Ball of Wax 63 Songs: Maggie O’Hara – “Worth the Wait”

Posted on March 17, 2021 by Jon Rooney

Maggie O’Hara makes her debut contribution to ye olde Ball of Wax with “Worth the Wait,” an uncluttered voice and ukulele song written by O’Hara and recorded by scene stalwart and bearded Cascadian musical guru Colin J Nelson. “Worth the Wait” addresses the bizarre state of isolation and postponement the world’s been in this past year, offering the kind of supportive, hopeful encouragement we’ve all needed and continue to need as we near the end of this mess. The lyrics are refreshingly sincere without coming off as Pollyannaish, acknowledging that “the world is a cold, cruel place” before assuring “though it’s dark right now, it’s worth the wait.”  Structurally, O’Hara takes a simple three chord repeating structure and adds variety in terms of dynamics, shifting strumming patterns, and clever variations on the main melodic motif, matching musical shifts with lyrical changes. All of which is mighty impressive considering O’Hara is new to both writing and performing. I really hope that this is just the start of O’Hara’s musical odyssey and she builds on her taste and initial musical skills to contribute more to the expanded Ball of Wax universe in post-pandemic volumes to come.

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Ball of Wax 63 Songs: Amanda Winterhalter and Rebecca Young – “The Bump Room in L.A.”

Posted on March 17, 2021 by Patrick J Gibbs

Before listening to Amanda Winterhalter & Rebecca Young’s “The Bump Room in L.A.,” my favorite Prince-inspired song was Bill Callahan/Smog’s “Prince Alone in the Studio.” Originally written for The Bushwick Book Club Seattle’s January 2021 showcase featuring songs inspired by Prince’s memoir The Beautiful Ones, Amanda and Rebecca’s collaboration on “The Bump Room in L.A.” began with a shared reading of the book and the passing of thoughts and ideas about and inspired by it. Together they transform Prince’s words and world into bumping feminist anthem.

Amanda’s vocals are delivered with such soul and conviction that the lyrics pulled from Prince’s memoir and their meaning become hers. “I live by the Feminine Principle. What you imagine is critical. Time is a lie. We’re all changeable. Create your life. Just try.” Damn. That’s inspiring. But wait, there’s more. This is a Prince-inspired song. It’s sexy. It’s steamy. At times it’s racy. But it is Amanda and Rebecca, not Prince, who set the tone and call the shots. Rebecca’s bass pulses and throbs. She finds the space between the notes to help dim the lights to accent Amanda’s most sultry lines. Contributing to the bumping atmosphere are pianist Jason Staczek and Moe Provencher, whose percussion tracks and production add the perfect amount of perspiration.

“The Bump Room in L.A.” is a much funkier song than Smog’s “Prince Alone in the Studio” and is a tribute better suited to an artist who worked closely with and celebrated women musicians throughout his career. Importantly, Smog’s work relies on a foreknowledge of Prince in order for it to come together, whereas Amanda and Rebecca build upon material left behind by Prince and elevate their song beyond his orbit so that it stands and succeeds without necessarily knowing their inspiration. Though, knowing “The Bump Room in L.A.” was lifted from the pages of The Beautiful Ones adds a layer of hilarity to this banging number.

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Ball of Wax 63 Songs: KO SOLO – Quarantine Boogie

Posted on March 16, 2021 by Amanda Winterhalter

I think I first heard Kate Olson play solo at the Bourbon Bar at Columbia City Theater. Years ago. Pandemics ago. Maybe it was a century ago, because Kate Olson always seems to transcend time and space. And yet time and space are where she really holds it down, because one of the first things you notice when you listen to “Quarantine Boogie” is the effortless groove in the space between her notes, then the perfect leap from here to there, like a saxophone constellation. And then you hear this singular force delicately lay down each part on top of the next, a galaxy of horn bops.

When I saw Kate Olson some time and space ago at the Bourbon Bar, I was struck by her command of a song and a stage. The way she moves from one note to the next, or one instrument to the next, makes you want to do more with your life, or at least practice your instrument for a few more hours a day. But Kate is much more than practiced. Like some of those icons from a century ago, she’s got impeccable intuition and direction. She leads the listener where she wants them to go, and “Quarantine Boogie” levitates us from the couch to the living room dance floor. Literally providing the levity we need to get some space from our space. This is the boogie I imagine Lisa Simpson and the spirit of Bleeding Gums Murphy duetting and dancing to in the nights of their pandemic pod. So if you’re together or alone, or alone together, let this boogie give you a lift to Space Time.

