Tag: Autumn Swiers

If You Can Hear Her, You Should Fear Her: “One of the Guys” by Zoë Pete Ford | Album Review

October 9th, 2025

Listeners may recognize Zoë Pete Ford from some such illuminated, genuinely killer acts as Friendly Company (drums and vocals) and Big Garden (drums, guitar, keys), both based in Brooklyn, NY. If so, forget that. “One of the Guys” is a sound entirely Ford’s own.

Fans of Suzi Quatro will quickly find that Ford blows straight past Suzi Cinco and turns up the VU knob to a blistering Suzi Diez. Which is not to say that “One of the Guys” is a faithful reimagination of any existing work. But that Ford picks up where The Anemic Boyfriends and Linda Manz in “Out of the Blue” left off and keeps the good work going – labor that demands strong shoulders. She’s got ‘em.

“One of the Guys” brims with songs about debauched bootleggers and cars with bad gas mileage. Ford arrives at some strange, sacred intersection that is at once playful and deadly serious. In return, listeners on the other side of the exchange are left drenched in cowboy perfume and desperate to believe that we are more than the sum of our urges. Assemble your most world-ragged friends, or a coupla wayfarers on a Wednesday – this one’s for audiences who are ideologically opposed to the nutrient shake. Ford has done the impossible by forging identity and tipping the scales in under an hour.

Any attempt to pigeonhole “One of the Guys” is to betray a dewy-eyed misunderstanding (or inability to understand) what the record is about. Zoë Pete Ford sings with a voice polite but not friendly. She has not come lightly to the wax. This is evidenced immediately by “Mint Juleps,” the opening track (and your reporter’s favorite on the record): “If you were a place you’d be a shopping mall. So scared to ever say a plain thing, wind up saying nothing at all. I might be Humphrey Bogart, but baby, you’re no Lauren Bacall. I wish I had a Ford Ranchero, wish I sang like Nat King Cole, wish I had a little money in my wallet. Sweatin this job that’s suckin my soul. I wanna drink mint juleps. I wanna play the leading role.” Our Holy Orator bites into every lyric with teeth like a waxy-eyed zen koan on speed. Ford has penned the breathless antidote to 2025’s influx of reactionary chickenshit fad muzak, dullsville and flabby (which, alack, has infiltrated even “the cool scenes” of America’s major cities). No modern bloat here, officer.

For the uninitiated, songs like Ford’s “Backseat Beauty Queen” may act as a guide into some altered way of living. (Your reporter has been lucky enough to walk the subterranean rock beside our Hero.) After a guitar lick straight out of “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” the tale begins, “Adam and Eve were seventeen. He was dealing coke and weed, she was his customer and backseat beauty queen […] on weeknights underneath the oak tree, the smoke and shadows of sex and nosebleeds.” Ford isn’t just an unassailably Cool Girl, she’s also a Master Storyteller – and, indeed, storytelling songs are sorely missing from today’s radio. Ford spins macabre yarns that the kids can dance to.

The record shines brightest in the moments where its authorial voice is at once man and woman, driver and passenger. “Over the Line” paints, “She’s equal parts ventriloquist, sorceress, and alchemist. She buys you drinks when you see her at the bar. Then she makes you hesitate when she racks the shots and makes you wait for the dozen other people she’s got in her pocket that night.” Caught your breath yet? “Saturn” confronts us with another American Gothic vignette: “He drives a hatchback Saturn, she doesn’t have a license. She told me, ‘Oh, he doesn’t mind driving me around town all the time. And besides, why would I get a license with Saturn by my side?’” The sense of becoming a victim of someone else’s fantasy. Once you get over it (or find some way to cope with it), nod tough and light a shag rollie (I checked and that’s what Zoë smokes. She also used to smoke Marlboros, if you can’t roll your own. I can’t). This writer dares you to put on “Mean Reds” (track seven) when your feet first hit the floor in the morning and watch how your internal ecosystem sharpens throughout the day, An off-balance but no-less-nourishing breakfast.

With “One of the Guys,” it takes Zoë Pete Ford just 29 minutes to convince listeners that “acting like you’ve never broken a pact before” is no way to live. How long does it take you?

