(Liv).e - 'Couldn't Wait To Tell You...'

By Phillipe Roberts

The name of this game is misdirection. Forget the crafty intro, where, soothed by celestial organ sounds and bantering with herself, she appears to crack open a clear “love story” for you. Forget the frantic suggestion of the title. Forget the rough edges of her previous solo output, the foggy lo-fi layers of reverb that clouded her bewitching vocals. One album into what’s shaping up to be a groundbreaking career, (Liv).e pulls off a stunning magic act on Couldn’t Wait To Tell You…, welcoming you into a psychedelic hall of mirrors where emotional states and sonic vignettes warp and distort in the blink of an ear. With unwavering confidence, she slowly paints a romantic map and dances through the brushstrokes. 

(Liv).e comes at you fast. For all the sticky humidity of her vocal hooks, the Texas singer has too much to say to keep any one idea in play for more than two minutes. Apart from album centerpiece “I Been Livin”, which traps her ghostly serenade within an icy piano sample cold enough to slow her thoughts to a near four minute trickle, and the bed-creaking bounce of “Stories with Aunt Liv”, you’ll have to keep your ears ready, thumbs locked and loaded to bookmark your favorite memories for later. But even when the floodgates burst open completely on the frantic “Bout These Pipedreams,” her portraits (“Gentle brown skin, soft as sugar / Bittersweet life like a cocoa bean / Dark eyes that eat the past”) come through clear as day, keeping pace with the surge of an unhinged hi-hat, all clocking in at a hardore punk minute-and-a-half. 

At every point and speed on the record, she flexes a lyrical cleverness and poised playfulness, matching the fantastic arsenal of beats at her disposal (all due respect to producers mejiwahn, Daoud, and Shungu for the pillow-soft landing zone for her vocal talents) while maintaining a poised playfulness. She plays up a big sigh for laughs on “Lessons from My Mistakes...but I Lost Your Number”’s false-ending gag. She floats against the clobbering beat to devastating effect (“How many portals will you jump through for my attention?” is one hell of a wake-up call) on the sobering “You’re Wasted Let’s Go Home”. She balances between “making room for myself” and giving herself over to one last one night stand on “How She Stay Conflicted...I Hope She Understands”. (Liv).e portrays her emotional fluidity with a winking, lucid clarity that’s positively infectious.

If anything, it’s that total lack of emotional defensiveness, this commitment to breathing life into the reflective pauses of romance, that makes Couldn’t Wait to Tell You... one of the most psychedelic listening experiences of the year. Just try to listen to (Liv).e gently curve through a lyric like “I've got a brand new crush today” or “Placed a bet with myself that you'd come and find me” and not melt into a puddle of your own well-earned goofy bliss. 

Way back in March, (Liv).e opened a livestream by saying “my name is (Liv).e and you’re under quarantine with me”; having experienced the sublime relaxation of this album, I sorely wish I’d been in the know back then. Praise has been rightfully heaped on Couldn’t Wait to Tell You... for its journal-entry candidness. As someone for whom journal-keeping is a daily act of quiet resilience, it’s impossible to listen to this album, with its fragmented urgency and dreamy wistfulness, and not feel seen with a blinding spotlight. But no record in recent memory carries this feeling, this purposeful urgency to knock you off of your bullshit, with so much self-affirming joy. A blizzard of thoughts, feelings, dreams, and ideas worth venturing out into, Couldn’t Wait to Tell You... plays mind games that only leave you smiling.

Busty And The Bass

Photography by Rachel Kuzma

We sat down with Montreal electro-soul crew Busty And The Bass for an intimate look into their origin story, their new music, why they couldn’t exist without Montreal, the music that made them, working with legendary record producer Neal Pogue, collaborating with George Clinton, the importance of music education, and much more.  

Check out their single “Baggy Eyed Dopeman” and their newest video single “Summer,” shot and partially recorded at the St. James United Church in Montreal. 

Members: 

Nick Ferraro (vocals, alto sax) – Evan Crofton a.k.a. Alistair Blu (vocals, keyboards, synths) – Scott Bevins (trumpet) – Chris Vincent (trombone) – Louis Stein (guitar) – Milo Johnson (bass) – Eric Haynes (keyboards, piano) – Julian Trivers (drums)

ThrdCoast: Do any of you guys live in New York?

