The Gen X rock writer visits the analog Gen Z punk & noise rock revival on a Monday night

 

They say that rock is in decline, that pop, hip-hop, & country reign. But I have recently seen the death & resurrection of rock & punk, all on a Monday night in a packed club in Kentucky. I am definitely in the “punk is not dead” & the “kids are alright” space right now.

I remember how dangerous I felt, when still in high school, going to my first punk shows, as though I had crossed over some invisible bridge into a country not our own, & even though I am now chasing 60 too quickly, in many ways I have never left that alternate universe. I hope these kids feel dangerous, too, or at least fringe & edgy.

Within rock, we are relegated to an ever expanding panoply of sub-genres, & sure, punk & post-punk & the elusive & ubiquitous “indie” or “alternative” all float around, but many groups increasingly make-up their own genres or delineate some back alley niche within a niche that only they & their fanbase fully grok & that rocks. 

I could probably do a decent enough job explaining something like emo or shoegaze or jangle, but the better we get at explaining or marketing the angels dancing on the head of this or that pin, the less relevant it all seems, especially when we all just want the endorphins & dopamine & oxytocin.

When I celebrate that punk & post-punk are not dead, I need look no further than Bandcamp & Instagram & music commentary podcasts & all the streaming services. If you like one thing, you can find similar artists easily enough & pretty sure you’re down ten rabbit holes of wonder & wow. Before you know it, you’re skimming Reddit subs & Facebook groups & blogs that serve up discussions & respond to queries, & if you’re at all online, you are not alone.

Pretty sure that it was a podcast (probably Indiecast) that introduced me to Chicago’s Lifeguard. Having worked in higher-ed for almost 30 years & now stuck in a mostly Dad rock/folk/Americana corner, it’s wild to listen to rockers the age of most of my students that are not trying the singer-songwriter thing, that unleash the energy & the danger that first drew me to the punk clubs when I was still in high school. This trio are so young, they have to arrange their touring schedule around school commitments. They are descendants of 70s & 80s punk with a keen sensibility for the cultural milieu in which their vibe resides, printed fanzines included. 

I’ve read reviews of Lifeguard that make me get goosebumps because good rock writing is still a thing, reviews by rock critics probably much younger than me, with better grasps of the musical precisions that make discordant noise so revelatory, writers with vast vocabularies to nail down what seems like an unfair amount of passion, enthusiasm, charisma, & good looks. Seeing Lifeguard now has the feeling of being there before it all blows up, & I hope it does blow up. But listening to an interview with the band on the way to the show, they are all going to college & keeping their options open & limiting tours to their academic breaks. I don’t know if they are straightedge or anything, but as far as I could glean, they were completely clean for this show, substance wise, & this in no way takes away from the pure authenticity of what explodes so gloriously from the stage. Rock & punk will never die with kids like this caring for the lineage. Gratefully, I am not the only Gen X person in the crowd, but most of the audience have sharpied Xes on their hands, if that tells you anything. I don’t feel like a chaperone either, just a privileged guest. 

It’s a Monday night in Louisville, Kentucky, & more than 200 people have gathered out-past their weeknight-bedtimes to bask in the guitars, bass, & drums so loud as to rearrange our inner realities. I arrive just a few minutes after start time & Plastics are already holding the room aloft & alive. Looking at the bill, I am thrilled to see that this old-school revival includes un-Google-able band names. Looking at the stage, we immediately notice that its vibes convey a happening as much as a show. Absolutely no traditional stage lights are washing the performers, but house lamps are everywhere on the stage. Add to that, there are about ten (I should have counted) old televisions across the front of the stage, showing coordinated random archival footage. Later, thanks to some stroke of genius & a camera-person down front, the TVs will show the bands while they perform. The drum kit is also front & center. Punk & noise & an arty aesthetic are all so late 80s, early 90s, so much my life back when, I am pinching myself in the time machine that these are all young folks rocking this surreality. 

Because the group PARKiNG are from Louisville, they are at the top of the bill tonight, supporting an album release, though they are Lifeguard’s support for the rest of the tour. The album PORTRAiTS is on Bandcamp of course, but tonight it is a cassette on sale for $7 at the merch table, & the cassette sells out & is sold next to the bass player Lizzie Cooper’s gorgeous & gritty print punk ‘zine Test Patterns. When the sound-person was adjusting some cords between bands, I asked who was responsible for the elaborate setting, & it was definitely PARKiNG.

