When James put up his hodge podge post on Friday and noted the last time he’d posted one was back in October, it reminded me that it had been almost exactly as long since I’d brought you folks one of my bulk EP reviews. Like James, I don’t have a good reason for the drop-off, but I can tell you one thing: it bums me out when it happens. These EP reviews, more than any of the other kinds of posts I do here at Citizen Dick, helps me digest acts from all over the country that are just at the very beginning of their career, as well as a few that are further on up the ladder. Today, as usual, we have a bit of geographical diversity, with our selections coming from places like Rock Island, Illinois, Pittsburgh, PA, Uniondale, NY, and, of course, the Big Apple. There’s a fair bit of career diversity, too, with Franz Nicolay having the kind of name recognition already that Lissie Maurus is on her way to earning while names like Jacob Vanags and The People’s Temple Youth Group. Despite their hometowns and their relative levels of fame, however, each of the artists in today’s round-up merits a minute or to with your ears.
Lissie – Why You Runnin’
I’ve written about Lissie Maurus before, focusing a Singles Club post on album opener “Little Lovin‘” back in October, and the neo-MTB influence I wrote about loving in that track persists throughout the most of subsequent four tracks. “Wedding Bells” is a peppy yet glum ditty about unrequited love with a slight June Carter vibe, while “Oh Mississippi” is a lovely and brief Woody Guthrie meets old-time revival sing along, while “Here Before” has a subtle 80s arrangement and some Stevie Wonder cues in the singing. “Everywhere I Go” might be the song with the most original approach, or at least the one with the least input from previous generations, and its also the one that best allows Maurus to show off her pipes. There are random and rare moments in this song where she briefly belts out the lyrics in a way that hints at the vocal power she possesses, though she keeps the big guns packed away by and large throughout Why You Runnin’.
Lissie’s debut EP, Why You Runnin’, dropped November 10th via Fat Possum. You can purchase it here.
Franz Nicolay – St. Sebastian Of The Short Stage
Best known as the mustachioed, accordion-wielding leader of hard partying and raoucous rock group The Hold Steady, this new solo effort isn’t going to do much to change Franz Nicolay’s reputation. Which, of course, is a good thing. For a music lover, I’m not much of a collector (at all, really), but I wholeheartedly recommend picking up this four song release on the 10″ vinyl. The album art (courtesy Nicholas Gazin) alone is worth the price of purchase (especially the insert, which also includes a Nicolay-penned short story, “Paraska Mikhailivna is a Witch”), but the music is where the magic is. Separated into separate two-track “fun” and “depressing” sides, with corresponding art on each side of the record, the record starts perfectly with a Nicolay-Dresden Dolls cover of Jonathan Richman’s New England. The song is a killer singalong, starting with a little chatter among the players (the highlight of which being Nicolay’s shouted assertion that “beef among New Englanders is pointless”) and ending with the trio shouting out their favorite places in slogans in their home region. The second track on the fun side finds Nicolay going solo on the Watchmen-inspired “The Ballad of Hollis Wadsworth Mason Jr.,” the backstory of which is another delightful dimension of the EP.
Side two is indeed the depressing side, all minor keys and melancholy. “When the War Came” is a dark and mournful tale of war and what it can do to a man’s soul, spirit, and bond with other men. The morosity continues on the final track, “I Just Want To Love.” Written several years ago, “back in 2001, after-hours at my old dot-com job,” Nicolay relates in the liner notes that it was self-recorded “in a pit of despair!” The song has a musical theater dimension to it, the kind of heart-rending solo number you’d expect in a 21st Century Andrew Lloyd Weber production after the lead character’s lover abandons him. Even whilst in an emo funk, Nicolay maintained his self-awareness, acknowledging its overwrought state in the lyrics – “And this song is dumb, I know/sensitive singer-songwriter trash” – but still using the artistic exercise to exorcise what it was that had laid him so low at the beginning of the past decade. As we enter this new decade, it is a testament to Nicolay’s perspective and ear that he included it as the closer on this short collection.
St. Sebastian of the Short Stage, Franz Nicolay’s recent EP, dropped on November 10th via Team Science. You can purchase it here.
Jacob Vanags – Pulses Are Pluses
The opening track on Jacob Vanags’s self-released third EP is the perfect track to listen to immediately following the closing track of Franz Nicolay’s EP. Vanags, a precocious piano popper who splits his time between Kent, Ohio (home of the infamous student massacre) and Long Island, NY (where Brooks Brothers ties are manufactured), has produced a record that is playful, diverse, and – especially considering the piano-driven nature of the arrangements, dense. Beyond the keyboard chops, Vanags has the kind of voice you can see major labels getting behind. If only this guy would’ve been discovered by Disney when he was 8; he’d be on tour with Justin Timberlake right now.
Pulses are Pluses will almost inevitably garner comparisons to Ben Folds, but take away the piano aspect and you don’t really see the connection. Where Folds alternates between tongue-in-cheek and melodramatic, whereas Vanags takes a more traditional pop approach as he crafts songs that are both more sincere and more ambitious. Sometimes that ambition results in a cluttered production, likely the result of Vanags trying to be more of a team player with his new band than a solo artist using session musicians under his direction, but as he gains more experience and confidence with arrangements, those sonic experiments will sound less messy and more layered. In the meantime, tracks like “Stuck” and “Antarctica” sound like they are a stone’s throw from charting.
Jacobs Vanags released Pulses Are Pluses, his third EP, on November 3rd. You can purchase it here.
Jacob Vanags – All That You Have
The People’s Temple Youth Group – The Slavery of Love
We receive countless emails from bands asking us to take a listen to new music and see if we like it enough to write about it. I believe in that kind of thing, so I do it as often as possible, but if I’m honest with myself, I also gotta admit that getting a full and fair listen is a bit of a crapshoot. It depends on how busy I am with my real-world job, what kind of mood I’m in, what cool stuff is or isn’t going around town that week, and so on. From the perspective of the folks sending those emails in, there’s no way to know what life is gonna be like for the person they are asking to listen, so the best thing they can do is be nice, witty, and optimistic.
Occasionally, though, they can help themselves out by tempting my curiosity by listing a provocative set of influences or a neat backstory. Or, like Darrell Sarka Workman did when he emailed us in November, play on the Rust Belt connection. I love me some Rust Belt art and would feel like a total shitheel if I didn’t at least listen (even if the fells in Pittsburgh-based The People’s Temple Youth Group are most likely Steelers fans), so I downloaded the new EP’s three tracks and put my headphones on. It didn’t take much more than the first thirty seconds of the EP’s first (and titular) track to realize that the Rust Belt connection was the least important reason I had to love this band’s work. Instead, I had three great tunes, each of which were a mash-up of seminal influences, all swirled together and reissued as something that easily straddles 70s psychadelia, 90s industrial, and this century’s west coast shoegaze.
There are a lot of influences here, from Trent Reznor to The Who and David Bowie to Electric 6, with a little Johnny Cash and Galaxie 500, but unlike some bands who seem like they are simply regurgitating, this strikes me as more akin to generational shifts in ideological movements; each new development is predicated upon the previous foundation, but still something new.
For now, the band seems content to keep things relatively underground – I can’t even find a myspace page for them – but hopefully that will change soon with the rumored full length set to hit stores this month. Based on the promising songs on The Slavery of Love, you can bet you’ll be reading more on these pages about that album when it finally does hit.
The People’s Temple Youth Group released their debut EP, The Slavery of Love, on November 5th via Ulja Factory. You can download it for free here.
The People’s Temple Youth Group – Hang Slowly