Nick: No.

ThrdCoast: So you’re all in Montreal?

Nick: Yeah, Montreal and Toronto.

ThrdCoast: When did you guys get into New York?

Louis: We got in yesterday, last evening. Got some pizza pretty much immediately upon arrival. We’ve been down a couple times, but yeah it’s been really nice. 

ThrdCoast: Are you on the road right now? 

Louis: We were and then we arrived—

(Laughter) 

Louis: No, there’s no shows, we’re just coming down to chill and meet some people and hang out with you fine folks. 

ThrdCoast: Well let’s start from the top: Give me a crash course on how Busty and the Bass came together. Who wants to spearhead it?

Chris: Lou!

Louis: We were all studying music in Montreal, mostly jazz. So we got together and created a kind of “no pressure zone” to create music for people in more of a house party setting, to just come together and play really loud in a house for people. That was pretty much the first two and a half years.

ThrdCoast: What year is this?

Louis: That started...2015? 

Milo: No, ‘11.

Louis: Oh—

(Laughter)

Louis: Damn! Yeah, 2011. 

ThrdCoast: What school is this?

Louis: We were at McGill.

ThrdCoast: All of you studied Jazz at the same program?

All: Yeah.

ThrdCoast: Who met who first?

Louis: I was the only one who wasn’t living in the dorms, I lived in a janky, poorly insulated apartment that didn’t have any noise problems, so we would play there. The first week of school we just invited everyone who seemed chill to a big four loft house warming party. There was a DJ in one apartment and I was in charge of live music, but I didn’t really know anyone so I just told everyone to come and bring their instruments. Chris came and multitrack recorded the entire five hour thing, people came and stepped in to play and people would trade off on instruments and it was the first time a lot of us had ever met.

ThrdCoast: What kind of stuff were you playing?

Louis: Everything from jazz standards with a fat backbeat to complete free improv, or someone would just shoutout like, “B flat minor” and we would just play that.

ThrdCoast: So it was a jazz hang.

Louis: It was a jazz hang, but weren’t really playing jazz, we were more figuring the music where we could all have fun. There were people partying and drinking and hanging out, so there was an intention behind it to make it a fun vibe. People were dancing, so we were energetically faced outwards. 

ThrdCoast: So are all of you Canadian? 

Louis: No.

ThrdCoast: Who’s Canadian here?

(Nick, Eric, Evan, and Chris raise their hands)

ThrdCoast: Okay, so what’s the difference between jazz in Canada and jazz in the U.S?

Louis: Well there’s more apologizing in Canadian jazz.

(Laughter)

Nick: Well there’s a lot more history in the U.S. That was the biggest thing I noticed going to school with the American players. I remember Scott saying ‘yeah the alto guy in my town studied with Jackie McLean’ and I was like, “What!!” I was like ten degrees separated from real shit, so that was really cool to see. 

ThrdCoast: Montreal is a jazz hub in Canada, right?

Louis: Yeah, I’d say it has one of the bigger scenes.

Milo: A fun international jazz story I have: My grandma saw Louis Armstrong play on Vancouver Island when she was a teenager. 

ThrdCoast: What’s going on in Toronto jazz? 

Nick: It’s pretty similar to Montreal. There’s a few more schools there so it’s still very much so ingrained in education, whereas in Montreal it branched out a little bit so you see people take more initiative and not so ingrained in jazz education culture. But that’s just the jazz scene itself, the music scene there is really popping as well. Just having our nest in Canada is really amazing because the arts are more publicly funded and there’s just more opportunities. There’s more concerts, there’s more all ages events. The bars you only have to be eighteen or nineteen to get in. That changes the whole dynamic of any sort of nightlife. 

ThrdCoast: So the first Busty release was in 2015? 

Milo: Yeah the one that still exists online besides Pirate Bay. 

ThrdCoast: What’s going on in those four years between when it started and that first release?

Milo: We just played a lot. Our first proper tour was in 2013. 

Julian: Yeah, “proper.” (chuckles)

Milo: That one was a two day thing to Toronto and Kingston. Then we did a ten or eleven day thing at the beginning of 2014 and we went through the states and a couple of shows in Canada. It was pretty reckless. 