I got myself here for Lifeguard & their 40 minutes in-no-way disappoints, keeping me rapt & revived the entire time. Isaac Lowenstein’s more-than-intense drumming rattles my tired-old-bones with perfect profundity while Kai Slater & Asher Case trade riffs & licks & vocals. I was filled to overflowing & it being a Monday night on the road, I thought about leaving early. I am so glad I didn’t. 

Early Sonic Youth might be one hope for a referent for PARKiNG, but they are almost like nothing I have ever seen or heard, though they also remind me of many trippy late nights in Detroit’s Corridor hood more than 30 years ago, communal & arty & visual & loud & weird. Loud & soft, fast & slow, from song to spoken word, singing-drummer T. Moore has so much versatile vision that I am simply gobsmacked. 

Where are we? What year or planet is this? One song starts so slow with stand-up bass & cello from the wings, all the crazy-looking kids are suddenly sitting like church youth group or yoga class but they are spastic moshing before its over. People who dismiss noise-&-drone-type things have not really grasped the extensive musical genius that goes into something like this, but as I bask & the mind bends & melts, it’s clear to me that PARKiNG are curating a multi-modal multi-sensory totally-human full-immersion experience. 

Before we know it, PARKiNG have played their album in its entirety & it’s almost 11pm eastern time & time to go home. But before I can blink or exhale, all three bands & about a dozen more friends are all crammed on the stage. Remember, I said communal? This is suddenly like the Last Waltz or the filming of John & Yoko for Give Peace A Chance or some holy moley hip shizzle. The version of Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane” includes & baptizes us all & I am in complete gratitude & awe. I have seen rock destroyed & revitalized at a funeral & baptism so brimming with energy that I forget that I am the dad-rock outlier at these Monday night dangerous devotions by the next generation of outsider genius. Wow. 
-Andrew/Sunfrog, wandering around America catching shows, July 2025

The Audio of the Angels: Another Amazing Collection of Folk Songs By Willi Carlisle

 Photos by Sebastian Timm (@Sebastian.Timm.144) from a recent show in Arnhem, Netherlands.

I am drunk on the brand-new Willi Carlisle album, just like I was so hooked on the last one that was released 17 months ago. 

With each Willi release, it gets clearer & clearer to me that he is the consummate folk singer, who understands the river in which he stands & swims & sings, maybe with just a little more depth & integrity & understanding than everyone who claims the contemporary “folk” label. As much as anything he has released, the brand-new Winged Victory is such a statement of the folk ethos & communal values, as it is an expression of Willi’s gorgeous gifts & exalted exuberance. 

Let me explain via much context & many examples. Let me share a little about this long lineage of the folk-song community for whom Willi is not just one of its stellar artists, but one of its finest ambassadors & dearest siblings & collaborators.

When I was young, I absolutely adored the song “Draft Dodger Rag” by Pete Seeger, an antiwar anthem & formative peacenik singalong experience, direct out of my parents’ record collection. It was years before I figured out that it was actually a Phil Ochs song. 

Long before the phenomenal folksinger Ondara migrated from Africa to Minneapolis, his teenage self lost a bet with a friend about who actually wrote “Knockin’ On Heaven's Door.” Ondara went from dying on the hill that it was a Guns & Roses original to becoming a Dylanologist who had to move to Minnesota.

When great songs become part of the American songbook or the global songbook, when they become part of your body-bone existential & essential reality, they become folk songs. Folk songs are for the folk, inherently communal & the sung currency of a gift economy traded around the campfire. When an artist chooses to cover a folk song, not just in concert, but on an album, they are conveying something of this shared depth & its dynamic spark to spread its glory like weeds on the side of every American backroad. 

Back in the days of the folking folks like Carl Sandburg, Alan Lomax, & Harry Smith, we were all also song catchers & song collectors, whether we were singers or fans or scribblers in folk music newsletters that preceded the genre of the fanzine. 

Back then, there was effort in digging & discovering before the back porch of the effervescent sharing, it was not always there at a simple click or keyword search. Now we talk about lost & not-always-attributed oldies as part of the “public domain,” but in some sense for true folkies, everything is the public domain. Everything was public domain, right up until the end of the last century, like this dirty dusty old Hootenanny songbook that was produced & passed around between squats & train-hops & Earth First gatherings in the glorious folk punk plagiarism of the 1990s.

