Freak Scene #15: Mystics Anonymous Explore Boundaries
A Guide to Music in Western Mass. (and sometimes Connecticut)
This week in Freak Scene, we listen to Mystics Anonymous’ first album in a decade, watch the recent video from New Haven-area duo Midnight Psychic and catch up with some great new concert bookings. Let’s get to it.
If the name Mystics Anonymous sounds like a 12-step program for people overly obsessed with tarot, say, or the healing power of crystals, the band’s music is another story. Jeff Steblea’s songs are a lot of things, but mystical isn’t one of them. Rather, the Northampton mastermind makes music that is intricate, exploratory and virtuosic on Dining & Lodging, the first new album from Mystics Anonymous in a decade (there was also an EP, She Wanted the Future, in 2016).
Dining & Lodging shows the breadth of Steblea’s abilities as a writer and musician on songs ranging from hooky and concise to dense and sprawling. He played many of the instruments himself, with contributions from a deep roster of guests who added vocals, horns and additional parts on drums, guitar, synths and bass. For all the instrumentation listed in the credits, some of the songs here are deceptively straightforward. “What Are Last Laughs For?” burbles along with a current of bright guitars and a springy beat flowing around Steblea’s hooky vocals, which refract into tight harmonies on the refrain. The mid-tempo rocker “Up at the Sharp End” is darker in tone, with a minor-key musical arrangement focusing on guitars and Steblea’s lean voice.
Other tracks are more complex. “Important Ladies Betting Horses” features an off-kilter harpsichord sound that gives way to a repeating bassline, an intermittent crunching electronic noise that sounds like an 8-bit Donkey Kong smashing something, and interlocking layers of mallet instruments. There’s an ebb and flow to “Unhappy Accidents and How to Avoid Them,” which packs a ton of ideas into six minutes. Steblea lets the song unfold over a West African-style rhythm while he adds and subtracts guitars, synths and bold horn parts. “Napoleon Is Here” stretches nearly to eight minutes, with a loose, echoing beat and fuzztone bass providing the framework for layers of silvery guitar and Steblea’s voice as he intones the title of the track through a curtain of distortion.
Steblea has said that when he started Mystics Anonymous in 1995, after fronting the Connecticut indie band Go Figure in the early ’90s, “the whole point was to establish a project where nothing is off-limits.” Since then, he has released a lot of music, and worked with a lot of collaborators, yet it still sounds like he’s just getting started.
Midnight Psychic Are Stuck in ‘Suburbination’
Although George Moore and Jayson Munro have known each other since they were kids in the Danbury school system, and have been making music together in various configurations for almost as long, their band Midnight Psychic is a more recent development: the New Haven-area friends came together as a darkwave duo early in 2022. “Suburbination” is their latest single, featuring Munro’s baritone voice and gleaming, reverb-soaked guitar lines underpinned by Moore’s fluid bass and a drum-machine beat. The song yielded Midnight Psychic’s first music video, a black-and-white clip that captures a sense of suburban desolation with images of crumbling buildings and endless streets stretching into the distance. The song is catchy, the video is bleak and the combination is compelling.
Upcoming concerts
Here’s a fun booking: Gillian Welch & David Rawlings perform two nights July 24-25 at the Iron Horse in Northampton. Here’s another: Neko Case comes to the Academy of Music Oct. 3. Among other projects (including a Broadway musical), Case has been working on a new album, which would be the follow-up to her 2018 release Hell-On. The Buena Vista Social Orchestra plays the Academy Sept. 18. The Iron Horse also hosts Hot Club of Cowtown Aug. 3 and Joshua Quimby Sept. 5. Check with DSP Shows here for ticket information for all those shows.
In Connecticut, the Mountain Goats come to District Music Hall in Norwalk on July 29. Washed Out are there Aug. 16. Kishi Bashi plays the Space Ballroom in Hamden Oct. 9. Ticket information for those shows, and a whole lot of others, is available here.
Next week: We go on a journey with Northampton trio Black Pyramid.
Do you know a musician you’d like to read about in Freak Scene? Let me know! To submit your (or their) music for coverage consideration, send a note to erdanton at gmail or reply to this email. Check out these guidelines first. You can find previous issues of Freak Scene in the archive. (Freak Scene is free, but donations are gratefully accepted, and have no bearing on coverage.)