You can listen to “One of the Guys” anywhere you find your music, as well as purchase them digitally on bandcamp.

Written by Autumn Swiers
Renny Conti’s self-titled bridges the gap between “now” and “next” – look no further | Album Review

March 24th, 2025

Innocents in Babylon doesn’t always work. Maybe it’s an extension of the fact that all of your reporter’s favorite musicians in the local New York City music scene right now just happen to be in their mid-twenties or mid-thirties (Renny Conti is such a Brooklyn-based musician). Either way, Conti’s self-titled is a refreshingly human record. It’s a well-timed, heat-seeking missile to the grown-up adolescent who’s just a few years past being able to relate to their favorite coming-of-age films anymore, and acutely aware of that distance/separation/isolation. For this cosmically stultified demographic, Renny Conti is solace.

Conti’s musky, different lyrics are delivered with intention and purpose, but not eagerness. Our singer brings a slightly chilly air to this record that keeps it cool instead of overly jejune. More akin to Pavement’s “Slanted and Enchanted” or, if things go poorly for all of us, Purple Mountains in fifteen years. Walk-with-you lyrics rip in on “South Star”: “It could’ve never been this way. I mean, it could’ve been this way, but it’s not.” Later, on “Room to Room,” Conti confides, “I feel your pain, I too want everything, wanting the world to stop, or just for life to change.”

On “I Find It Hard” (which might be the star track for your reporter), Conti brings a unique vocal delivery that doesn’t appear anywhere else on the album. Conti is singing differently here and it works. This New Voice is backed by an unconventional chorus, a few voices loosely strung together in a melancholic drone. Like if the Greek chorus in a Homeric drama repeated every line after Falstaff’s soliloquy, it’s surprising in a way that makes you smile, but it’s a bitter smile. The lyrics are bleaker and more honest on this track than any other on this dimensional, all-seasons record – self-conflicting like its just-past-ripened audience.

With Renny Conti, the artist rides the neo-wave of Neil Young worship, but not with such piety that it’s a faithful adaptation or in any way lacks originality. Not unlike MJ Lenderman, but tougher on the ears, toothy with dissonant key chords, especially on “Room to Room,” which ends in a broken mirror guitar solo that belongs on “Metal Machine Music.” Conti’s album is all about tension and release, but a release that doesn’t let you off the hook entirely. If “Manning Fireworks” found a place in your Best Albums of 2024 roundup, but you want it darker, Conti brings the flame.

This, as aforementioned, is a human record – not a perfect record – but that doesn’t stop it from being a masterpiece. The prickly-world-weary gauntlet has been thrown down and Renny Conti has answered. A rare and welcome reprieve from the fear panic white noise of Modern Life On Mars (a volume his track “Life on Earth” aptly points out). If you partake in general anesthetics or arylcyclohexylamine derivatives, put on “Life of Earth” and lie face-up on the rug (and thank us later).

This new voice on the indie scene is marked by a lived-in feel. Although not his musical debut, it feels fitting that this album is the artist’s self-titled. Still, “Andrew Plays” is arguably the most important song in this collection, and Conti’s voice isn’t on it at all. It’s an instrumental track less than two minutes long. If music has the power to move you – or, more accurately, if you’ve managed to stay un-soul-hardened enough that the power of music is still able to reach you in 2025 – to not give this one a listen is to cheat oneself. “Andrew Plays” is on-par with such powerful, wordless movers as Cobain’s “Letters to Frances” and Ed Harcourt’s “Like Sunday, Like Rain.”

Renny Conti is a mature evolution from the artist’s 2020 “Figurines.” Five years later, this is that record’s older brother, who went away and got cooler and a little wiser and tucked some more experience and technical mastery under his belt. Now, he’s back in town, and everyone at the dive’s tugging on their friend’s shirt sleeves in a whispered chorus of “Do you know that guy? Who’s that guy over there?” Lookin good. Renny Conti is detail-oriented down to the cryptic, evocative cover art, promising subtle magic and mood swings that can give you jet lag. Cloudy romanticism meets eyelash-searing realism. Happily, the album totally delivers on that promise. Expect to hear more of the name Renny Conti.

You can listen to Renny Conti out on all platforms now!