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Ball of Wax 63 Songs: Datura Blues – Silence for the Apple

Posted on March 16, 2021 by Levi Fuller

With “Silence for the Apple,” the sprawling, long-lived collective known as Datura Blues brings us a brief, percussive meditation, created during a 20th-anniversary (!) improvisational retreat in the pre-Covid days of late 2019. It is noteworthy that six musicians contributed to this work, and yet it never feels crowded or overly busy. The percussionists work together as one to create a steady heartbeat for Sarah Jean Hart’s flute to impart its melodic wisdom. Once this rhythmic bed has been established, the flute slowly makes itself know, gradually adding more notes, climbing up and scaling down, reassuringly returning to the root note established at the beginning. Having said what it needs to say, the flute finishes its thought and the percussion ensemble gradually drops out, winnowing, all too soon, to nothing. This is the kind of piece that would work equally well as a ten to thirty minute immersive soundscape, but given that this volume of Ball of Wax contains about exactly as much music as I can fit on a CD, in this instance I appreciate the brevity.

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Ball of Wax 63 Songs: Orion – Witch’s Blood

Posted on March 15, 2021 by Lattney B. Jones

“Witch’s Blood” by Orion works a spell of converging time periods and ignites within me a nostalgia for events that never happened, or that I never experienced. It wastes no time in getting down to its main progression, with prickly guitars laying down a not-quite-hard chug-chug-rest-chug rhythm over billowing distortion and a touch of synth before everything dips into a riff refrain that will have metalheads kicking themselves in the ass for not having thought of it first. All of this and then repeat with plaintive vocals—and it’s damned effective.

What is this nostalgia? I want to say a blend of ’90s shoegaze and pre-post-rock postmodern rock but sounding current in a way that current music doesn’t. And with a touch of something I can’t quite grasp from my childhood, something early ’80s but lacking all of the overproduced flash. Which is to say that this all sounds more organic than it feels like it should. Before I can figure it out, the primary instruments suddenly fade for a final-minute anti-whizz bang ending by allowing some distortion to ring over the synths—which might be playing a different progression now! It’s a dreamy outro and it makes the song’s opening all the more impactful when played on repeat.

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Ball of Wax 63 Songs: NIGHT of 21 HOURS – “Flight Risk”

Posted on March 15, 2021 by Patrick J Gibbs

The origin of NIGHT of 21 HOURS is written on their Bandcamp page:

By the winter of 2020, approximately 9 months of COVID related isolation had started to wear on me. That’s when this started.

The credits on ISOLATION, their album released in February 2021, as listed on Bandcamp read:

written and produced by Mark Schlipper
performed by his computer

NIGHT of 21 HOURS is a modern collaboration. An exercise in which Mark Schlipper channels his thoughts and feelings into compositions which his computer then translates. NIGHT of 21 HOURS evokes feelings associated with this last year of disease, uncertainty, anxiety, and loneliness.

“Flight Risk” opens with a staccato electric drum pattern that repeats with the precision of a well-practiced roofer with a nail gun, hoping to get away from the hot summer sun. The drums are joined by a heavily distorted industrial guitar or keyboard voice that plays a few notes as it feels out its place among the raptap of the drums before settling into a dirty and driving groove. The instruments lock in, more effects are piled on, and the track takes off. The playing on “Flight Risk,” its structure, the seemingly intuitive nature in which the instruments communicate with each other, all have an organic quality that drench the piece with emotion. Mark’s computer is clearly an accomplished player and interpreter of music.

“Flight Risk” is powered by an urgency and a need to get somewhere. It is not a song about staying still. It is a song seeking an escape from isolation. Many of us are closer now to our desired destinations than we were just months ago when NIGHT of 21 HOURS was born. As such, it is a perfect coda to their album ISOLATION.

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Ball of Wax 63 Songs: Night Owl – “Lunar Ghost Phase”

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Levi Fuller

As you might expect, Night Owl’s “Lunar Ghost Phase” is perfect nighttime music. Specifically, driving at night. Specifically-er, driving late, late at night, the neon from empty bars reflected in the rain-slicked streets ahead of you. The interplay of guitar, bass, and drums keeps you company as you meander the city streets, trying to remember what it was that brought you out here in the first place, your foot slowly easing down on the gas pedal, your hand sneaking over to nudge up the volume knob. It’s late. You’re tired.

