Amy Denio: “All Together Now”
Seattle’s own brilliant and prolific Amy Denio spins a mystical and complex tonal landscape to perfectly present her simple and profound incantation, which is especially relevant these days: together.
THEATH: “Helocentric World”
Spend 60 seconds spiraling through photons and spinning across beams of warm light; you can feel the sun’s bright heat.
Holly & the Dead Saints: “A Clean and Faded Calico Dress”
’80s lo-fi is recalled in these mysterious goings-on about a court and broken sticks and a calico dress, sandwiched between spates of bass and catchy drumming.
The Deep Cove: “Emergency Is My Emergency”
A ’70s vibe is recalled here, with synthesized harpsichord (back then it would have been merely electric) and intentionally-never-quite-in-tune vocals: we are promised that “what’s mine is yours,” but we’re never quite sure what that is.
[Ball of Wax 60 is made up of a lot of really short tracks. So we’ll be doubling up our blog posts for this one, with two one-sentence reviews each, between now and June 5th, the official release date. Enjoy! -ed.]
Levi begins a new volume of Ball of Wax with a glorious slowly-unfolding bang from Hart Slights, whose “Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski” sails in on crisp-but-relaxed drums and a bassline to die for while disembodied megaphone spirits conjure the ghost of Neruda by invoking the title of his darkest poem.
“Remembering Six” from The Ex-Optimists is the kind of thrilling romp that the late ’90s promised but too often failed to deliver except on secret college radio stations, its chug and grind overlaid with excellent guitar work and, through it all, a self-aware narrative in memoriam.
Photo courtesy Flickr user Steve Austin
Well, it’s happened. As planned, we have assembled a mighty collection of sixty one-minute tracks from all over the world, in celebration of 60 volumes and 15 years of this ridiculousness. The release date will be Friday, June 5th (not coincidentally the next Bandcamp fee-free day), and we’ll do some kind of ludicrous Zoom-to-Facebook live explosion on Saturday, June 6th. Stay tuned for details, and look for Volume 60 track reviews to start rolling out today.
Stay safe and keep listening!
Photo courtesy Flickr user Steve Austin
For a while there I had a grand, Seattle-based plan in mind for Ball of Wax Volume 60, representing the completion of 15 years of whatever this is. That fell through, but never mind: I have a new grand – and global – plan! To wit:
The next volume of Ball of Wax will (I hope) consist of 60 tracks, each 60 seconds in length.
That’s right! 60 minutes of 60 60-second tracks, to celebrate 60 volumes of Ball of Wax. (That’s a lot of 60s.) So please send me 60 seconds of music/sound (a little less and we can extend with silence, a little more and we can fade out). Send some different tracks under different project names! It could be a song or a theme or a sonic mini-landscape . . . just go for it!
Deadline: April 1st, but earlier is always great.
Guidelines: Here.
Send to: lmf@denimclature.com
At this point in my “music reviewing career” (I don’t think anybody appreciates more than me just how cool that sounds–in fact, it may only sound cool to me), there is no point in denying that I’m a fan of Amanda Winterhalter. Not that I would want to and not that anybody else would ask that of me. And if you haven’t listened to any of her material or watched her powerful live performances on YouTube, then I really feel bad for you.
I kicked off this review cycle by talking about the way that Jack Shriner’s Frames in Motion took Levi Fuller & the Library’s colossal “Colossal” (sorry, but there’s really no better way to state that) from one musical realm or genre and ran it through their very specific approach to composition and sound to end up with something all their own. In that, and really, throughout this compilation, we’ve seen transformations and interpretations and even melodic and harmonic shifts and THAT, my friends, is what makes the kind of collection that you want to keep in rotation.
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have seen the thread of continuity and reinvention running through Ball of Wax 59: each artist is covering a song by the succeeding artist. Now we’ve come to the end and it’s Amanda’s turn to cover Frames in Motion’s chiming “Euptablisses.” And herein lies not just the closing track, but one of this volume’s neatest tricks. At the beginning, Frames in Motion turned ragged indie rock (indie Americana, if you will) into ’70s AM radio rock (if you dare suggest that I don’t mean this as high praise, I will challenge you here and now to a game of Sudden Death UNO)–and here at the end, Amanda Winterhalter is turning ’70s AM radio rock into dusty, dusky, wispy Americana. And so now you do with this compilation what you do with all great collections of music: YOU PUT IT ON REPEAT. There you go. Ya feelin’ it? I could be talking out the side of my head, but I’m calling this meta-recursion. I’ve coined it, it’s a thing now, and so let’s get past that and talk turkey.
You don’t listen to Amanda Winterhalter without taking note of the voice. Yes, she plays guitar. Yes, she normally records and performs with a band that can weep through country music’s real progeny and then growl through the bastard child of Midwest post-punk. No matter the context, her voice is the unifying force. It’s impossible to describe without using emotive or tactile adjectives. From her lower registers, through twangs both gentle and firm, and up to a falsetto that sometimes feels like it’s a secret note that exists outside of our Western 12-tone scale but complements it nonetheless. Take all of that and then throw it into the frightening (for artists) chemical solvent known as the “stripped down arrangement.” This is where the bells and whistles and most instrumentation get removed and a song is revealed for the strength and beauty–or weakness and mundanity–of its lyrics and lyrical melody. That’s exactly the solvent that Amanda has applied in transforming “Euptablisses” into her own beautiful folk tune and I am happy to report that Shriner’s solute (yeah, I dig chemistry) retains its magic and mystery.