Written by Autumn Swiers
Claire Ozmun Brings it Home on New Music Video for “Dying in the Wool” | Music Video Premiere

February 21st, 2025

Step aside, OK Go. Claire Ozmun’s “Dying in the Wool” is about to dethrone “Here It Goes Again” for most iconic music video of all time, and it doesn’t even have any treadmills. What it does have is a concrete bowl that skaters have been dropping into since 2014. The Soul Bowl has been well-known and equally as beloved in the skating community for a decade, since it was poured by hand in the backyard of an unassuming Brooklyn apartment building. Multi-talented percussionist Immanuel Pennington of such acts as Poolblood and Captain Tallen & the Benevolent Entities holds it down there now.

On the day of the shoot, the band had just gotten back from the first leg of a two-week tour. Shows in Brooklyn, Philly, Poughkeepsie, shot the video, then left for the second leg 48 hours later. We loaded the car with gear and hit the road west-bound for shows in Cleveland and Chicago. (“We” because I got to play roadie-for-hire. Please hire me.)

To create the effect of the crowd moshing in slo-mo as they played, the band had to learn to lip-sync and play their instruments at double speed. During every take, director Ellie Gravitte reset the song and played back a double-fast sped-up version. While this had potential to feel like a quasi-Speedy Gonzalez cartoon (and it totally did at first), after everyone got used to it two takes in, the overarching crowd-feel quickly shifted from comedic to “Holy hell this is even cooler than we thought.” Seeing the band so tight even at 200% speed was wildly impressive. Keyboardist Catey Esler noted how
solid the whole band felt playing “Dying in the Wool” at future live shows after having gotten it down at double-speed for the video.

Gravitte’s visionary, experimental camera angles are the product of insanely impressive balance and athleticism. She and her team balanced perched on top of the skate bowl wielding heavy camera equipment to get these shots. At the same time, Gravitte’s hurling necessary artistic directions like “Can you guys smile less? You all look like you’re having a blast, but this is supposed to be cool,” and “Just mosh like you’re all on ketamine.” (The whole crowd said “ohhhhh.”) Indeed, everyone in the bowl knows each other and loves each other and cares about each other’s lives, and it was a genuine challenge to not over-smile. A few weeks before, the same group chat of friends that sends “what’s poppin 2nite” texts gets a casting call like, “Hey we’re shooting a music video and we want you to all be in it. There’ll be pizza and beer.” And
everybody came and it ruled.

Watch the video for “Dying in the Wool” premiering here on the ugly hug!

Ellie Gravitte, the video’s director, shares in a statement, “if you’ve been to a COB show, you know it’s all about community. Claire Ozmun loves her friends harder than anybody I know, so we thought it was only right to make a video with the homies at the center of the action. Throw in some Brooklyn skater vibes and you’ve got yourself a taste of that retro punk scene that this EP so beautifully evokes. We put this together in a single day in a backyard skate bowl in Bushwick, instructed all our pals to wear their best goth looks from 2009, and moshed our little hearts out. We hope it inspires you to do the same.”

Not only can Claire Ozmun write a generational battle cry, but she can also apparently serve face even at double speed. It takes a sturdy person with A Good Song to be able to sing into a camera and make it look not only natural but unbelievably cool. Watching her here feels like the first time a fourteen year old watches Kurt Cobain speak to an interviewer and feels that deep inner stirring. She is the icon this new generation of rock n rollers has been hungry for – assuming the position left empty by predecessors Kim Deal, Chrissie Hynde, and Grace Slick.

This video is an amalgam of supremely talented artists. But, the actual shooting came with minimal direction, because the entire cast had trained for this role with months or even years of method acting. We all knew how to shake ass at a COB show. Attend one show yourself and you’ll find it’s impossible not to start movin. The videographers put us in the bowl and just said “mosh” and we knew what to do. A few takes actually had to be redone because we had to dial it back from the level of enthusiasm that was our natural reaction/instinct to deliver. Everyone wanted to take an elbow to the chin for this band. Months later, everyone on set still refers to this shoot as “dying in the bowl.”

