Ball of Wax 58 Songs: Monica Schley – “Pavane”

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Levi Fuller

What would a holiday collection be without a little harp? Harpist Monica Schley has brought us her arrangement of Gabriel Faure’s “Pavane,” and it’s the perfect, peaceful interlude to relax and refresh one’s mind and soul for the season. I don’t know anything about this piece or its origins, but in Monica’s hands it is wintry indeed – reflecting the soft, icily beautiful side of the season. We’re not trapped in a storm or slogging through slush; rather, we’re sitting at our kitchen table, sipping tea, watching the flakes fall down and surrendering ourselves to the moment.

Posted in Ball of Wax, Check Out This Song | Tagged | Leave a comment

Ball of Wax 58 Songs: Small Life Form – “Charlie Brown”

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Levi Fuller

If our previous track was the peaceful aftermath of a heavy snow, Small Life Form‘s “Charlie Brown” is a swirling blizzard of sound. The raw material from which this storm was summoned is none other than the holiday musical wizardry of Vince Guaraldi, but in the hands – and through the chain of effects pedals – of Small Life Form it is transformed from something nostalgic and wholesome to a darkly menacing sonic mass. You may never hear “Christmastime Is Here” the same way again.

Posted in Ball of Wax, Check Out This Song | Tagged | Leave a comment

Ball of Wax 58 Songs: DREKKA+DARRYL BLOOD – “Hibernal Hymn, The 40th Night”

Posted on November 22, 2019 by Levi Fuller

Longtime BoW friend Darryl Blood (who just keeps getting weirder and weirder and I love it) has collaborated with Drekka, a more recent arrival to our musical family, to bring us this “Hibernal Hymn.” Hibernal, of course, means “of, relating to, or occurring in winter” (and no I didn’t just look that up, how dare you?), making this a perfect piece for our wintry compilation. And it does sound like winter – specifically, like the middle of the night after a snow storm, when the sky is darker than dark and everything around you is covered in a thick white blanket. It’s soft and quiet and beautiful, but not entirely comfortable due to the piercing cold. The bed of drone and hiss is the snow, the meandering piano a few stray flakes tumbling down through a street light. You stop for a few minutes – not nearly long enough, but as long as you’ve got – and take it all in, watching each flake fall. Then the spell is broken and you shake your head and go inside. Or skip back to the beginning for another dose of hibernal magic.

Posted in Ball of Wax, Check Out This Song | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Ball of Wax 58 Songs: Jesus on the Moon – “Festivus”

Posted on November 22, 2019 by Levi Fuller

Puyallup’s Jesus on the Moon released a new album this fall, and this seasonal tune just happens to be the third track. “Festivus” combines a dirty, lo-fi production approach with some fine pop songwriting and arrangement. The first thing you notice is a restless slide guitar leading the charge, but there are more guitars under there, with scrappy bass and drums holding it all together. There are also sleigh bells, naturally – and even an autoharp toward the end. It all calls to mind the unhinged early days of the Flaming Lips in a way that definitely works for me. Jake Frye’s vocals are low in the mix, but it’s worth looking up the lyrics so you don’t miss gems like “Nostalgia is a horse from hell / If you couldn’t tell / This festivus gets the best of us / Every single time.”

Posted in Ball of Wax, Check Out This Song | Tagged | 1 Comment

Ball of Wax 58 Songs: Grumpy Bear – “Red Weather Tigers”

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Jon Rooney

The desert’s finest bedroom bards Grumpy Bear bring the brooding, spacey folk with “Red Weather Tigers.” A moody, sparse psych ballad that blends Elliott Smith with Parachute-era Pretty Things, “Red Weather Tigers” features both futuristic synth dabbling and finger-style acoustic guitar. What really makes the song for me are the vocals, both in terms of performance and production. There’s a soothing, pastoral vibe to the singing that’s made delightfully spooky with some well-applied reverb. Add in the synth bloops and whooshes, and there’s a bit of a Wicker Man in space vibe going on, which is a fine, fine Christmas gift to the writer.

Posted in Ball of Wax, Check Out This Song | Tagged | Leave a comment

Ball of Wax 58 Songs: James Whetzel – “God Rest Ye Funky Bhangra (Sarod & Beats)”

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Levi Fuller

It wouldn’t really be a holiday compilation without a new spin on a traditional classic, and we’ve got a couple gems along those lines. First up, our pal James Whetzel has cooked up this wondrous bit of intercontinental Christmas magic. The title “God Rest Ye Funky Bhangra (Sarod & Beats)” tells you pretty much everything you need to know about this song – and you might even read that title and say “Not for me, thanks” – but you still need to hear it. James (on aforementioned sarod and beats) and Shree Dee (bringing more percussive power on dhol) have created a piece that is more than the sum of its parts. It’s more than a fun spin on a Christmas classic; it’s an adventurous, satisfying, head-bobbing piece of music that is guaranteed to make your holiday parties at least 50% cooler – and that would still be a pleasant surprise if you heard it in July.