Then somehow you’re floating, dreaming, remembering . . . and then – inevitably, but shockingly to you – you’ve stopped moving, you’re perpendicular to where you just thought you were. Your head hurts, and your engine is steaming. There’s someone else out there, but you don’t want to look. Better just start the song again.

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Ball of Wax 63 Songs: Saint Nefarious – “All Promise Is Bust”

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Levi Fuller

Our dear friend Lattney (see also Grumpy Bear, Holly and the Dead Saints)’s newest offering, “All Promise Is Bust” does not come from a happy place. You can hear the darkness creeping in with the first slow, heavy drum beats and sinister bass line. Your anxiety spikes as an Albini-esque guitar squall jabs across your brain pan. As this patiently bludgeoning dirge unfolds, Lattney intones a sad tale about a town where the children believe the lie of their own inherent exceptionality (a lie that is certainly one of White America’s greatest/most awful legacies), before ultimately finding themselves confronted with the truth of their own mediocrity.

Needless to say, I won’t be spinning this tune for my own five-year-old any time soon, but as a cynical old person and former jaded teenager of the ’90s, it hits a lot of my musical pleasure centers. Swirling, discordant guitars, angst-fueled dynamics, sung-spoken vocals that seem dispassionate and world-weary until it finally all becomes too much, and they become one with the sonic scream of guitar/bass/drum: “ALL PROMISE IS BUST!” Ironically, the brilliance of this song – and so much of Lattney’s prolific musical output over the past couple decades – would tend to disprove its own thesis. I never knew young Lattney B., and I’m sure the current version of him is not what he or his parents expected as a wee child of the American Southwest earning participation trophies and honorable mentions with the rest of us, but good lord, that boy was filled with promise, which has proven to be anything but bust.

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Ball of Wax 63 Songs: Die Geister Beschwören – “A Cultivation of Reflective & Meditational Skills”

Posted on March 11, 2021 by Lattney B. Jones

Before I get to the psychfolk epic-in-miniature that is “A Cultivation of Reflective & Meditational Skills,” please allow me to share my love for this act’s chosen name: Die Geister Beschwören may not roll off of your tongue, but it sure rolls off of mine. And its English translation—“summon the spirits” or “the spirits conjured up” or some iteration thereof—warms my little soul. I am a man of science by trade and a yearner for spirituality by experience, an oft-terrified someone crushed by the vastness of the world, the universe, the whole of existence, who wants to believe in any number of things but demands proof and validation. Ghosts, spirits, spectres—these are the supernatural entities that remain in the spaces of my mind where desire meets imagination long after the demise of holy trinities, hobbits, and space operas.

The music of Die Geister Beschwören brings me back to those spaces and swells my imagination enough for it to rub shoulders with the boundaries of what I am able to trust or believe. “A Cultivation of Reflective & Meditational Skills” is so aptly named that I am convinced the artist may have composed the music to match the title and not the other way around. The Cultivation takes place primarily across the first two minutes of the track as guitars at first spy warily and then ease themselves into the nest of a synth drone sparsely decorated with the most minimal of bells. Once comfortable in their surroundings, the guitars ebb and flow, advance and recede, swell up and fall back—and from somewhere far off a lap steel or a singing saw or a wailing soul joins in and announces the arrival of a male choir wordlessly calling out exactly the tones that can bear one’s mind close enough to the edge of the veil to actually touch fingers with those beyond it, before all parties recede into the ether and leave you with a warm hopefulness that maybe next time an exchange might take place.

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Ball of Wax 63 Songs: Sceneries, Placements – “Handful of Hope”

Posted on March 11, 2021 by Levi Fuller

I don’t know if Sceneries, Placements were thinking of Emily Dickinson when they concocted the delicately peculiar “Handful of Hope,” but the first thing that came to my mind as I pondered the title, and this piece, was the phrase “Hope is the thing with feathers.” I went and found the full poem, and it really does feel like this piece is a musical representation of it. As I sit here listening I can just imagine holding this little bird in my hand, this feathery embodiment of hope, watching it flex and flutter, hearing it coo and tweet, until, at last, it lifts off, never having asked a crumb of me.

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