Ozmun’s “Dying in the Wool” video showcases the electric, thriving music community alive in Brooklyn, New York in 2024. This is a truly special, ageless capture of a time and place where a lot is happening and all of it is good – especially COB and their music. Melomaniacs worth their chops (or at least worth their CD collections) should keep their eyes on The Claire Ozmun Band.

The video for “Dying in the Wool” was directed and edited by Ellie Gravitte. Director of Photography was Alexander Roque Petersen and Camcorder Operator was Lucie Buclet.

You can listen to Claire Ozmun’s latest EP Dying in the Wool out everywhere now!

Written by Autumn Swiers
A Lighthouse in a Dried-Up Sea, Hazel City’s “Old Friend” Invites World-Weary Swimmers to Believe Better | Album Review

October 23rd, 2024

“Old Friend” is a love letter to people looking over the edge penned by a person looking over the edge, or who has at least spent a good deal of time looking over it before. The edge of “what,” exactly? There’s the proverbial cliff, or perhaps more applicable to modernity, the roof ledge. But, holistically to the modern world at large, the edge is less a razor-line than an amorphous amalgam of youth, love, doubt, hope, disappointment, fear, exhaustion, beauty, trust, and once again, deep, all-encompassing love. What it means to grow up or at least grow older and see some ideas you thought you had about the world and the people in it fall away, and what that means, and how destabilizing that can be. How to step out of that years-lingering mushroom cloud.

“Old Friend” is the debut album from Hazel City, the brainchild of Clay Frankel, guitarist and vocalist of Chicago-based Twin Peaks. (This album also features some tasty upright bass from fellow Chicagoan Liam Kazar of “Shoes Too Tight” acclaim). Time has only made this capsule sweeter. When the album first dropped in June 2023, I came to it very happily entrenched in this-changes-everything romantic love, and found plenty of tender lines herein to feed my affliction like “Are you looking for a husband or just someone to get drunk with? What you want is never wrong. I could do both or either one. I could see us holding court at night or you holding our son.” Now, I revisit “Old Friend” in the early days of an equally life-changing breakup, and there are plenty more morsels waiting in these lines for me this time around – stuff I missed on the first pass, or more accurately, wasn’t ready or able to hear. Frankel’s record is a lyrical kneecapper, brutal in its simplicity and unflinching in its sincerity.

“Rain” (the opener) is the star track for me, followed closely by “Dirt.” The piano composition on “Rain” is jaunty and impressive, tones that make this gloomy ballad wildly poignant instead of weighing too one-note sad – and this is a sad, sad song. It opens with radio static and rain sounds, immediately evocative of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” and the singer is telling a similarly domestic story. He’s pacing from the living room to the kitchen to his young daughter’s bedroom waiting for his lover, late, to arrive back home. Our speaker is sadly, patiently, even a little worriedly waiting while, outside, it rains.

This album is unexpectedly orchestral in scrumptious pockets the listener doesn’t see coming – like “Snow,” an interlude that contemplatively heralds the next song (“Gorgeous”), not unlike “Behind the Wall of Sleep” into “N.I.B.” on “Black Sabbath” Black Sabbath. When it arrives, “Gorgeous” is cheerful but not naive. It doesn’t forsake a lively beat to lean self-indulgent or heavy-handed, but it’s still enough to break your heart. (“I knew that you were someone that I wanted to get to know, and now I know you, but I don’t know if you’ve done me any good.”)

No rest for the wicked! Next track “Really” rips in with another kneecapper, “What am I so dumb that I don’t know? Haven’t I been good and beautiful?” backed by dreamy effects keys from strawberry chimes to space bells. One song later, our singer lays the heater “No one remеmbers what we did. No one was еven looking. No one knows we almost made it. No one knows how close we were.” Holy shit! Ow! Not the Face!

“Rain 2” is clearly the answer to “Rain,” the cryptic counterpart of the earlier story-song sung by a piquant chorus of vocalists Emily Neale, Lillie West, Quinn Tsan, and Elizabeth Moen. But, in subtler ways, “Root” is the response to “Dirt.”