Posted in Ball of Wax, Check Out This Song | Tagged | Leave a comment

Ball of Wax 58 Songs: Green Light Cameras – “Broken”

Posted on November 20, 2019 by Levi Fuller

Phil Chamberlin – aka Green Light Cameras – continues his quest to become Ball of Wax‘s most prolific musical contributor with “Broken,” a morosely propulsive slice of synth-pop arriving just in time to underscore your SAD in the darkest time of the year. The lyrics are many-layered and nuanced (and yes, there is a Christmas tree in there), and Phil’s strident yet pensive baritone has a Bowie-ish quality to it that I admire (especially that delivery of “thunderheads” in the last verse). The production and mixing choices throughout, though, are what keep me coming back to this tune. The melodic ping-ponging guitars (and then synth) on the verse are an absolute delight, and the big climactic moment where everything opens up is just perfect. But then, instead of continuing to ride it out and get bigger and more epic toward the end, Phil has made the surprising choice to slowly bring down the instrumental tracks, exposing his vocal, which brazenly continues with song-ending bombast (see, again, those “thunderheads”). It’s a bold – and, as a singer, terrifying – choice, and it totally works. Yet another piece of skewed pop genius from Green Light Cameras.

Posted in Ball of Wax, Check Out This Song | Tagged | 1 Comment

Ball of Wax 58 Songs: Julia Francis – “Thanksgiving Song”

Posted on November 20, 2019 by Levi Fuller

You know what holiday doesn’t have nearly enough songs in its honor? Thanksgiving. It has all the love, friendship, and familial bonhomie (and, of course, familial anxiety) of Christmas without its attendant religious baggage or gift-giving pressure. Now that most of us have moved beyond telling fairy tales about this continent’s early white colonizers, it’s becoming a near-perfect holiday. Julia Francis, I’m guessing, would agree. “Thanksgiving Song” is an appropriately warm and sweet ode to the holiday, starting with a long list of things to be thankful for, before seguing into gustatory delights such as baked sweet potato and marshmallow fluff, then pivoting to the deeper joys to be found with friends and family (however one personally defines those terms). The arrangement is somehow both lush and quirky, backing up Julia’s voice with piano, percussion, and an ever-expanding palette of musical colors (is that theremin?) that beautifully supports Julia’s voice without overcrowding the message. In addition to the sweet and happy, the chorus – which is, cleverly, a little bit different every time it comes around – acknowledges the darker side of life and offers the song itself as a sort of balm. Julia closes, “Thanksgiving song, when everything’s wrong / and all that you own are the things you’ve outgrown / except for your soul and your flesh blood and bone.”

Of course this holiday-themed volume of Ball of Wax doesn’t come out until the Saturday after Thanksgiving – when Julia and her band will join us at Conor Byrne – but I heartily recommend adding this song to your Thanksgiving playlist this year and henceforth, if only for the conversational prompts. I could think of much worse things to say during an awkward or unpleasant family moment than “Nothing is wrong with the way that you feel, if it’s what’s real.”

Posted in Ball of Wax, Check Out This Song | Tagged | Leave a comment

Ball of Wax 58 Songs: Tekla Waterfield – “Come Together Christmas Cheer”

Posted on November 19, 2019 by Jon Rooney

Seattle-area mainstay Tekla Waterfield delivers a polished, fully-realized holiday folk song with “Come Together Christmas Cheer.” With nothing more than acoustic guitar and a few vocal tracks, Waterfield constructs something that would readily hold its own alongside any mainstream country/Americana Christmas collection (like this Tammy Wynette record I wisely picked up at a thrift store years ago). While the lyrics contain the straight-ahead greeting card sentiment one might expect, the vocal performances and simple arrangement are just beautiful. As much as I love lo fi, experimental music that takes big chances and is totally okay leaving most listeners behind, I find myself increasingly impressed by artists who can create something that wouldn’t sound out of place in almost any setting. There’s really no audience too big or broad for this quality of music, a restrained, complete nugget from an artist at the height of her powers.

Posted in Ball of Wax, Check Out This Song | Tagged | Leave a comment

Ball of Wax 58 Songs: “Christmas in the Borough of Our Birth”

Posted on November 19, 2019 by Levi Fuller

In case the title didn’t tip you off, Virgin of the Birds lets us know right out of the gate that this is a Christmas song, with a comfortable “Be My Baby” beat and insistently chiming sleigh bells. The lyrics themselves are not your traditional holiday fodder, but the lines that do evoke the season are vintage Virgin of the Birds: “Kiss me on the mouth, it’s Christmas Eve / I have stars in my eyes, I have winter seeds.” As with any Jon Rooney number, “Christmas in the Borough of Our Birth” will likely have you doing some internet research on the fly. “What do I think ‘brutalist’ means?” “Wait, what actually is ‘Hosanna’?” “Who’s M. Emmett Walsh again?” But once you’ve settled into your own level of familiarity or ignorance with the various references and cultural touchstones, you can sit back and enjoy the music.

“Christmas in the Borough of Our Birth” is, like most of the best music, a triumph of collaboration. The classic VotB power trio lineup of Jon, Colin J Nelson, and Ken Nottingham is here enhanced with a spasmodic guitar solo from Bart Cameron (the Foghorns) and some delightfully demented sax playing courtesy Paul Beaudry (every band ever, probably playing behind you right now). There’s also some fine, tinkling Omnichord or Casio or something throughout that adds an extra layer of cheer (that’s probably Paul, too). The last two minutes of the song are given over to a raucous choir singing hearty “la la la”s, putting a jaunty bow on this admirably overstuffed musical gift. (Full disclosure: I’m one of the choir singers, along with most of the abovementioned crew, Casey Ruff, and Sam Russell. Keepin’ it in the BoW family!)

Posted in Ball of Wax, Check Out This Song | Tagged | 2 Comments