Don’t get me wrong, I think songwriters & singers should be paid & deserve to eat. If there are royalties to be paid, then do so. I also see this folkie thing as a sharing different than downloading & file-sharing & even ripping things to cassette & CD, as we have always stolen & shared recorded music to some extent. But when a folksinger learns a song from another folksinger & then shares it with yet another folksinger & then that folksinger passes it on to yet more folksingers & fans, when some transcribes lyrics & notes & chords along the way, the energy grows in this wanton contagious & chaotic fashion. 

But knowing all this, I have to confess when I first started to unpack the advance-listen & press-pack for Winged Victory, I had a gut impulse, “Wow, that is a lot of cover songs.” To be fair, it’s only 4 songs from the 11 tracks. But then, I reflected & felt a strong “no, we don’t even need to call them covers.” They are folk songs in the communal songbook. I am excited for this album as a true folk album, not just as a new Willi album. 

So stupefied we are by the cult of originality we want everything to be as singularly raw & real as Springsteen’s Nebraska (or whatever important album comes to mind) with only original songs & now we want the unedited, deluxe, bootleg, uncut edition with something like 30 or 70 songs & original samples of the napkin & notebook scrawls & the artist’s sweat bottled in the extra-deluxe edition. Like how the Sylvie character scoffs at Bob Dylan & his first major label disc, when she says to the Timothy-Chalamet-version-of-Dylan in the new biopic: “Those are other people’s songs.” Of course Dylan would write amazing songs directly to the canon, but maybe he was a folksinger first, learning Woody Guthrie songs. See, the folk song community shares songs, it doesn’t own them, per se. 

This is all some deeper context as to why I love, love, love that Willi Carlisle is our Utah Phillips & Willi Carlisle is our Pete Seeger. Non-gender-binary god-goddess knows, this world needs a generational folksinger with this depth, with this intensity, integrity, & curiosity. We need artists with a sense of their communal & collective purpose & Winged Victory seems to belong to all of us in that sense. 

Because Willi Carlisle is also a folk scholar & fan who wants to scrounge around the dusty bins at a mile-long yard-sale in some bleached-out backwater of rural America, just to find a B-side or deep cut that we have never heard. Then Willi will learn that song & teach it to friends & put it in the setlist, fuck-all if nobody knows it. Maybe by the next time Willi comes to town, everyone knows it, & we will be screaming for that song. 

I first learned & loved the album-opener “We Have Fed You All For 1000 Years” from Utah Phillips, but as Willi explains in his extensive & excellent liner-notes, it was written by an anonymous Wobbly/IWW worker somewhere around 100 years ago. But Willi also learned it from Utah, when Carlisle was riding a bus to DC to visit the Smithsonian Folk archive. One of the other breathtaking covers contained here has been in Willi’s live show for a while, “Beeswing” by Richard Thompson. Both of these tracks pair nicely in terms of the record’s overall message with the first single “Work is Work.” It is a bluegrass anthem for the hourly laborers in the late-capitalist hellscape & I hope that it gets covered by others & put on their albums. My takeaway is that it also smacks down the reality that AI is not doing the shit jobs for us, so why should we pay it to write emails & draw pictures because we are too numb from narcotics & Netflix? Another page from the collective songbook closes the set, it is “Old Bill Pickett” by Mark Ross, about a legendary black rodeo cowboy, who died from a fatal kick by a bronco.  

Maybe the most important of the four previously recorded songs on this record is “Crying Those Cocksucking Tears” by Patrick Haggerty & Lavender Country. In the liner notes, Willi describes his version as wanting “to sound like a drag queen in a horny vaudeville act.” In late 2023, I first heard some of the songs for the Critterland album at a packed variety show of queer artists during Americanafest in Nashville. 

So Willi hasn’t exactly been in the closet, but I feel like I heard him say something in an interview or on a podcast that he also wasn’t about marketing the rainbow brand, so to speak, by which I heard him say having his queerness pigeonholed or commodified. The way he described himself gave me the vibe of bi- or pansexual as opposed to other identities on the vast continuum. But with this album arriving at the end of Pride month when the right’s war on queer folks seems as cruel & unflinching as any time in the last several decades, this feels like Willi’s lustiest, wildest, out-est, & gayest album, to put it one way. 