Louis: I think it was thirteen shows in eleven days. 

ThrdCoast: You were double booking yourselves?

Louis: Yeah, we had the little Hermoine Granger hourglass thing.

(Laughter)

Milo: We did a show at the Brookline Public Library in Boston and then a Tufts frat house that evening. 

ThrdCoast: What was the library gig? Was there a crowd?

Milo: There were maybe twenty or thirty people.

Julian: Ten people. 

Eric: I think we actually got shushed. 

Evan: A lady came up to us and told us to be quiet. 

ThrdCoast: So in those years, you’re just formulating what would become the first release.

Louis: Yeah, I mean, we didn’t really have that much of an emphasis on songwriting. We hadn’t really written any songs with vocals. A lot of it was instrumental arrangements of pop tunes so people could latch on to the melody. There were some original things. Chris arranged a five part Disney suite medley which was super epic.

ThrdCoast: Does that still happen? 

Louis: It happens very occasionally, like when the lunar eclipse matches the tides. But yeah, people would just bring in tunes they wanted to play and then some things would develop out of jams, but there wasn’t an emphasis on songwriting until later. 

ThrdCoast: What’s inspiring that early iteration of the band? What were you guys listening to?

Chris: We were listening to Pabst Blue Ribbon, uh, Mr. Jameson…

(Laughter)

ThrdCoast: When you guys were doing that stretch in 2014 what was playing in the van?

Louis: Honestly I don’t think we were trying to consciously listen to bands that sound like us. Our sound has always developed and evolved from individuals listening to crazy things. Someone might be really into Dr. Dre, and then someone else is really into Jack Johnson, and someone is really into Earth, Wind & Fire. I feel like our van playlist has always been so wide ranging and it makes it exciting for me at least to come together and figure out a sound that we’re not trying to replicate from someone else. 

ThrdCoast: What’s the common ground? What’s the band you can all agree on?

Scott: I think in that year it was definitely James Blake. 

Julian: And I remember the first tour we were introduced to Moonchild. They’re awesome. We got the singer of that group Amber Navran to sing on one of our new singles, “Clouds.” 

Milo: There’s certain tours where one or two records kind of defined the trip. The first James Blake record was always the thing you could throw on. Voodoo you could always throw on. 

Eric: Channel Orange.

Milo: Yeah, To Pimp a Butterfly and Channel Orange you could always throw on. That’s kind of how I remember certain tours. 

ThrdCoast: What about now? What are you guys bumping now?

Louis: We just listened to Holly Herndon. She does like electronic avant-garde composition. She created an A.I choir. 

ThrdCoast: What do you mean “A.I choir?”

Eric: She worked with a choir of humans, and using that choir of humans she programmed an A.I vocalist that sings on the album. It’s wild. 

Chris: That was in the other van yesterday. You guys had a good drive!

ThrdCoast: Oh, you’re split into two vehicles this time around?

Chris: We’ve always used two minivans since the beginning.

Milo: The other van listened to the new Mac Miller record. 

ThrdCoast: How is it?

Milo: I liked it. I was curious about the process behind it, like what stage all of those tracks were at, where all of the vocals were, stuff like that. 

Nick: I know his family allowed producers to work with his demos to release it posthumously. I’m really curious as to how that was done, we were talking about that yesterday. 

Milo: We were also listening to—a couple of years ago I did a deep dive into the P-Funk catalogue and their side project catalogue and put together a playlist that I called “P-Funk Soul.” We listened to that as well. It’s some picked gems from a lot of the madness. 

ThrdCoast: So I imagine when you go on tour, it’s not just you, you have crew—

Milo: No it’s just us. 

ThrdCoast: So no crew or anything?

Milo: We’ll do it for bigger shows that we don’t have to fly for, but most of the time it’s just us. 

ThrdCoast: Well even with just the eight of you it can’t be easy all the time. How do you cohabitate?

Louis: We always just get one bed. 

ThrdCoast: One really large bed. 

Chris: One thing that helps is having two seperate vans. It allows for a lot of flexibility. You can break up the groups, people move in and out. One car can go do one thing on the way to a city and another car can do another thing. There was one time we were driving from Salt Lake City to Phoenix and one car went through Hope, Arizona and the other car went through Vegas and lit the town red. 

