Over the past few weeks, I’ve been catching up on new releases from local musicians and doing the bar crawl across the Lower East Side to watch several bands – both local and from across the pond – perform in the four-night bash in lower Manhattan known as the New Colossus Festival. It’s kind of like going to boot camp before they jetted off to SXSW.
Continue reading for New Colossus festival highlights + new releases from Brooklyn power pop outfit Wifey and Liverpool via NYC post punk outfit Torture and the Desert Spiders.
New Colossus Highlights
Scrounge
To watch Scrounge live is to be swept up in their sonic tornado. Like a wave crashing over you at high tide, you’re left with no choice but to accept that you no longer have control over the laws of physics. The band ripped through a 30-minute set at Heaven Can Wait with borrowed equipment and little sleep. I’ve always found Heaven Can Wait to be a rather cramped and uncomfortable spot, but watching Scrounge play, I couldn’t care less. You know your band has something special when your set can transcend the discomfort of an undesirable location; it’s what makes parking lot and basement DIY shows so much fun. It’s never about the place, but rather the energy and the spirit of the community around you. And watching lead singer/guitarist Lucy Alexander shred her vocal cords into oblivion as she shrieked the final stretch of their loudest song while drummer Luke Cartledge chipped at the drum kit with ferocious snare cracks, it was like watching a wrecking crew teeter on the edge of total destructive annihilation.
Ducks Ltd.
Ducks Ltd. was one of my most-anticipated sets of the entire festival, namely because they’re one of my favorite new power pop bands to emerge in the past decade. To quote one of my favorite modern writers/pen pals Matt Mitchell, “Most bands are either trying to put their own spin on an already-perfect genre and falling short, or they recognize what ain’t broke and, as such, work on perfecting their talents under the thumb of a formula that has never needed any fine-tuning […] Luckily, Toronto band Ducks Ltd. […] have figured out how to add their own touch to jangle-pop without saturating the foundations of their own prospects.”
The band took the stage at Arlene’s Grocery at the festival’s closing party, playing through a majority of their sophomore album Harm’s Way. I’m a sucker for a good jangle, so naturally, Harm’s Way was one of my most-played albums of the past few months. The melodies are sticky and infectious, and hearing them played live felt like they were pouring simple syrup directly into my ear canals. And just when I believe it couldn’t get any better, they bring out the big guns and close out their set with a cover of “Head On,” by the Jesus and Mary Chain. It was easily a 10/10 performance that I won’t be forgetting any time soon.
Housewife
There has been a flurry of saccharine-laced guitar pop outfits to emerge in the past few years that I utterly adore, and Housewife is one of them. Her coming-of-age, sardonic writing is refreshingly nuanced and cuts like a razor with sticky sweet melodies and abrasive instrumentation.
Brighid Fry, the face and the brains of Housewife, exuded an utterly delightful stage presence and sense of humor, making jokes about how 50% of her set consisted of “angry-at-men songs” and the struggles of being a queer femme person in today’s age. They were also a delight to interview (coming soon). A major highlight of Housewife’s set was “Fuck Around Phase,” a self-deprecating ditty that Fry wrote about losing themself in spontaneity and reckless behavior, a natural phase we all tear through in our early twenties.
New Music
Wifey – “Mary Ann Leaves The Band”
Fusing the power pop majesty of bands like The Lemonheads and Big Star with campy spoken-word theatrics, Brooklyn-based quartet Wifey made their smashing debut earlier this month with their first single “Mary Ann Leaves the Band.” Joining the canon of iconic songs about named persons, from “Mrs. Robinson” to “It’s a Shame About Ray,” “Mary Ann Leaves the Band” tells a story about a rogue flute player in a high school marching band who abandons her craft after committing to a relationship (“Mary Ann finds herself a man and then the band starts falling apart.”)
Torture and the Desert Spiders – “Blood on the Reef”
Whenever I describe Torture and the Desert Spiders to friends, I ask them to “imagine if Courtney Barnett was raised in New Jersey and cut her teeth in the scrappy Liverpool punk scene.” Lead singer/bandleader Anna Kunz is a force of nature. I’ve seen her play solo acoustic sets that command the entire room just as much as she would with a full band. “Blood on the Reef” is a well-crafted slice of churning post punk and goth rock with booming production and haunting lyrics.
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