But if Willi’s “Cocksucking Tears” is bold & provocative, brace yourself for the bootylicious track buried on the back-end of the record. “Big Butt Billy” is pure unadulterated unfiltered R-rated queer poetic genius of the kind that Allen Ginsberg gained notoriety for. It’s a folk song for sure, but also spoken-word-confessional & sermon of the most salacious & incisive & inclusive kind. “Big Butt Billy” is some brilliant vocabulary & visionary humanity celebrating all of us in all our most carnal & culinary ways, taking place in a diner & name-checking the menu items, as it does. Lust & appetite never had such wordsmithing genius & genuine silliness. A track for the ages. 

Just as the song “Critterland” had the hardy air of thesis statement & manifesto on the last one, title-track “Winged Victory” sets us up with some core proclamations & parameters. The declaration on this one, as needed as the critters & big tents of his previous efforts, is this: “I believe in the impossible/that no one is expendable.” Ever the poet, Willi weaves his utopian flair in the mercurial & mundane contradictions that would make Walt Whitman blush. To make it clean, it gets dirty. It is never good, if it doesn’t acknowledge its shadow, & by the final stanza, the curtains are on fire. Willi is not singing this anthem of hasty inclusion at the church or protest rally but in the crazy-ass confines of the memory-unit at the old-folks facility. Not that the lofty aims of other scribblers of folk-anthems ever lacked the earthiness that Willi wields, it’s just that the Willi Carlisle take on love & activism & “everyone” has such a naughty fringe, a colorful freaky flavor that resists being flattened into gentrified postcards recited at the funerals of politicians. 

Willi’s influence (& mine), Utah Phillips loved to say that the Wobblies stole the hymns because they were pretty, but changed the words so they made sense. Willi Carlisle’s albums are deeply spiritual to me because of their sheer glorious honesty & humor & radical politics & joy, but Willi is not by any stretch a gospel singer. Yet the catchy & corny communal hymnody of gospel is in the depths of all great folk & rock & soul, & this is why Willi concerts are also anarcho-communist church & why I am an acolyte & apostle. So after several spins of this amazing album called Winged Victory, the song that is stuck in my head is the acapella hymn “Sound and Fury” (performed as a quartet on the disc), which is an utterly intoxicating holy earworm about, as Willi puts it in the liner notes, a way to “explore the dualities and contradictions of so many ideologies in this world.” On this glorious track, the narrator gets nectar from the “udder of angel.” Willi’s music is the ecstatic, glorious audio of the angels.

I didn’t think I could love Critterland as much as I loved Peculiar, Missouri, so I definitely didn’t think I could possibly love Winged Victory as much as Critterland, but the more these songs burrow their bawdy truths into the vast holes of my soul, the more that the Willi Carlisle songbook becomes us, it is so much deeper & wider than albums to rank & review. In the radical surrealist sense, Willi Carlisle breathes & becomes the poem-song itself, because Willi bleeds a manifesto of messy, hopeful, humorous, riveting, radical life-itself. So in a world of so much tragic & unneeded loss, count these songs as victory. 
-Andrew/Sunfrog
scribbling essays about music on stolen land 
Winged Victory is out everywhere you stream music on Friday, June 27th. 

 

Florry flourishes like all these summer wildflowers - live from Asheville

Florry flourishes like all these summer wildflowers, like they are much more than a band. 

Florry feel like a contagious concept, a moment & a movement, an entire thing of all the things combined in this messy beautiful life. Now, I am a complete dork to say all this about a band, but Florry bring this freaking feeling unpretentiously & with an open heart that is turned-on & tuned-in to a raging choogle of psychedelic stoner country. 

I remember the worn cardboard of an old album cover of hippy daze house band, with an entire collective on stage in flowing fabrics, blissed out trippy R&B with a gospel hint. Those bands like Stoneground or Yahowha 13 or the Farm Band could be a religion, a free love thing, or the staff at a vegetarian restaurant. They might even live in teepees or yurts or on a magic mystery bus. They might be the house band for every house party & backyard jam. Don’t pass this off as cliche or quaint or all faded sunsets through a nostalgia filter. I don’t think Florry are a religion but they have released two versions of a song about prayer & they did have an album with the word Bible in the title. 

