New Music: Thee Rakevines

I stumbled upon Thee Rakevines yesterday, and they’re quickly becoming one of my favorite bands. Their tracks have a strong garage-rock vibe, but they’re also pretty eclectic. In other words, there’s no pigeonholing this group, which I love.

The first track on their Spotify playlist, This is “Thee Rakevines,“ is called “In a Time of Covid (I Need Fuzz),” and while what the world needs now may be love, sweet love (apologies to Burt Bacharach), it also needs this song. The cool (and appropriate, given the title) fuzz effect on the vocal reminds me of a lot of my favorite grungy song from the 1990s, including “Cannonball” by the Breeders. There’s also a blistering guitar solo. The sudden ending feels like hitting a brick wall and demands multiple listens.

The second song on the playlist is called “Damaged,” and it sends the clear signal that Thee Rakevines are not a one-trick pony. This track is mellow and almost jazzy, and a sublime vocal from Byddia Lewis (who reprises vocal duties later in the playlist on “Sticking With You”) is somehow both the polar opposite of the distorted vocal in “In a Time of Covid” but also its perfect counterpoint.

I’m hearing strong hints of Nirvana in “Just the Way that I Am,” and there’s a cinematic Spaghetti-western feel to “Another Time (Another Place),” a song that would feel right at home on the soundtrack of an underground 1960s film — or anything by Quentin Tarantino. The fade-out in “Thinking in Pictures” reveals the cool organ riff that undergirds the entire song — so don’t skip ahead when you’re nearing the end of that one!

The punk influence on Thee Rakevines is undeniable. Most of the songs (with the exception of “Thinking in Pictures”) are well under three minutes long. Nonetheless, the band draws on a wide range of musical influences, incorporating 60s garage rock, 90s grunge, psychedelia, and jazz into an amazing debut playlist. Weighing in at just under 23 minutes, This Is “Thee Rakevines” is definitely worth listening to in its entirety in a single sitting.

Music Review: Playback is a Bitch

Over the years, Scot Sax has produced a wide range of exceptional music. From the ultra-polished pop perfection of his work as the front man for Wanderlust and Feel to his more homespun recordings as Bachelor Number One and as a solo artist, Scot has always brought equal parts compassion and energy to his music. His 2018 album Drawing from Memory was certainly a case in point. A collection of original songs evoking the best of 70s AM radio gold, the album found Scot echoing much of the music that likely inspired his lifelong appreciation of the well-wrought tune. With this year’s Playback is a Bitch, Scot is digging deeper, taking risks, and coming up with a blend of tracks that feels at once familiar and artistically satisfying.

The new album finds Scot getting a bit funky (not for the first time in his life) but also a bit trippy and dreamy at the same time. The dreamlike quality takes hold immediately with the first track, “Roller Wakes Up,” a thirty-six-second intro that sounds like the feeling of gradually returning to the waking world from a deep sleep. It transitions naturally into the album’s title track, which is where the funk starts to kick in — but not all at once. “Playback is Bitch” actually sounds like a throwback to the Monkees for the first few bars before a short blues riff introduces a bass-heavy dance groove. The rest of the album follows suit, drifting sweetly and soulfully between groovy beats and trippy, dreamy sojourns, like the instrumental “How Come There’s No Wind In Your Kite,” which gives way to the percolating, trumpet-laden “Fell in Love with Myself Again,” a true highlight of the album.

Not surprisingly, songwriting is at the heart of the album, both in terms of craft and as an over-arching theme. When Scot sings in “Two Sweethearts” that he has “exactly two minutes” to get out his thoughts, it’s easy to imagine he’s describing the job of tunesmiths everywhere, the unrelenting compulsion to distill the essence of a heart full of conflicting, confusing, overwhelming emotions down to the parameters of a radio-friendly pop song. It isn’t easy, and it also isn’t a science. As the penultimate track, a spoken-word recording titled “Roller’s Monologue,” makes clear, it’s a work of heart. Yes, there are people in the world who can boil songwriting down to a formula and treat it like a business. But as songwriters like Scot Sax show us time and time again, there are also people who are “out there singing to the clouds” (as the track’s narrator insists), artists driven by their sheer love of music. In the end, that’s exactly what Playback is a Bitch is all about.

PS: Playback is a Bitch is actually soundtrack! For more info, visit the film’s FB page: Playback is a Bitch.

 

Internet Box #1: Slow Drive Through a Strange World by Plush Gordon

There’s something kind of cool about a band that (almost) nobody has heard of releasing a deluxe edition of a slick and lushly-produced EP complete with a bevy of bonus materials — including, among other things, bonus tracks, a video, a short film, illustrated lyrics, a short story, and a manifesto. It’s the kind of move that another band might have made in another time as it slid comfortably into its imperial phase, that moment of bloat that followed a string of chart-topping albums and signaled a slide into relative obscurity just over the horizon.

But since Plush Gordon is coming from nowhere, their motives appear to be rooted less in a sense of hubris than in a sense of the sheer possibility of the moment — and, it should be noted, less of a desire to cash in on their good name (since a: they don’t have one yet and b: everything in their self-described “internet box” is free) than to establish themselves as artists who want nothing more than to push the envelope not only in terms of music but of what a band can be.

The music on the EP is hard to pin down. The first track, “Silver Nissan,” is part car tune in the vein of early 60s tracks like “409” and “Little Cobra,” and part cartoon in the style of a Merry Melodies animated short. The subject matter sees to the former while a wild, dizzying slide trombone line provided by Aaron Buchanan takes care of the latter. That the song is clearly about a stalker only adds to the mystery, and the only answer to the question posed in the song’s pre-chorus — “Is it weird to follow you?” — is a resounding and likely self-aware “YES!”

Continuing the car theme, the other three tracks on the EP depict motorists in various states of unease: a lost and lonely driver watches the world fall apart behind her in “Rearview,” a similarly lost driver tries to find his way home in “Red Door,” and a down-on-their-luck couple eyes a dreams of a new life in the dramatic closer, “Madrid.” Throughout the proceedings, lush string arrangements bring cinematic flare to all of the tracks, perfectly complementing the impressionistic storytelling of the lyrics.

Other highlights of the “internet box” include a short story that fleshes out some of the details of “Madrid,” and a five-minute film titled “Milk Fudge” (inexplicably attributed to “Team Humanity”), in which three members of the band argue over the nature of candy as they drive toward a rendezvous with a potentially malevolent forest entity named Jerry.

Perhaps most interesting — at least in terms of explaining who Plush Gordon is and what they’re up to — is the band’s manifesto, “Invasion of the Potato People.” And, yes, including a manifesto with a debut collection of songs is admittedly pretentious, but the page of epigrams culled from Laura Dern, Bob Balaban, Manny Farber, Epictetus, and the Mysterious N. Senada speaks directly to what the band is trying to do. Quoting Laura Dern, “If you’re in it for the result, then you can’t experiment, but if you’re there to redefine art, you can do anything.”

Which more or less sums it up for Plush Gordon. They don’t appear to be in it for the result. It’s more of an ongoing experiment. That being the case, there’s a good chance that Plush Gordon can do anything.

Slow Drive Through a Strange World. Everything in the “box” is available as a free download!