Ball of Wax 56 Song: Amanda Winterhalter – “This Is It”

Posted on June 12, 2019 by Lattney B. Jones

There is as much talent to be found in this world as there is beauty, and just as part of the challenge of seeing beauty depends on context and circumstance, so it goes for talent. Both qualities exist in and of themselves. I have seen Amanda Winterhalter sing accompanied only by her acoustic guitar and I can testify that she possesses a level of vocal talent that is almost supernatural in its ability to stir the soul.

Here’s where context and circumstance come into play. Ms. Winterhalter has put together a band that functions not as “back-up,” but as an extension of her own talent and vision. This wouldn’t work if the members of the band didn’t have their own individual talents to bring to bear—and they do so in spades on “This Is It,” a work of thematic and dynamic depth and grace that uses the eruption of Mt. St. Helens some 39 years ago as inspiration to delve into an Americana/gospel rumination that incorporates just enough Biblical imagery to keep it from evangelizing and instead evokes the death and rebirth of that holiest of spiritual experiences: love.

“This Is It” is a work built on the elements of tradition: a slow lilt composed of playful-but-powerful drumming, upright bass, electric guitar (both tremolo and buzzing), lap steel, and vocals that have to be heard to be believed (Ms. Winterhalter wails—WAILS—at points in a way so emotive and barely restrained that one could almost believe she was a member of Lazarus’s family). What the band and their leader does with these elements is both reverent and transcendent, using their talents to brilliantly contextualize the beauty of sound.

Amanda and her voice and guitar will be joined by Ed Brooks and his pedal steel at the Ball of Wax 56 show next Thursday, June 20th at the Blue Moon. Join us!

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Ball of Wax 56 Songs: Poor Neighbors – “First Time Caller”

Posted on June 10, 2019 by Zach Warnes

“First Time Caller” by Poor Neighbors is just one more reason to be excited about a yet to be announced release from this thoughtful duo based in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, WA. Taking a page from the handbook of their previous group, St. Kilda, Josh Morrison and Jon Wesley deliver a driving, up-tempo, pop masterpiece with elements of post-rock and lyrics that emote the pains of growing older and gaining experience. This song in particular seems to draw on a wide variety of influences both contemporary and otherwise, but what I found most striking and what I am often impressed with from this duo is the attention to detail and care they put into their work. This atmospheric track sheds the cheesy urgency that is often tied to more emotionally driven rock music and replaces it with gobs of patience and space.

It is clear to the listener that these fellows have a deep appreciation for and understanding of ambiance in their music. The dulcet sound of Morrison’s voice weaves beautifully with every shimmering reverb trail on this track. Each guitar and synth line stays in its place without ever becoming too busy or too up-front. All parts complement each other and enhance the song, creating a vastness and depth for Morrison’s words to ring out into, “. . . stand to be be alone long enough to really know what’s best?” Morrison calls for patience and wisely reminds the listener to check in with themselves before charging headlong into relationships or situations where even more patience and sound judgement will be required.

This is a solid effort from a great band. Can’t wait to hear more from Poor Neighbors down the road.

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Ball of Wax 56 Songs: Holly Small – “Ghosted”

Posted on June 7, 2019 by Levi Fuller

Longtime Ball of Wax friend Holly Small returns with “Ghosted,” a  spare track that does a lot with a few ingredients. A minimalist electronic bed of beeps and boops backs up Holly’s jazz- and R&B-inflected riffs on life from the point of view of a ghost. The term “haunting” is overused in music criticism – especially in connection with women’s voices – but it applies in a very literal sense here. Holly’s voice is strong and sure yet sensitive, and her words inhabit the loneliness and displacement that would likely come with being an actual ghost, if such a thing existed. One of art’s superpowers is to elicit sympathy in unexpected places, and our friend Holly has done a fine job flexing that sympathetic muscle in “Ghosted.”

Holly will play this and other favorites (including, I hope, a few we’ve heard on BoW before) at the Ball of Wax 56 show on Thursday, June 20th!

