Freak Scene #32: APIE, All Feels, Wallace Field, Mates of State!
Behold! New tunes from Animal Piss, It's Everywhere; All Feels; Wallace Field; and Mates of State!
A Guide to Music in Western Mass. (and sometimes Connecticut)
Yet again our cup overfloweth: this week, we consider a new album from Animal Piss, It’s Everywhere, a new single from All Feels, a new video from Wallace Field and a new single AND video from Mates of State. Phew!
Two things about Animal Piss, It’s Everywhere. First, they’re right: most critters just let fly wherever. Second, a band with a name like that is bound to have a subversive streak. In APIE’s case, it manifests in songs with a shambling cosmic American music vibe, delivered with deadpan self-awareness. You could almost say they’re taking the piss on Grace, the band’s second album.
How else to explain barroom weepers like “Fried Baloney?” The track features Clark Griffin and Shannon Ketch’s harmony-ish vocals on lyrics describing a sad bastard drowning his sorrows, paired with Graham Vunderink’s bare-bones drum beat and Andy Goulet’s mournful pedal steel guitar. Or “Cocktail Time,” a psychedelic take on a Bakersfield country shuffle that sounds as if maybe cocktail time started a half-hour or so before the song did. Goulet’s pedal steel licks swoop around effects-treated guitars as Griffin and Ketch describe who else is also on cocktail time: robbers, coppers, the breeze, even the Dalai Lama (no wonder he’s so chill).
Yet if the lyrics are often deliberately dumb, in a tongue-in-cheek way, the musical arrangements are on point. There’s nothing fussy here, but the band shows versatility on loose-limbed tracks that run from old-school honky-tonk on “Dime a Dozen” to a British invasion sensibility filtered through the Byrds on the swiftly flowing “Permanent Vacation.” Opener “Beach Song” comes complete with meandering saxophone for a mid-’60s surf-rock feel, if surf culture had taken root on the Jersey Shore instead of in Southern California. Griffin and Ketch add to the effect by blunting their consonants: “We’re goin’ to da beach t’day.”
Grace seems on the surface like an incongruous title for an album like this. In the end, though, it makes sense: it’s what the people in these songs are seeking. If that sounds suspiciously sincere for APIE, it’s also what makes the band’s characters more than caricatures.
All Feels Ready New Album With ‘Hide’ Single
Easthampton’s All Feels nail the balance between huge and intimate on “Hide,” the last single from the band’s forthcoming album This Place Is a Message. A blend of synths and guitars cascades over singer Candace Clement’s reverb-laced vocals, and she sounds at once sorrowful and self-assured. The powerful track is the fourth song All Feels have released from the album, which is out Oct. 4. We heard two of the other songs, “Shoreline” and Absent,” in Freak Scene #3 in February, while the spiky rocker “Possessed” came out in August.
New songs aren’t the only thing happening with the band. All Feels recently welcomed to the fold Kate Dowd and Noah Dowd, who also comprise two-thirds of True Jackie, another Easthampton group (we heard from them in Freak Scene #4). The Dowds joined the band too late to have contributed to This Place Is a Message, but you’ll see them onstage soon.
Wallace Field Goes for a Ride in ‘Nothing Is Everything’
Wallace Field’s new video for her dire breakup song “Nothing Is Everything” was a long-term project that included footage she filmed in 2022, and a car she borrowed in 2023. The car was the lynchpin. In the spring of 2023, she put out a call on social media asking if anyone had a yellow sedan she could borrow. She ended up with a sporty vintage Mercedes, which carries Field down lonely roads in her heart, and also to Montreal. It’s a fictional re-creation of a trip she took with a former partner in his 1980 Volvo.
“The car I was searching for had to be a yellow sedan from the ’80s, because the trained journalist in me needs my artistry to be as factually accurate as possible,” Field jokes by email. (She studied journalism at the University of Massachusetts.)
The Shelburne Falls native wrote, directed, filmed and edited the video, which accompanies the song from her 2023 album All Costs (I wrote about it for the Boston Globe). Not only did Field painstakingly piece together clips of the scenery that scrolls by the car windows while she’s “driving,” she shows off some skill on roller skates, too, in footage she filmed at Olympic Park in Montreal in 2022.
As for the Mercedes, Field was sitting behind the wheel, but the vehicle never moved. “Fun fact: the car was dead in the driveway and its owner put air in the tires to make it more realistic for the video,” she says.
Mates of State Are Back With ‘Somewhere’
Connecticut duo Mates of State are back with a new single, their first in nearly a decade. The group this week put out “Somewhere,” a song at once wistful and packed full of hooks as Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel trade perspectives about a promising relationship in the past that fizzled out, but still looms large in their narrators’ minds. Considering that Gardner and Hammel have been a couple since they were undergrads at the University of Kansas, it’s probably safe to assume the lyrics are fictional. They pack a punch anyway.
Hammel made a lyric video for the song that intersperses footage of little kids (theirs, presumably) and cats (also theirs?) with what appear to be AI-generated animations of a man and woman who resemble Mates of State, in an uncanny-valley kind of way. “Somewhere” comes on the heels of a tour the group did this past summer. They haven’t mentioned whether it’s a one-off project or part of an upcoming album — their last LP, Greats, came out in 2015 — but when Gardner posted the video on Facebook, she noted that she and Hammel have been a band for more 25 years now, and finished by saying, “I want to keep making music guys.”
Upcoming Concerts
Aimee Mann’s variety show holiday concerts were always a fun time, now she’s gone and added Ted Leo: The Aimee Mann and Ted Leo Christmas Show comes Dec. 8 to District Music Hall in Norwalk, Conn.; Premier Concerts/Manic Presents has more info.
Bone Thugs-N-Harmony perform Nov. 22 at College Street Music Hall in New Haven, while Gov’t Mule are there Dec. 28. Check Premier/Manic for details on those, too.
The Academy of Music in Northampton hosts Kathy Griffin Jan. 30, Pink Floyd tribute band the Machine Feb. 7, the High Kings March 16 and Gaelic Storm March 26. DSP Shows has more info.
The Drive-By Truckers perform Saturday at Mass MoCA as part of the FreshGrass festival, and singer Patterson Hood returns to Western Mass. Dec. 3 for a solo show at Tree House Brewery in South Deerfield.
Antwuan Stanley of Vulfpeck plays a solo show Oct. 23 at the Drake in Amherst. Mal Blum is there Nov. 9. Anxious, Restraining Order, Burning Lord and Dimension share a punk bill Dec. 13. More information here.
Freak Scene is always seeking submissions! You can send music for coverage consideration to erdanton at gmail or reply to this email. Check out these guidelines first.
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