“Root” is a vote of encouragement to keep fighting the good fight – an intensely sincere, even desperate plea for loved ones to just try, try again. Its non-naive world weariness prevents this track from being gratingly optimistic. (If there’s one thing people on the edge historically respond well to, it’s a “Hang in there!” cat poster.) Instead, Frankel posits, “I know it’s hard they’ve saddled you up with a heavy heart, well ain’t that a weight we can share.” This is a track that recognizes that the world is fucked, and that at the end of the day the Everyman’s antidote to surviving it is just living the best you can from day to day, loving other people, and letting them know how deep and life-affirming that love really is. Frankel is speaking here about the type of love that is only earned after years of walking the rock beside a person – which might be where the album title “Old Friend” comes in. For the rest of us, “Old Friend” offers an answer to the sempiternal background question that takes on an especially tooth-shaking volume in eras such as ours: “What now?”

Written by Autumn Swiers
Witches Up No Mountain Switches Down No Valley by All The Pretty Horses | Album Review

October 16th, 2024

The album title reads like a “Mellow Gold”-era Beck lyric. The cover art is a psychedelic children’s drawing depicting a mystic midnight menagerie (notably horse-less) which seems to be ruled by a floating, buck-toothed, suboxone-animated magenta gumdrop. It’s far out, but not dramatically unlike the space in which All The Pretty Horses played the first show on their record release tour in New York City last Friday night.

The room was tucked into the back of The Windjammer in Ridgewood, a
sailing-themed towny bar among the final frontier of $6 beer-and-shot specials in the five boroughs. There’s miscellaneous nautical décor nailed to the walls, a single pool table in the middle of the room, and about three lightbulbs in the entire joint. Everyone was dressed with the pomp of ill-fitting jeans and amorphous sweaters like a bunch of locals who just happened to swing by their local watering hole on the walk home, or
towards whatever’s next. Whether that was probably exactly the case at The
Windjammer is ultimately irrelevant (or maybe the point?). The real point is that this is a Hartford band and the music speaks for itself. If the musicians – especially frontman/composer/lyricist Austin Traver – had wanted or tried to insert themselves into the spotlight in front of the music, it wouldn’t have worked. No one did that. The band was a vehicle for a solid album more than a band on a stage, and it ruled. This album doesn’t need any help standing on its own.

All The Pretty Horses live at The Windjammer NY | Photo by Autumn Swiers

“Frances,” the opening track, reads a little one-dimensional until the synth rips in during the final third of the song. Is it worth the wait? Depends on whether you’re in it for the long game. Unlike the bulk of albums dropped in 2024, The Year of Our Lords Big Oil and Unceasing Mental Masturbation, All the Pretty Horses’ latest release is made for listening from cover to cover. One song wafts effortlessly into the next without providing or feeling obligated to provide a distinct beginning or end, stop or start, not because the songs are repetitive or unmemorable, but because Horses has its own
sound and knows what that sound is, and this album is (praise god) not a series of singles Frankensteined together by a cohesive theme and ultra-earnest Scotch tape to the point of being uncool (sorry). This is an album. It’s an art piece that shines best as a capsule. Step back to look at it all at once like a large canvas – and resist any creeping discomfort at the feeling of “I really liked that track, what was it called? Oh, we’re onto another track already? I didn’t even notice.” Lean in.

As such, I feel like a dick for cutting it up with rock-critic dissection shears, but the star track here is “Sophie,” a heavy, droning drug anthem bookended by radio dialogue, fuzzy barely-there vocals, and minimal bass. Stuff your hands in your pockets and take a walk with this one. It’s an old formula, but it doesn’t need upgrading because it works. Incidentally, the opener is also a person’s name, “Frances,” but if they ever met in real life, Frances would be trying to win the gal while the gal is already busy writing her number down for Sophie – who didn’t ask for her number and doesn’t even want it, actually. After “Sophie” ends, the record immediately rips into an orchestral kazoo chorale (yes, really) before it’s right back to all that scrumptious sludgy beauty with “Hard Hill Road South,” made all the tastier thanks to the
unexpected Zappa-esque interlude. That initial one-dimensionality was on-ramping. The equal mixing of instrumental and vocal in the tracks that follow makes the lyrics blur, melding into a comfortingly dissonant ode to the ennui of modernity and its deathless white noise.

