Photo © Sasha Arutyunova 2012
I get emails!
If you ever want a bunch of new friends to start emailing you constantly, just start a music blog. Within weeks you will have musicians and their publicists sending you very friendly messages, calling you by your first name, asking you very politely to listen to things. I’m not complaining, not exactly; this can be a very good way to hear about great undiscovered new music to talk about, which is theoretically why I started this blog and and Ball of Wax in general. But sometimes the inbox gets a little overwhelmed with these type of solicitations and, I’ll be honest, I don’t always listen to everything. (I do listen to everything sent directly from the artists, but I find myself deleting a lot of publicist emails without listening.)
But I’m not writing this post to bore with the minutiae of bloggerdom (yes, I know, I’m doing a great job of it anyway), I’m writing to tell you about a pretty darn cool song I would not have heard if the band hadn’t emailed directly and asked me to listen to it. Landlady is a band out of Brooklyn, apparently led by one Adam Schatz. Schatz is a 20-something whippersnapper who has played with a bunch of bands you’ve probably heard of – but you know how we do, we don’t really talk about those sorts of bands. Schatz himself is a musical force to be reckoned with; I very much enjoy his arranging and melodic approach, as well as his compellingly strange (but not too strange) falsetto vocals, as showcased on this here song:
[wp_bandcamp_player type=”track” id=”4031300001″ size=”grande” bg_color=”#FFFFFF” link_color=”#4285BB”]
The b-side of this digital single is a seductive cover of the Pixies’ “Oh My Golly” that lurches and sways appealingly, with lead vocals from Schatz’s fellow Landlady Renata Zeiguer.