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Ball of Wax 56 Songs: Green Light Cameras – “This Useless Lullaby (303 Remix)”

Posted on June 6, 2019 by Lattney B. Jones

Over gurgling sawtooth synths, reverberating booms, and searchlight-in-the-dark choral swells, Green Light Cameras present words of wisdom, lamentations, and resignation centered on D major. I’ve spoken before about the power of this most sinister of tonics, and while its darkness is present here in literal/nocturnal form, our sleepless poet masterfully—woefully—wrings from this tone every bit of malice, leaving only dread-tinted longing . . .

. . . at least for the first and second verses. A change begins to take place, announced by an unsteady rattled buzzing and the sudden inability of the choral voices to reach their former glory. When they finally do, we’re set up perfectly for the reveal. It’s in the final verse that “This Useless Lullaby” shows its real beauty: sustained G and A tones impress a IV-V ascension on the listener as our narrator confesses that he needs to be lifted up from “this abyss,” and indeed—even in the depths of despair—the tonal movement brings an undeniably uplifting aspect to the piece and that dark tonic is at last subverted and made to appear bright and hopeful.

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Ball of Wax 56 Songs: Grumpy Bear – “Wojciech Frykowski (Dead Playboy Song)”

Posted on June 5, 2019 by Louis O'Callaghan

“Wojciech Frykowski” begins with a bouncy electronic bass and then builds layers of acoustic and electronic textures and hooks over a four-chord progression which, apart from a bridge section a bit over halfway into the song, repeats for the song’s entire 5 minutes and 54 seconds. This is a great example of how much you can do with a relatively simple repeating structure and just loads of creativity adding and subtracting elements, particularly when each element is thoughtfully composed and fits perfectly into the whole.

One prominent sound is of what might be a balalaika or mandolin and lends something of an Eastern European folk feel to the track, while somehow also, when the vocal melody comes in, reminding me of ’60s California folk bands like the Byrds or the Youngbloods. I was getting these vibes before looking up Wojciech Frykowski to find out he was a Polish man murdered by the Manson family in LA in 1969. Coincidence? At the same time the electronic elements place the song inside of more recent decades.

It’s an interesting song and I like it.

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Ball of Wax 56 Songs: Frames in Motion – “Behind the Face”

Posted on June 4, 2019 by Lattney B. Jones

Jaded as I am with commercial music and the industry in general (my indignation isn’t necessarily righteous or justified—I’m just continually upset at what gets on the radio and what the general populace seems to want), I have come to expect that “perfect pop songs” are to be found no more. Then I hear a little song like “Behind the Face” by Frames in Motion, a Seattle band fronted by multi-instrumentalist Jack Shriner, and I rethink my expectations.

Make no mistake, this is almost straight pop, though partially of the dream variety, with its soft vocals; the folk variety, with its non-traditional instrumentation (a bass harmonica, which sounds gorgeous and is completely essential here); and the slacker variety, with its trailing snare taps and nearly-buried cowbell. Riding on an arrangement of jangling guitar and playful bass, it’s beautifully played, sweetly sung, and feels fresh.

Shriner and his cohorts have delivered here a lovely ditty about nostalgia and the truths revealed in the analysis of memories. The familiarity one senses in the various parts of the recording dare the listener to analyze their own aural memories—there’s nostalgia in the music as well as the lyrics, but of a type harder to pin down: the song is familiar enough to feel like an old friend or a place you haven’t seen in years, but different enough to assure you that it’s not who or what you had thought. That’s how you know you’ve heard pop songwriting at its best.

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Ball of Wax 56 Songs: Breichiau Hir – “Penblwydd Hapus Iawn”

Posted on June 3, 2019 by Lattney B. Jones

Breichiau Hir waste no time getting to the point. On an insistent beat and an opening scream of “OKAY,” the band jump right into insistent beats, mad guitars, and shouted verses on “Penblwydd Hapus Iawn.” Punctuating each stanza with staccato thrashes on the guitar and bass strings (complete with all of the distorted squeaks you could ask for—a complement and a gem of a sound in this world of overproduced pop music) is a great touch. It adds to the mayhem and creates a stop-start feel.