(Laughter)

Chris: Er, painted the town red! But yeah that’s a big thing. If we were all in the same car—

Julian: We’ve done that before, where we’re in one big van and you’re all stuck in there. If someone’s sick then everyone is feeling like they’ll get sick. 

Chris: It’s the little things too. If we’re all in a big van, not only are we feeling claustrophobic, but then parking is a nightmare and if anyone has to get off to do something from the highway… you’re just really a unit. Whereas the two vans allow for the little things to become easier. 

ThrdCoast: So what was the point where you guys realized that this band was going to be your job?

Chris: Well you asked what happened in those four years before the release and I think what goes a little underspoken is, as Nick was saying, there’s a whole ecosystem we were existing in. Not only is the drinking age lower in Canada, but the dynamic is just completely different in Montreal because the moment you get to school you can go see music in a bar. So those first four years were really just about laying the foundation to build a business off of, which is something a lot of people just don’t get. And not only building a business, but also failing. Trying and failing and just doing all of that groundwork so that by the time we graduated we could make a grand from a gig. And that doesn’t sound like a lot—

ThrdCoast: I mean, that first grand is huge.

Chris: Yeah it feels like a lot of money! There was a lot of just laying the foundation. By the time we got out of school we could make just enough, and then within a year we were able to cover our rent. So I think a lot of us saw that trajectory. 

ThrdCoast: Right.

Chris: A big moment for us was when we one this competition in Canada that you got a cash prize for. 

ThrdCoast: What competition?

Chris: It was called “Rock Your Campus.”

(Laughter)

Chris: It was put on by the CBC, which is our version of NPR. We put a song up and were really fortunate that we won it. 

Milo: Basically that funded our first proper recording project and a horribly failed first attempt at a PR company. 

ThrdCoast: Would you consider that competition your break, in a way? 

Julian: That, and recognizing that Montreal has so many students. There’s so many young people just trying to go out and party and have fun. We just kind of capitalized on that for a couple of years and slowly built this small group to get bigger and bigger. By the time we graduated we could go to these different cities and play bigger shows and have just been working on that over the last eight years. 

ThrdCoast: Where would the band be now if you were in the States instead of Montreal?

Julian: Not a band.

Milo: Just the combination of Montreal living cost and grants have basically allowed us to exist and also not have to go deep into debt or sign a super controlling deal. It’s so much more breathing room and has been a huge part of us continuing to keep doing what we do. 

ThrdCoast: It’s insane the amount of money Canada puts into the arts. It’s really a profound, special thing. It seems like you guys feel that.

Louis: Definitely. Canada and Quebec. 

Milo: Eric, do you want to do your little blurb about national security? 

Eric: Not really.

(Laughter)

Milo: I’ll just paraphrase stuff Eric has sent me. The reason why there’s so much arts funding is because at a certain point the government viewed a national security threat because they felt like Canada would just be consumed by the U.S because it’s so big and so close. So the arts were seen as one of the main ways to keep Canada a separate entity.

ThrdCoast: So let’s talk a bit about the new music. How did you guys get in touch with Neal Pogue? 

Milo: We’ve been working with him since 2015. Our manager somehow knew his manager and sent over some demos that we were working on at that time and he liked a few of them.

ThrdCoast: Did you know who he was before then?

Louis: No but we had listened to a lot of his music. He’s done so much music. We were all really familiar with a bunch of things he’s done from OutKast, Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, TLC… So to get an email back like ‘this guy is super interested’ and then we look him up—it was pretty sick.

ThrdCoast: So you worked with him in 2015?

Milo: We did two tracks with him. He’d come up to Montreal in little blips. So the first time we did like five days, and the next was like a week, and so on. 

ThrdCoast. How does he work with you guys?

Louis: It’s pretty crazy actually. Somehow he has managed to move very patiently, but also we like to move faster, but it doesn’t feel like we’re rushing anything. A lot of times it will start with whatever tracks we’re thinking about and go back and forth with him before his arrival and then as we’re playing it in the room he’ll pinpoint little problems or things he’d like to change and we’ll check it out together. Pretty quickly after he’ll be like ‘alright, we’re not going to play it anymore, let’s go record it.’ He’s really good at figuring out when people need more hands on guidance or inspiration, or if we have it he’ll just let us do it. 

