Freak Scene #79: Kelly LaMay Shows Another Side on 'Gone with the Low Tide'
Plus, a new song from Dennis Crommett, who found inspiration on a road trip for pizza
A Guide to Music in Western Mass. (and sometimes Connecticut)
This week in Freak Scene, Kelly LaMay is making music at a blistering pace, with three LPs in the past 18 months. We check out her latest, Gone with the Low Tide, along with a catchy new solo track from Dennis Crommett.
Kelly LaMay has set a prolific pace over the past 18 months, a period in which she has released three full-length albums and a pair of singles. After establishing an alluring, vaguely menacing persona with the fuzz-tone guitars and forceful rhythms on last year’s releases Out of Tune (Freak Scene #4) and Punkish Broken Radio, the Western Mass./Cape Cod singer takes a different approach on Gone with the Low Tide, her latest.
It’s still very much LaMay, who tends to sings in a hypnotic murmur. Yet these 10 songs have a more vulnerable sensibility than her previous music. In part, that’s due to musical arrangements with softer edges (her brother, Bobby LaMay, contributes guitar and bass). On “Bad Decisions,” LaMay’s voice carries the song, which blends clean guitar lines with a pliant bassline, and what sounds like an organ whirring away in the background and occasional chimes on a glockenspiel. “Chokehold” blends acoustic guitar with atmospheric clouds of synthesizers and the subtle addition of a theremin.
LaMay hasn’t moved completely away from the motorik sound of her previous work. “Knock Three Times” has a surging rhythm and gritty guitars, but swirls of synths lighten the tone. “Long Time” skirts the edges of electro-pop with a combination of synths and a pulsing beat, before fuzzed-over guitars rise up like a miasma that gives the song a thrilling sense of turbulence in the contrast with LaMay’s controlled, ethereal vocals.
As engrossing as LaMay’s first two albums are, dialing down the bristling, fortress-like guitars on Gone with the Low Tide allows a fuller picture to emerge of her strengths as a songwriter. Not only can she sound tough, she has a reflective side, too.
Dennis Crommett Takes Off on ‘Wheels Up’
When he’s not busy fronting Spanish for Hitchhiking or filling out guitar textures and harmony vocals in Winterpills, Dennis Crommett tinkers with electronic music by himself at home. That practice yielded his new single, “Wheels Up.”
The song started in December 2024 as an instrumental track. Then, as Crommett writes in notes that accompanied an emailed link to the song, “one day driving to get pizza in Connecticut I started singing along. Thanks, pizza.” Thanks, indeed. (His order? Two slices of pepperoni, at Zephyr’s Street Pizza in West Hartford.) Brooding organ and bright flurries of guitar swirl together around a speedy beat, and Crommett’s vocals sound at once yearning and bemused — a combination at which he excels.
For the hardcore Crommettheads, he’s also making available a compilation of electronic tracks he was tinkering with 20-odd years ago. Called The Enjoyable Tones of Sound, you can download it here.
Upcoming Concerts
The Iron Horse in Northampton hosts Great Lake Swimmers Dec. 9 with Abe Partridge (tickets) and Eliza McLamb April 23 (tickets).
Indie-folk singer Joan Shelley plays the Parlor Room in Northampton Oct. 18 (tickets). Also booked: Canadian singer-songwriter Jason Anderson with a Cloudbelly solo set Oct. 24 (tickets), and Splendid Torch and Friends playing the songs of Shania Twain and Sheryl Crow (tickets; read more about Splendid Torch in Freak Scene #65)
The Drake in Amherst hosts the New Bedford-area indie-rockers Autumn Drive Sept. 12 with Skruple and Over the Median (tickets) and beatboxer and producer Honeycomb Oct. 25 (tickets). Also, the UMass Fine Arts Series includes a handful of shows at the Drake: Haitian singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer Paul Beaubrun Oct. 14 (tickets), anti-folk singer-songwriter Carsie Blanton Feb. 11 (tickets), a solo show from Red Baraat founder Sunny Jain Feb. 19 (tickets) and Mexican jazz-pop singer Lucía April 9 (tickets).
The Fine Arts Series also includes Bill Janovitz, the singer and guitarist of Buffalo Tom and author of a forthcoming book about the Cars, reading and performing Oct. 22 in Bowker Auditorium at UMass (tickets), along with Parliament-Funkadelic mastermind George Clinton in conversation with DJ Spooky Oct. 29 (tickets), the Brandee Younger Trio Nov. 13 (tickets) and Soweto Gospel Choir Nov. 20 in Frederick C. Tillis Performance Hall (tickets).
English folk-rock guitarist Richard Thompson plays Nov. 16 at Infinity Hall in Hartford (tickets).
New York rapper Skizzy Mars performs Nov. 15 at the Space Ballroom in Hamden (tickets). Jimmy’s Chicken Shack are there Dec. 5 (tickets).
That’s it for this week, but 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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