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No No It Makes Sense

by Alexander Strung

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Cruelty 03:03
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Vext 03:14
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One Day 02:28
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Lake House 01:30
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about

In these times of uncertainty and crisis, artists from across the musical spectrum are under more pressure than ever. With the last redoubt of guaranteed income - touring - all but eliminated, artists are turning inward - profligate, almost gratuitous in their output. How can an indie artists differentiate themselves from the Bandcamp masses - get on the right side of the signal to noise ratio and make an impact in these troubling times?

Enter Alexander Strung, the unheralded home studio maverick and key personnel in a half dozen bands and projects you didn’t know were already favorites. A lifetime in the making, his singular opus No No It Makes Sense (the title itself a subtle rejoinder that places the LP at once in the lineage and outside the canon of post-internet Needle Drop hipsterati notions of rock history) drops into musical landscape not so much transformed as traumatized. What do you with trauma? Name it, own it, work through it. The aggressive percussion of bombastic opener “What If I Told You” (late period Scott Walker by way of Prince [No, really]) sets the tone - this isn’t your parent’s mid-fi, mid-90s slack indie - this is Art, man.


By the time you get to “Drunk In A Diner” - a disarmingly straight story song that cracks the twelve minute mark - you’re only halfway through but you’ve heard every reference point from Phil Spector wall-of-sound-on-a-shoestring-budget to, yes, dubstep (the bass depths plumed on “Lake House” give truth to the lie of the brown note).


But beneath all these frantic genre-hopping and stylistic whip pans (The bridge on “The Most Realistic Movie of All Time” can only be described as circus music) there’s a human heart beating.


I have it on good authority that inside Strung’s New York home studio, an American flag is displayed prominently. Such a gesture can hardly be considered ironic - and if 9/11 didn’t kill irony dead, COVID has snuffed out any life support (sorry) that was keeping it propped up. Whole label rosters full of “90s revival” bands have sprung up in the last decade. What do they want? They wanna rock. But here’s an artist who lived it, loved it, threw it all away and then built it all back up from scratch.


What it means to commit oneself to such a selfless act of creation in these times - harnessing the full weight of history and the doubts and pessimism we must attach to the future - into the medium of rock and roll is nothing so edifying as the act of life itself. It Makes Sense, indeed.

- Barry Morse, Detroit, May 2020

credits

released May 12, 2020

Sarah Trimpe: violin and vocals
Vikas Pawa: mastering
Cover photo: Jim Abbott
Alex Trimpe: Everything else

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Heavy River Records Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Check out our new sub-label Inside Outpost @
insideoutpost.bandcamp.com

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