ThrdCoast: Did you have any moments of being to just sit around and shoot the shit? 

Louis: He’s got a lot. A lot of stories. 

(Laughter) 

Milo: It’s interesting just hearing his stories and his perspective. I never really thought about the behind the scenes of the music industry too much. You think of the artist and the public-facing stuff but then there’s people who have been doing it for forty years who have been on so many records but you don’t hear about them until you’re actually in the scene with them. I mean, the dude did “Hey Ya.” It’s a track that defined multiple years of my childhood. 

ThrdCoast: —Of everyone’s childhood in our generation! 

Milo: Yeah, exactly. 

Julian: He had little things about Outkast that were pretty sweet. I’d ask like ‘how did you guys do that song? What happened with “Ms. Jackson?”’ and he’d be like ‘oh you know, we didn’t put bass on it until two in the morning—Andre would say ‘let’s put bass on this track!’ so a guy would come in and record it in like an hour.’ That’s such a defining part of that song. 

ThrdCoast: In a way it kind of demystifies these things that we love. 

Julian: Yeah, hearing about the process. 

ThrdCoast: So let’s talk about “Baggy Eyed Dopeman.” 

Evan: The piano part came about in my friend’s place in Toronto. I was jamming out on this E minor 11 chord and the bass line is really triplet heavy, the whole track is really triplet heavy. I feel like we kept coming up with different versions of the big line in that song. So then I went to New Zealand for Christmas and was playing in front of the jungle with all this rain coming down. I remember going to sleep—I’m pretty bad at sleeping—and asking ‘why am I always so tired, why do my eyes always look like bags,’ and I realized I’m a baggy eyed dopeman—because I’m smoking so much weed.

(Laughter)

ThrdCoast: So how did George Clinton get involved? 

Evan: Through Neal. He’s huge for all of us. He’s basically the founder of all of the music that we play. So I don’t know if it was our idea or Neal’s idea, but once we learned he could potentially be on the track, we just wanted to make it happen. So then our manager just sent his management the song and he liked it. I remember him specifically saying the keyboard player really liked it from the new P-Funk band. He sent us a demo of his take and the rest is history. 

ThrdCoast: It immediately made me think of “Wesley’s Theory” from To Pimp a Butterfly. He had a similar energy, this mythic shaman vibe. 

Milo: I remember during the process of making the track, at a certain point were just throwing around names of who would be fun to have feature on this and someone said George Clinton, but we felt there was zero percent chance of that ever happening. 

ThrdCoast: Did you guys get to meet George?

Evan: Not yet.

ThrdCoast: But you will.

Evan: (confidently) Oh yes. 

ThrdCoast: What about “Summer?” Was that tracked around the same time? 

Nick: Yeah, around the same time. It was sitting in a batch of songs for a while as a piano/vocal demo. At the time that I had written that, we were very much so a groove music band and I just had no clue what to do with it. We were working on some new music and different sounds started coming out so we thought ‘maybe we could pull this off.’ We got some other singers to come in and lay down parts, we got the strings on it and it turned out great. But then we did the church version which we realized after the fact that it was how that song was meant to be. Just grandiose. 

ThrdCoast: The video is beautiful. 

Nick: We pretty much recorded all of that while we were doing the music video, we were in another room doing the track. We had a demo mapped that we were miming the video to and in that same day, because we had all of the singers and the choir and the string musicians there, we just used them—it’s actually kind of crazy to think about when I tell people about that turnaround.

ThrdCoast: That’s crazy!

Nick: Yeah, it was almost all in the same day. 

ThrdCoast: So you tracked that whole band next door? 

Milo: We had done the beds the day before, but we tracked the strings in the green room and then the choir in the green room and then set up mics throughout the church and did the organ and all of the reverb from the church. 

ThrdCoast: So you guys were just like, ‘fuck it, let’s record while we shoot the video’?

Chris: Um, it was actually kind of like, ‘let’s check it out.’ 

