Labels: Drunk With Love
Review by: MH
Gay Angel is back…and when I say he’s back I mean REALLY back. No half-measures here as this is 100 songs. Once upon a time someone sent in a 53-track compilation of all of all their recorded output and I managed to review it without it breaking me. It was a close call though. Here we have almost double that number of songs from Gay Angel a.k.a Jake Bellissimo who I reviewed previously when his previous album came our way via Stereo Dasein who put out that one. This new set of songs is being released in four parts on CD.
It’s taken me a while to listen to all the songs and I’m probably not going to talk about every one of them. However, there is plenty of variation on here. The CD is full of lo-fi tracks, instrumentals and other oddities including 4 orgasm skits in a row. I don’t know how many other people contributed to the songs on here as I can’t count that high but they’re listed on the Bandcamp page and it’s a huge list. All sorts of vocals and instruments including viola, tuba and trombone appear along the way – there’s even an appearance from the Eastman School Symphony Orchestra on “Things To Do”. There are very few short songs on here too with only a few coming in at under a minute and there’s even a track that clocks in at almost 9 minutes long.
I guess the way I will go about this one is to to pick out a few of the songs along this mammoth journey. Second track,”The Words I Read” is absolutely lovely and features a kind of train of thought lyrical style. Its style reminds me of “Sleep The Clock Around” by Belle & Sebastian. Some songs including the title track have something of a theatrical slant to them and this is likely due to Jake’s background in writing musicals in the USA before his move to Berlin where he now resides. Instrumental “Kill Me One Time” is like Lake Michigan in its downbeat sparsity. In fact, there are a series of these “Kill Me…” instrumentals scattered across “Flora”. “Kyle in November” is another delicately lovely song.
Lyrically, things are very interesting – lots of stories and trains of thought. I could pick out any number of the song lyrics and find something new and engaging. I don’t think there a single band or musician that I would want to listen to 100 songs in a row by but I will come back to this release to listen to it in chunks and pick songs out of. There is a quirky, offbeat nature to it all and also some lovely moments along the way. You just might have to work a bit harder to find them than on your regular kind of album.