If you’re neither happy nor sad – indeed, if you’ve been feeling “a little off” for the past five years or better – “Witches Up No Mountain, Switches Down No Valley” might be the album for you. You don’t have to be in a particular mood for this one to hit. Or, perhaps more accurately, if you point to the “bored” face on the Emotional Vocabulary Chart hanging on the wall in your analyst’s office (that’ll be $60), drop those shoulders. This album has arrived right on time to rub its grungy little fingers into your brain, not for that long-awaited lobotomy but for a massage. Take a break, and maybe even take that aforementioned walk. Chances are that analyst is on your case to take more walks already (and to get your grungy fingers off of her Emotional Vocabulary Chart, thank you very much). The least you can do is circle the block just to prove it won’t help. And, at 27 minutes from start to finish, All the Pretty Horses’ extended anthem will only get you around the block once or twice anyway.

You can listen to Witches Up No Mountain Switches Down No Valley here.

Written by Autumn Swiers
Autumn’s Hi-5’s

June 21st, 2024

Every Friday, a staff member at the ugly hug curates a list of their five favorite new(ish) releases to share with us all. This week, our writer, poet and member of newly formed punk group Big Garden, Autumn, shares with us “five Hot Hot Steamin’ Blazin’ Brand-Spankin-New Tracks to Sizzle onto your table and into your heart (or liver)”

“Rock & Roller Girl” by Liquid Images

Liquid Images is the tour de force of Cleveland rock n roll veterans Marty Brass (Ma Holos, Red Devil Ryders, Marty Brass & the Lavender Jets) and Richard Hamilton (musician, author, founder of Quality Time Records in 2014). “Rock & Roller Girl” comes from the duo’s debut album – which, in true punk style, packs seven songs into less than 18 minutes. This snack-sized smorgasbord was recorded in Downey, California over the course of 2021 to 2023, finally unleashed unto the eager masses earlier this year in January. It sounds like a record leisurely recorded by two friends who know what they’re doing, and it rocks.

Liquid Images’ self-titled album is a jammy, groovy departure from Brass and
Hamilton’s earlier, (mostly) retired project, Pig Flayer (which is heavy and nasty and absolutely rules, if you can get your hands on one of the few remaining ‘45s). All seven tracks are jammy revelations you can sink your teeth into and shake your ass to, both, but “Rock & Roller Girl” stands out as the representative track of the whole lot, energetically.

Hamilton’s dreamy yet heavy-hitting vocal style oozes with honed punk power that’s been marble-chiseled by time and experience into a pied piper rally cry that’ll make a believer outta you yet, you silly stuck-in-your-ways sensible shoegaze softies. Get freaky and give this one a spin (and thank me later).

“Spend It All” by The Oystermen

Don’t let the whole alternative-teen-groupie-Thorazine-lapsang-souchong look fool you. This writer gets down to a good ole stompin’ bluegrass hootenenay hit from time to time – but it has to be pretty damn good to pull me away from my regularly scheduled brooding cuppa the aforementioned lapsang souchong (I know who I am). “Spend It All” by Brooklyn’s newest bluegrass super-force is that good.

This red-hot track just dropped a few weeks ago, and lyrically, it’s a masterpiece. Frontman Stanley holds it down and pushes it up with jaunty harmonica and driving acoustic guitar, but more than his lively, boot-stompin’ delivery, it’s his words that walk home with you after the show’s over. The chorus rips in with the proverb, “Get a whole lotta money, spend it all havin’ a good time.” This is the new national anthem, or at least the song of the summer. “Stay out all night listenin’ to the rest of the album, it’s
gonna be a blast. Go back home tomorrow mornin’, and then you can crash. Doctor said I should count some sheep, I said ‘Whaddo I look like, Little Bo Peep?’ C’mon listen to the rest of the album.” *harmonica solo* Finally, a track you and your dad’s friends can all get down to.

…and The Oystermen’s trumpet player deserves his own write-up. Every band in New York that’s been looking for a trumpeter is going to writhe and lament when they hear this one.

“MASS APPEAL” by Nat Cherry and Braxtino

This dark, toothy groove dropped just two weeks ago, and I’ve already spun it at least 50 times. Longtime punk rocker Nat Cherry and soulful guitar god Braxton (Smith Taylor, Black Lazarus) joined forces for a soon-to-be cult classic track that, frankly, doesn’t look like any of the tunes either of them have put out before now.