(Laughter)

Chris: I think the intention was that we knew we were doing this video in a church and it was the only day we had all of the choir and strings, so we knew we wanted to record them. I was heading the engineering part of that and I knew I really wanted that to sound authentic. We did the whole video and all of that recording in one day, and at the very end of the day we did the organ and piano and threw up a couple of PA speakers and re-amped everything through the hall. We had an opportunity to capture that space and it was really sweet that we did it that way. 

ThrdCoast: So what’s coming up in the Spring? 

Milo: We’re doing some shows in March, going back to venues in the big cities we love. We’re playing Bowery here in March. We’re releasing some new music in February. 

ThrdCoast: What are some things we can expect from the new music that’s coming out?

Louis: I feel like it’s a more mature sound. Just as we grow as people and as a group and play more music, we’re getting more comfortable with saying more with less. I feel like “Summer” is a really good sign of that. It’s really powerful and it’s not a bad thing to strip it down to just piano and vocals. That’s one thing that I’ve heard from people who come to our shows. That’s something we’re trying to do more of, spotlighting these unique combinations of ourselves. 

ThrdCoast: I know when you guys started it was about spontaneity and improvisation and energy, but this stuff, is it more song based? 

Louis: I think so.

Milo: Neal called this a “classic sophomore record,” whatever that means. 

ThrdCoast: You’re saying that getting older and maturing are what’s pushing the new direction.

Louis: Yes, and it’s allowing us to explore more musical offshoots and spaces that we may have not been mature enough to explore. 

ThrdCoast: What was the songwriting process like for the new music?

Louis: I think a lot of it was people having ideas and then bringing them to the group and then fleshing them out together at various stages. 

Chris: It’s been a very different recording process than what were used to. The album before, Uncommon Good, a lot of the beds got done as a rhythm section and a lot of the overheads got done also in sections. It felt a little more like smaller teams. The new stuff has been way more of a hodge podge. We cranked it out too, there was a two week period at the end of recording where Scott and I were up at a small studio space and we just cranked out all of the horn parts. Meanwhile, they’re doing all of the lead vocals at another studio. The drums were a complete hodge podge. In “Summer” they were recorded piece by piece with Milo, Julian, and I at a small studio in a random part of Montreal. Another time we drums at my studio. There was no formula for anything other than vocals really. 

ThrdCoast: Did you guys have walkie-talkies?

(Laughter)

Chris: No, I wish! 

Nick: Yeah we really cranked it out. It’s crazy to think about in such a short time. 

Chris: I think what sets the new music apart from the old stuff is a lot of the songwriting and parts writing came from individuals, where on the old stuff it was more born out of group playing. What you can expect going forward from us is a lot more of all of us together writing songs and using that as a foundation. 

ThrdCoast: What else do you want to add here? Anything you’re dying to say?

Louis: One of the other things we’ve started to incorporate on tours is visiting schools—high schools, middle schools, elementary schools. We’re all products of our own unique music education. There’s usually one person who worked really hard and is super passionate—at least that’s for me, coming from New York in a school where my English teacher was just an amateur guitarist who built the music program with the help of students. We’ve done quite a few visits as we go around.

ThrdCoast: What do you do when you’re there?

Louis: Usually if it’s a full school, we’ll do a full school assembly and depending on their age we’ll take our set and use different songs and break them apart to either do a call and response interactive thing, or to use elongated arrangements to show what each instrument can do. Occasionally we’ll do a period where we’ll split kids into groups by instrument or by activity, and I think what a lot of people forget is that a lot of kids don’t get to see music in the States until they’re twenty-one. For me, I think it would be pretty hard to get inspired if all you can hear is your band teacher who’s kind of playing the flute but it’s their fourth instrument, so you have no perception of music being a fun social thing. We’re trying to redefine that for the youngsters.

---

Busty And The Bass National Tour:

