mid-May 2021 playing outdoors in rural Pennsylvania in front of a drive-in movie screen as part of a weekend long tribute to (and viewing of) David Lynch’s filmic oeuvre at the Mahoning Drive-In Theater (the only drive-in in the world still screening 35-mm movies on the regular for all you b-movie cineastes out there) and lemme tell you it was a gig both wonderful and strange. 

Anyway it’s probably clear by now that I’m starting to lose concentration and anyway you don’t need me to spell out the rest of Scam Avenue for you (the band or the album) so just move on to the heart-rending harmonies of the six-minute-plus “Destroyer” which I’d say is one of the best aching-with-longing-indie-pop-epics since Lush’s “Desire Lines” (ok ok I’ll stop now) and keep going. And if you have any more questions I recommend you head out to the nearest forest clearing and throw some stones at a bunch of empty bottles. (Jason Lee)

photo by Ebru Yildiz

 

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)

If Freidrich Nietzsche were somehow alive today he would conceivably be the biggest metalhead in your local university’s philosophy department for there is no other musical genre in existence that so clearly and ably illustrates his theory of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. When it comes to the latter, heavy metal has long been notorious for its Dionysian side due to popular associations with primordial urges, raw power, and a fixation on subjects like madness and sex and unbound chaos. But equally true, if less acknowledged, is that metalheads are often unabashedly nerdy--enter the Apollonian side of the equation--and just as fixated on control and mastery and order as on sheer anarchic energy with said control expressed through disciplined instrumental and vocal mastery, elaborate lyrical conceits and album concepts, and a tendency to adhere to established conventions whether in death/doom/black/thrash/glam/power/prog metal at least until the next musical leap forward.

Speaking of philosophical concepts and musical leaps forward is perhaps as good way as any to introduce Liturgy’s latest release, a literal “rock opera” titled Origin of the Alimonies. Led by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, Liturgy established themselves out of the gate with their 2008 debut LP Renihilation (the title a neologism for the countervailing and balancing force to “annihilation”). By the time their widely lauded but also widely debated follow-up Aesthethica was released in 2011, Hunt-Hendrix had composed an elaborate manifesto on "Transcendental Black Metal" written for an academic symposium, granted one held in a nightclub and bar. This intellectualized approach to metal ruffled more than a few feathers, while the band itself stood accused of being “Brooklyn hipsters" by many in the ruffled-feathers contingent. So yeah there were some big words and big ideas in effect, and a sculpted beard or two in evidence, but does it really stop the rock? The music they put out and live footage from the time strongly indicates otherwise.

Fast forward nearly ten years and Liturgy has doubled down, maybe more like quintupled down, on their ambitious approach by releasing an album that comes accompanied with multiple YouTube lectures covering an assortment of musical, philosophical, and cosmogonical concepts relating to their new music with the promise of an accompanying full-on opera soon to follow. Building on their surprise 2019 release H.A.Q.Q., Origin of the Alimonies features a chamber ensemble playing strings and woodwinds, church organ and harp, that's just as heavily featured as the musicians in Liturgy. 

The notion of a religiously-themed opera couched in Lacanian psychoanalysis and Deleuzian philosophical concepts being released by a band that's in any way associated with black metal will come as a surprise to your average man on the street (gender choice deliberate) who likely associates the genre with church burnings and the physical desecration of deceased bandmates. The book Lords of Chaos has a lot to do with the familiarity of these images, based on some undeniably sensational real-life events, which have since sedimented into stereotype. But for a smaller group of initiates the music of Liturgy is in keeping with a New Wave of Experimental Heavy Metal (a clever play on NWOBHM) and the queering of metal and its boundaries advocated by Hunt-Hendrix and some others. 


Whatever one's perspective it's hard to deny that the music of Origin of the Alimonies effectively balances out its Apollonian conceptual grounding with some seriously Dionysian furor--as much in the quiet bits as in the guttural howling and seismic burst-beats which are Liturgy's version of blast beats. In its overture section Origin starts off not unlike that other staged musical work that got a riot going on with its depiction of "primitive" human origins, namely Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Both these works open with a vulnerable sounding solo woodwind (flute for Origin, bassoon for Rite) that's soothing for about a second but quickly becomes uneasy with its sense of lonely, aimless wondering. And then more unnerving still as more instruments enter the picture adding layers of tension-generating dissonance and you can just tell something "wicked" this way comes. 

And indeed it does when Liturgy enters the fray and by the beginning of the third track “Lonely OIOION” (you’ll have to watch those YouTube videos if you want to understand the titles, or just wait for the debut of the opera itself) we’re off to the races. Again this feels like a parallel to The Rite and the "Augurs of Spring" section in particular where likewise a few minutes into the ballet the whole thing gets blown wide open, and it does actually sound like an early 20th-century orchestral equivalent to blast beats. This is where the Parisians started really losing their shit supposedly and it didn't help that the dancers were stomping around like rabid orgy goers forming an ballerino/ballerina mosh pit on stage.

By the time the dust settles on Origin of the Alimonies you’ll have heard everything from violins played with screwdrivers to a very angry demon baby playing a piano (admittedly I'm taking some stabs in the dark here) to a trap music beat to a free-jazzy-ish interlude to a glitching CD player (neat trick since there’s no CD player in sight) to a fourteen-minute piano-and-metal-band adaptation of a work written for cathedral organ by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1932 (talk about literal heavy metal heh-heh-heh, sorry). In other words this opera is a great deal of fun despite the seriousness. And I figure God up in Heaven is grateful He’s finally got something new and kick-ass to listen to meaning that He can finally get rid of that Stryper cassette that's been stuck in His Walkman for the past several decades. 

One final note regarding the quite striking cover image to Origin of the Alimonies (strategically cropped in the YouTube video above) which is in keeping with the theme of binaries and their subversion in heavy metal and in life in general. This is best expressed in the words of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix herself as taken from a recent Instagram post alongside the uncensored album image in which she addresses the process of actualizing and ultimately presenting as transgender: “I came to terms with my gender over the past five years in part through the somewhat torturous development of this piece, and I was only able to turn it into an album and put vocals on it upon deciding I could play the role of the female protagonist. That’s the importance of having exposed breasts on the cover.” 

When one considers that the music of Alimonies is only one element of the overall Gesamtkunstwerk still to be unveiled, you had better prepare to have your mind blown all over again... (Jason Lee)