Singer / songwriter Amanda Winterhalter has made quite an impact on the Ball of Wax universe and PNW Americana music scene these past few years, going back to her 2016 debut LP Oleo that features a song called “I’m 100 Years Old” that’s flat-out amazing and you should click the link to listen to it right now. This past October Winterhalter and her band followed up Oleo with What’s This Death, the title track from which Zachary Warnes chose to cover. Winterhalter’s original recording starts as a sparse, country dirge with mostly voice and finger-picked electric guitar. After the first cycle the rest of the band comes booming in, creating an ominous, swamp Gothic atmosphere that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of True Blood. It’s a polished, thoughtful arrangement that builds a simple, minor-pentatonic melodic idea (there’s really no B section or real shift) up to considerable weightiness.
Warnes takes “What’s This Death” out of the lush vampire boudoir and onto the front porch, reducing it all down to voice and acoustic guitar. Whereas Winterhalter’s version grew and growled, adding layers of instruments and textures, Warnes’s cover relies on the spookiness of simplicity, hoping to hypnotize you with deft guitar playing and soft-double tracked vocals. It’s a neat choice that’s really well executed.
Let’s not bury the lede; Sam Russell sings his cover of Zachary Warnes’s “Everything is Changing” in falsetto. Like full, guileless, going-for-it falsetto accompanied by nothing else than tastefully played electric guitar dialed up with a healthy dose of reverb. Sam’s cover is confessional, desperate, and laced with a kind of timeless R&B pleading that plants the song firmly into Sam’s well-curated Eddie and the Cruisers-esque universe. This is a meal made out of 2 simple but hard-to-nail-down ingredients. Enjoy:
Which brings us to the original from Zachary Warnes, which starts out with a more early 21st century indie band-based arrangement, like the shimmering power pop of Big Star or the Raspberries pulled through the slightly more brooding vibes of Mazarin or, more notably, the Shins. The vocals have a pinched, reedy quality for which I’m generally a sucker. The band, particularly the drums and bass, are tight and groovy, occasionally punctuated by clean, funk guitar chords and “oooh” background vocals that tie the whole song together. A Big Muffy acid rock guitar solo leads into one last chorus that repeats a few time before giving way to a Vanilla Fudge-esque outtro (maybe it’s a coda? anyone know?) that dials up the guitar wailing and circa 1971 spacey vocal effects, ending the song in a decidedly different place from where it started. It’s like Warnes showed up on a Vespa and tore out of town in a van with a dragon painted on the side. So Sam dove into this murky, yet enjoyable, bongwater to grab the essential pearls that form his pared-down version. This, my friends, is the magic of a Ball of Wax covers volume.
It’s quite an experience to hear one of your songs covered for the first time, and I can’t think of a better one to have than hearing Tomo Nakayama do “The Sugar Nile.” In fact, “cover” seems a woefully inappropriate term; I’m thinking maybe “resurrect” or “define” might be more apt verb.
For many of us indie artists with small fanbases, songs live and seem to die by quickly becoming obscure and mostly unlistened to on streaming services and bulk order boxes of CDs gathering dust in the storage space. If you stop playing it live too, then the reasons for writing said song in the first place also become obscured until the song itself almost seems to have never existed at all. It’s a true gift of this compilation and Tomo to have a song written by my younger self given back to me in such a way that the new version seems to be the realized and finished one and the old version just a demo.
From a musical standpoint, what Tomo does is reharmonize the melody with different placements of the song’s chords underneath at various times. In the original recording, the minor vi chord is slightly more prominent in the verse, whereas Tomo saves it to use once at the end for maximum impact. He then inversely uses the same chord as part of the main chorus progression, whereas the original recording saved it for end of chorus THERE for maximum impact. To my ear, this makes the verses more confident than melancholy and the choruses more anthem-like and pleading than surrendering.
I bring this up only to say that this reframing of the melody comes from a more seasoned and nuanced worldview than that which the original arrangement of the song came from, and I relate to this new presentation greatly more than the old one. I don’t want to get too much more pedantic about this because I wasn’t thinking this analytically when listening Tomo’s version for the first 20 times or so. I was just blown away.
Medejin’s cover of Tomo’s Nakayama’s “Roma” highlights, in its simplicity, how beautiful and strange the original composition is at its core. Medejin’s rendition feels especially haunting and hollow in the best way. Perhaps it’s because Jenn Taranto abandons her soft approach to downtempo shoegaze and the listener is just left with piano and voice, giving you the space to fully appreciate how strange some of the chord progressions are.
It’s a gorgeous cover. It’s strong and confident. I feel like I can hear Medejin taking this song personally and loving it. It’s a very comfortable vocal performance and the comfort resonates with me, making me want to dig deeper into both projects.
I’ve followed Tomo in some capacity for about 10 years. His orchestration with Grand Hallway is as solid as any chamber pop act ever and it is equally strong if not better in his solo work. I’ve always appreciated his predisposition for more off the beaten path elements on his music. I think that sets him apart from a lot of his peers and I think that’s what will set Medejin apart too.
I used the term downtempo shoegaze to describe Medejin’s sound, but really, that’s such an oversimplification. They draw comfortably from everything to trip-hop to folk. The ease with which they blend all these influences is something of note. They describe themselves as ethereal, which hits the nail in the head as this seems to be the common thread through all the different influences they balance. Looking forward to hearing more of this band.
Jenn will play a solo Medejin set as part of the Ball of Wax 59 show this Friday. Don’t miss it!