Mar 6 - The Danforth Music Hall - Toronto, ON 

Mar 10 - Bowery Ballroom - New York, NY 

Mar 13 - Troubadour - West Hollywood, CA

Mar 27 - Centre Phi - Montreal, QC 

Mar 28 - Centre Phi - Montreal, QC 

April 3 - Imperial Bell - Quebec City, QC

Busty And The Bass Online:

https://www.bustyandthebass.com/ 

https://www.facebook.com/bustandthebass/

https://www.instagram.com/bustyandthebass/

https://twitter.com/bustyandthebass?lang=en

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiqQ1b4tcOZLhl8qReKCydA

2012 BID ADIEU - SOMETHING TO TELL YOU

By Gerard Marcus

2012 Bid Adieu is a DIY artist collective headed by Jordan Clark and Gray Hall, featuring a lot of our favorite artists in the New York scene. Their output to date has consisted of three singles and two videos which all exude creative experimentation and high levels of musicianship. The new video for “Something To Tell You” keeps that trend alive. The track, fronted by Hall on vocals and guitar, deals with themes of escapism. How do you move on after finding yourself in a situation where remaining would only make things more confusing. The video, directed by Jeff O’neal, helps bring that story to life through creative use of isolation and distortion, with a spotlight on Hall allowing the emotional content of his words shine through. It’s another truly intriguing piece from the New York based collective, and has me very excited for their debut “We Died In 2012: This Is Hell,” set to release Friday, June 7th of this year.

Words from Jordan Clark himself:

As it stands, We Died In 2012: This Is Hell serves an open-letter to the internet set to release Friday, June 7th. “Something To Tell You” is 2012 Bid Adieu’s third single off their debut album. Sung by Gray Hall, “Something To Tell You” is a conversation with someone who the singer no longer has a relationship with. Frustrated and seeking answers that he is not receiving, the singer ultimately knows that he’ll have to leave the situation (“I’ll move to a city”). While 2012 Bid Adieu’s album begins with a more generic look at escapism in the internet-age, "Something To Tell You," the final song on the album, looks at the singer’s own struggles with escapism.

Obvious Creature - Hiding (Video by: Lobo Incognito)

Gerard Marcus

Through all the histories I’ve read in my short time here on earth, I've learned that hiding has been a crucial elements of human survival. Hiding from danger, hiding from the truth, hiding who one really is–it’s a skillset one develops in order to protect or withhold one's personal world from outside influences. As important as hiding has been in the past, it's interesting to think about the modern-day climate of shared information where everything you do is recorded. Nowadays, where can you truly hide? Artist Lobo Incognito takes on this question his video for Obvious Creature’s track “Hiding.”

The video is a mixed collage of found-footage and hand-shot imagery exploring the idea of where we go when we hide. Some of the imagery seems almost voyeuristically intimate, while at other times it is distant and cold. It's the balance of these contrasting elements that Incognito nails beautifully in this video, perfectly capturing the tension of hiding in a modern world where nothing is really secret. Images distort, repeat, and cut to the point where they only fly past as reference. Color change to impossible hues. And digitally-constructed images bend around the analog. Nothing seems stable, and it feels like at any moment all the secrets held within the video will be revealed–but it never happens. Incognito is able to hold it all together with a strong sense of style and aesthetic, teasing at a digital realm where all secrets lie. The video's warped digital style, paired with the chill jazz stylings of the Obvious Creature’s track, creates a dueling experience that breezes through subliminal messages and shows us the reality that today, we all hide in plain sight.

REVIEW: Smalltalker - Talk Small

Will Shenton

Smalltalker's latest EP, Talk Small, opens with a quiet, distant-sounding jazz-hop groove, casually noodling along and seeming to promise a more demure sound than their previous work. But fifteen seconds in, the track comes into focus with a few bold instrumental hits, fleshing out the atmospheric haze before launching into the lush harmonies of "Wildcard." It's a playful tease to kick off the record, and one that captures the band's easy confidence.

One of the first things you'll notice about Smalltalker is the comparatively huge roster of musicians—ten in the regular lineup, including ThrdCoast's very own Gerard Marcus on trumpet—that gives their smooth, jazzy soul its size. But they don't just rely on walls of sound to bowl you over; every song is meticulously crafted, giving each instrument its own time to shine. The crisp production makes it easy to pick out the constituent parts, leaving the listener plenty to discover on subsequent listens.

Talk Small may be a relatively short EP, but it feels like a fully-formed album. We ride from the wistful melodies of "One Too" to the energetic, danceable highs of "To Choose," before closing with the quiet reminiscences of "Sorry." And with such a density of instrumental and vocal elements throughout, Smalltalker seems to have crammed more into its twenty-minute runtime than most bands do with twice that. It's an impressive feat, and one that will leave you satisfied even as you pine for their full-length debut.