Sharing a familiar song can make a nursing home visit feel personal. It can surface an unexpected worry, too: how do you report nursing home abuse if the visit turns up something wrong? Music connects people. It cannot diagnose a … Continue reading
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Cosmic Joke, Pity Sex, Firestarter and Contract Killer also have special covers sets planned for it.
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There was always something faintly threatening about DEVO, even when they were dressed like escaped laboratory technicians and making middle America wonder whether Akron had been contaminated by industrial runoff. By 1984’s Shout, however, their absurdism had become so synthetically swollen that Puppet Boy could almost pass for another piece of mutant pop comedy. DEVO also have a long history of unconventional covers, from the classic Stones track I Can’t Get No Satisfaction, to Jimi Hendrix’s R U Experienced? Bex Delgado, recording as The Phantom Eyes, turns the tables on the Spud Boys: she hears the threat lurking inside Mark Mothersbaugh’s words and gives it a set of fangs.
This version of Puppet Boy takes DEVO’s original premise and drags it into the bedroom of an especially disreputable vampire. The synthesizers feel colder and more severe, the rhythm carries a steady club-floor compulsion, and Delgado sings with the cool authority of somebody who already knows which end of the leash belongs in her hand. Mothersbaugh’s lyrics suddenly acquire an uncomfortable erotic logic. Obedience, dependency, affection, and ownership begin rubbing against one another until nobody seems especially interested in establishing boundaries.
That change suits The Phantom Eyes remarkably well. Delgado approaches post-punk and dark electronic music through horror, where desire frequently comes with unfortunate contractual obligations and love can involve surrendering both your better judgment and access to daylight. There is humor inside it, too. Any cover of “Puppet Boy” that treats the title with complete solemnity would miss part of DEVO’s genetic code. Delgado preserves the perversity while turning the joke several degrees darker.
The accompanying video makes the implication explicit. Filmed by Tori Kellogg/GR4VES in a single evening, it pairs Delgado’s scarlet entity with Sett’s Puppet Boy, a willing captive whose submission appears to have become his natural state. Red satin, CRT distortion, VHS degradation, and physical closeness give the footage the grubby glamour of an 80s vampire cassette discovered behind the counter of a video store that probably should have been investigated by local authorities. Some sequences were even filmed directly from Gr4ves’ CRT, giving the images their wonderfully diseased television texture.
“I was trying to embody the spirit of not exactly a dom/sub relationship, but more like a master/servant one,” says Delgado. “This story isn’t romantic in nature, but still has that sweet feeling that the characters do take care of each other. I wanted the Puppet Boy to be not just a “sub,” but rather someone who just doesn’t really know anything else because it’s his whole life–and he has long been fine with this.”
The Puppet Boy has no great awakening coming. He knows his place, perhaps enjoys it, and The Phantom Eyes leave him exactly where DEVO put him forty-two years ago: attached to invisible strings, smiling nervously, waiting for somebody else to pull.
Watch below:
Listen to Puppet Boy below and order the single here.
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The newly reconfigured band’s take on their gold-certified album.
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A nor’easter is on the way, devastating every music festival in its wake. So far, All Things Go NYC, Global Citizen Festival, and Oceans Calling have all been canceled due to severe weather conditions.
The post All Things Go NYC, Global Citizen, Oceans Calling Festivals Canceled Due To Nor’easter appeared first on Stereogum.
I’m a living god
In the same way as all human flesh
A pretty song can pose a problem when your band has spent a decade cultivating less agreeable habits. Melbourne quartet Bitumen found themselves facing precisely that predicament with “Perffect Dress,” a handful of chords that had begun behaving suspiciously well. Their response was to introduce a little trouble: vocal distortion, an outlaw-country inflection, and a bouzouki. Beauty survived the intervention, though its manners became considerably less predictable.
The single offers an unexpected turn ahead of Reality Red, the band’s third album, due November 6 via It Records. Acoustic instruments and live drums open up fresh possibilities for a group whose post-punk has long accommodated goth, metal, and electronic abrasion. Here, that expansion takes the form of something loose-limbed and oddly pastoral, with a threat tucked into its Sunday best.
A slow drum crash and twanging acoustic guitar set the pace, with further strings gathering around the opening figure. There is a country-folk lilt to the arrangement, carried by the easy movement of Andrew Huhtanen McEwan’s drums and Bryce Maher’s bouzouki. As the layers accumulate, a deep bass hum draws the music toward alternative rock and post-punk, while a high electric-guitar line swims through the spaces overhead. The song seems happy to wander, even as its low end keeps track of where everyone is going.
Kate Binning’s voice gives that wandering its peculiar charm. Her vocal suggests Marianne Faithfull meets Thom Yorke’s languid reverie. The distortion adds texture without making the performance abrasive; there is an almost whimsical quality to the delivery, a daydream being sung aloud before anyone has checked its contents. Simon Maisch’s murmured backing vocals move beneath her, introducing a second, less easily deciphered train of thought.
The words supply ample reason to inspect that daydream. Revenge, freeway exposure, pursuit, and the vulnerability of flesh run through lyrics that keep shifting between smallness and grandiosity. The speaker can be a little sound one moment and a living god the next, claiming divinity on the same terms as every other mortal body. Rearranging a perfect dress becomes a wonderfully incongruous gesture amid all this damage: a small adjustment to one’s appearance while existence itself appears to be coming apart. The overlapping vocal lines complicate the picture further, slipping bodily images and cryptic instructions beneath the lead.
The accompanying video places the band around an open fire against corrugated metal, their faces and instruments catching its orange light. Rectangular close-ups overlap the wider performance, bringing hands on strings and Binning’s singing face into the foreground while the gathering continues behind them. As those frames change size and position, the clip moves between collective intimacy and private concentration. It suits the song’s peculiar hospitality: pull up a chair, enjoy the acoustic guitars, and try to overlook the revenge being discussed beside the flames.
Watch the video for Perffect Dress below:
Formed in Melbourne in 2016, Bitumen brings together Kate Binning, Sam Varney, Bryce Maher, and Simon Maisch. Working with a drum machine has been a deliberate part of their approach, allowing guitars, synthesizers, samples, and programmed rhythms to change the terms of each song. On Reality Red, Tongue Dissolver’s McEwan adds live drums to that existing setup, while acoustic instrumentation and a greater openness to melody give the four-piece further room to experiment. Perffect Dress was recorded by Maisch at Lily Street Studios in Coburg North, with McEwan assisting, and produced by the band.
Reality Red is available to pre-order here on digital and limited-edition transparent red vinyl through It Records.
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