“MASS APPEAL” is for folks who discovered Nico’s “Chelsea Girls” in their teens, graduated to the realm of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Nina Hagen in their twenties, and are now looking for what’s next. Your search is over, lovers. Nat Cherry’s deep, round, lilting drone pulls the trip forward through heavy synth and a brick-laying drum beat. Braxton brings the smooth polished vocals in just the right places, but those places are few. No one is over-singing or over-performing here, and that’s what makes this track so deliriously cool. It hits because it hits, and no one is doing backflips to
catch your attention. They don’t have to.

Hopefully, “MASS APPEAL” is the scintillating promise of more to come from this Brooklyn-based duo. My loved ones are becoming strangers as the mouth-foaming jones for a full EP ravages my body (please god more).

“G Bus” by Tired Horses

The single, “G Bus,” dropped in 2023, and Tired Horses edged their loyal following of jazz-horny clean cut acid freaks with a live album recorded at Hidden Fortress in Philly. Now, it’s 2024 and we’re ready to climax. Give us the manna from heaven, Steely Dan.

This freewheelin’ psychedelic fantasia of acid jazz is just what the doctor ordered in two ways: It’s the antidote to the singer-songwriter-mania that’s oversaturated the New York music scene since the pandemic, and listening to it will make you live forever. Whether folks know about it or not, Tired Horses is already a supergroup – but ultra-niche-lovin’ music heads (you know who you are) will want to pounce on this one now if they want to say they knew about the horsies before they were big. Savant guitarist Cameron Criss (Ruby, Buga, the Claire Ozmun Band), saxophonist Mike Talento, bassist Alex Tvaroch, Jack Gruber on keys, and Szecso Szendrody on drums
fill a space and keep it filled so effortlessly that you won’t even miss a singer.

Tired Horses did something truly special with “G Bus” by capturing that delicious live sound without it going flat. All those groovy layers are preserved in amber – and for New York groovers who wanna shake some action in-person, the band has a residency at Troost bar in Greenpoint. They play a totally original set on the first Monday of every month and there’s no door fee.

“What Money?” by Crystal Egg

Curtis Godino makes the organ sexy. “Organ” as in the instrument, aka the cooler older sister of the piano. This Nashville band hit the stage for the first time in April 2023, but Crystal Egg is already dripping with style. “What Money?” is the group’s only recorded track on music streaming platforms (and it just dropped in April) but they already landed a spot opening for the Lemon Twigs on their most recent tour a few months ago. Also, the anti-capitalist canticle of “What Money?” effortlessly captures the rage-gut-punch of wanting to be a part of something awesome but getting disenfranchised with a door fee and, gasp, being broke.

Dream-queen Jess McFarland’s avant-garde bohemian vocals melds with futuristic flair from Godino’s one-of-a-kind synth stylings for what can only be described as the intersection of poetry and chaos. There really aren’t any other bands to compare Crystal Egg to, and what a feat. They could quit now and already be a legend. But, the hypersonic life force behind their tunes and off-stage creative tsunami (Godino runs Drippy Eye Projections and a gag toy company called Jester Trading Co., and McFarland is a master seamstress and clothing designer) suggests that there’s much, much more to come from these Nashville newcomers.

Written by Autumn Swiers

Tag: Autumn Swiers

If You Can Hear Her, You Should Fear Her: “One of the Guys” by Zoë Pete Ford | Album Review

Renny Conti’s self-titled bridges the gap between “now” and “next” – look no further | Album Review

Claire Ozmun Brings it Home on New Music Video for “Dying in the Wool” | Music Video Premiere

A Lighthouse in a Dried-Up Sea, Hazel City’s “Old Friend” Invites World-Weary Swimmers to Believe Better | Album Review

Witches Up No Mountain Switches Down No Valley by All The Pretty Horses | Album Review

Autumn’s Hi-5’s

“Rock & Roller Girl” by Liquid Images

“Spend It All” by The Oystermen

“MASS APPEAL” by Nat Cherry and Braxtino

“G Bus” by Tired Horses

“What Money?” by Crystal Egg