This band always bring strong vocal melodies, though on “Penblwydd Hapus Iawn” it’s the verses that run wild, while the chorus is more subdued. It’s the gentler chorus that hints at what’s to come at the halfway mark—see, where their last appearance on Ball of Wax dove into harder territory, the change here goes for more of a mellow break, though you wouldn’t know it from the drums. While the percussion plays with the beat (another of the band’s motifs), everything else fades except for the bass, which buzzes out the roots of the progression. Guitars return one by one as the vocals return to calmly narrate and things steadily pick up until a morphed instrumental version of the opening progression brings everything to a close and the listener can breathe again.

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Ball of Wax 56 Songs: Sun Tunnels – “Brynn”

Posted on May 31, 2019 by Lattney B. Jones

With an intro that almost feels like a false start, Sun Tunnels announce to the listener in the first few bars of “Brynn” what they’re ostensibly about: psych-garage rock built on the trio of guitar, bass, and drums. They spend the next four minutes showing what kinds of magic can be woven with those tools in regard to arrangement, dynamics, structure, and even tone.

From that subdued opening to its near-frenetic close, Sun Tunnels apply a number of tricks to suggest various types of movement. The guitar and bass follow a progression centered on a D Mixolydian mode with a mediant borrowed from D minor and a return to the major tonic, followed by extended rests from both instruments on each run. This adds both color and a sense of unrest (that borrowed flatted third also suggesting power), while the drums alternate between straight beats, rests, and semi-fills. But the band never actually stray from their chosen tempo, even when they turn the dynamics from grinding chug to soft breakdown and then bring everything back up for a payoff outro.*

Guitarist/vocalist Louis O’Callaghan uses his voice to great effect, moving from keen-eyed victim to yowling accuser to half-hearted philosopher and finally determined victor as he lets his subject know that he’s more than aware of what’s up and has designs of his own and that, ultimately, it’s all good—”you can play me because I’m playing you and we’re none the worse for it,” in a sense. Modern romance, except that some small sense of remorse or hurt peeks through in those occasional strangled yelps and breaking coos.

Sun Tunnels will play at the Ball of Wax 56 show on June 20th at the Blue Moon. Don’t miss it!

*About that payoff outro: built on the strength of a rhythm section going for broke, O’Callaghan twice delivers a simple ascending-descending tremolo riff that declares “modes and scales be damned” even while reaffirming the mixolydian on the way up and allowing the inclusion of the flatted third on the way down. But why are you reading about it? Go listen and then thank Levi for knowing exactly how to open a compilation!

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Ball of Wax 56: June 20th at the Blue Moon

Posted on May 30, 2019 by Levi Fuller

Photo courtesy Flickr user xavib

Ball of Wax 56 Release Show
with Frames in Motion, Sun Tunnels, Amanda Winterhalter, Holly Small, and Schruggs (Josh Schramm and Kevin Suggs)

Thursday, June 20th, 8pm
The Blue Moon, 712 NE 45th St.
$8 / Ball of Wax 56 CD included with entry

Here comes a new volume of Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly! There is no theme to this one, just damn fine music from a damn fine group of musicians at a damn fine venue, marking 14 years of . . . whatever this is. We’ll start rolling out tracks tomorrow right here on the Blog of Wax, so stay tuned!

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Album Review: Nic Masangkay – DARK AT DUSK: The Final Suicide

Posted on May 28, 2019 by Julia Massey

Nic Masangkay – DARK AT DUSK: The Final Suicide
(2019, self-released)
Exclusive Ball of Wax preview link!

Nic Masangkay’s DARK AT DUSK: The Final Suicide tells the story of how one might create something deeply strong and beautiful out of intense trauma and seemingly insurmountable pain.

What becomes evident immediately with “Trauma Is a Metaphor” is Masangkay’s mastery of production. Working with Camelia Jade Lazenby at Jack Straw Cultural Center, they interweave beats that showcase a background steeped in pop, R&B, and hip-hop, among many other genres. Polyrhythmic bass lines move the lyrical content along in waves of understanding. It’s easier to comprehend these difficult experiences through this music.

Continue reading →

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