Tag: Orville Peck

Pom Pom Squad began as songwriter Mia Berrin's solo operation but now employs four full-time experts in musical munitions and lethal lyrical techniques

There are voices so distinctive that their timbre is an instrument onto itself. This is the case with Josh Caterer, who was first heard singing for a band called The Smoking Popes. He has a wildly diverse solo career now, but tonight we play his reworked version of a Popes song.

Years from now, the early 2020s will timestamp short albums recorded and released during isolation the way protest songs on the pop charts mark the late ‘60s. This one would be near the top of the heap, intimate yet meticulous.

The mysterious Orville Peck is a modern cowboy marvel, a rare and legendary masked man with a dusty guitar and a lonesome coyote howl.

The cowboy bandwagon is in full effect as Bobby Tenderloin takes us into a rough-and-tumble universe filled with tragic and entertaining Western tropes.

The chauffeur peered at the rear-view mirror. The scattered reflection from the rain-slicked A7 revealed only headlights, no politely alarming Luxembourg police flashers. The Corniche bulleted down the roadway, the flutter of its diplomatic flags the only sign that it wasn’t standing dead still. Some miles away, in Ettelbruck, the authorities were coming to the conclusion that the altercation at Chez Fred had been a distraction. In the back seat, the jeweler closed the briefcase, satisfied with its contents.

The luthier adjusted the direction control of the four-legged arachnoform lumbering above the forest of Oro Bay. The spherical contraption had been difficult at first, but proved to be intuitive in guiding the transport’s spindly hissing legs across the varied terrain. Behind the padded seat, the cartographer consulted screens and printouts. The purple spruce should be visible soon. A single trunk would yield over a hundred cello bows, worth millions in the underground market. They were there to make sure it remained just another tree.

The catamarine knifed silently upstream, its passage discernible only as a faint twin wake on the surface of the river. Up ahead, the sonar array was already picking up the turbulence from the Mbocaruzú falls, the staccato warning pings slicing neatly between the Mozambique big-band swing being piped into the earpieces. In their individual pods, the cartographer and the miner reviewed their maps, surveys, and orders. Up ahead, behind the rushing down-flow of the water and completely out of sight, a set of steel doors silently opened and awaited the pair’s arrival.

Once above the canopy, it was impossible to see the green-winged hang-gliders that the archeologist and the mercenary had used to enter the Antananarivo bird sanctuary. Going through Customs had been dicey, the parts for the flying machines had been dispersed with various kinds of unassembled patio furniture, but the quality of the materials still stood out. Fortunately, the mercenary had brought up the Madagascar goth metal scene and distracted the functionaries into stamping passports and waving them through. They hadn’t even asked about the Geiger counter.

Old fashioned haunted country music… Orville Peck howls, croons, and yodels in a way that is extremely dramatic, yet never quite goes over the top.