As so many writers & re-issue vinyl labels have reminded us, when you peel back the onion skin of the time portal, all that crazy stuff might not just be as good as you remember, it might be better. There have been some more recent floral folk-pop attempts to project this aura wide-angle & wide-screen, say Polyphonic Spree or Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros. 

But as awesome as those projects were, they are purified water sipped in choir robes when compared to the questionable moonshine & dank weed of what Florry is throwing down. Those groups were clean eating while Florry brings the fried foods of a diner at 2am with some raging munchies. 

Enter front-person Francie Medosch & her merry band of collaborators with their relentlessly face-melting take on the margins of our musical past, all Meat Puppets meets Mother Earth. Not just the dueling guitars but the fiddle & the pedal steel. 

At the glorious Grey Eagle in Asheville, Francie has on an NRBQ blue ballcap, a blue peasant top, & a floor-length plain-style denim skirt that touches a new pair of charcoal Merrill hiking shoes. With long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail & no makeup, Medosch throws out a strong hippy librarian energy. From what I can glean from articles & interviews, Medosch recently relocated from Philadelphia to Burlington, Vermont, which given these stylings, fits perfectly.

But when she starts working her magic to melt my face as she shreds on the red Fender guitar, I think we are witnessing some serious Rosetta Tharpe energy. The band’s overall talent & intensity fuse with Francie’s singular talent & they burn through their set with so much blissful bravado that the crowd cannot help but to start shaking. Down front, we had a dance party revival meeting that uncorked into a friendly multigenerational mosh pit by the time they sizzled through “First it was a movie, then it was a book.” 

I think the only song that wasn’t pure bottled lightning was a mellow shift to the soulful tender jammy cover of Commander Cody’s “Seeds and Stems (Again),” which simply worked. 

Florry’s chemistry & charisma are so raw, raucous, unfiltered & friendly on stage, that their live shows extend the glorious intricacies of the already shaggy albums into feral immersion in the sweaty arc of human connection. It’s all-to-the-wall with passion & musical precision, all seven band members find their own beauty & blow your minds.

Asheville’s Tombstone Poetry were a stunning, also very vibey & energetic opener, also shades of psychedelic punk but with fiddle & pedal steel. Such a great show. 

- Andrew/Sunfrog

Florry at the Grey Eagle

Asheville, North Carolina

June 22, 2025

Dip Myself like an Ice cream cone

Pretty eyes Lorraine 

Hot weather 

Waiting around to provide

My amigo (possibly a Terry Allen cover, but totally changed if so)

Say your prayers rock 

Seeds & stems (cover)

Take my heart 

Trucked Flipped over

2 Beers

Hey Baby

First it was a movie, then it was a book

This album sounds like your brain on this album: Florry freaks us with a furious folk rock for the ages

 When Florry’s front person Francie Medosch was in high school, she skipped school to go on tour in her band. Recently, the twenty-something singer skipped out from her home town in Philadelphia to go work at a dispensary and a record store in Vermont. Florry sounds like the basement project, the garage project, the back-porch or front-porch project of someone who skipped class in high school and now works at the weed store in Vermont. “Sounds like . . .” is the name of the new Florry album. 

“Sounds like . . .” is a provocative title, because we scribblers of reviews, we love those points of reference to lure folks in. This band you may have never heard of, they sound like this other band you might have heard of. 

The synthy samply crunch clicks that open the album sound like late 90s R.E.M. and like nobody discouraged Florry from opening the album with a 7-minute track. Folks cannot seem to stop mentioning the likes of Dylan, Gram Parsons, and the Rolling Stones in their impressions. Florry is part of what writer and podcaster Steven Hyden calls the “Wednesday/MJ Lenderman Cinematic Universe” when he is not calling it “the same country rock solar system that includes Wednesday and MJ Lenderman.” Cinematic universe. Solar system. Florry sounds as cosmic as these metaphors. 

If it’s a scene or a movement, Asheville’s Drop of Sun recording studio seems to be the common denominator to this shaggy sound, the freaky fulcrum, portal, thin place, and power spot that projects these woozy sonics on the bedroom-wall interstellar-lightshow of our dreams. Yes, this album also sounds like they could be the black sheep cousin that got kicked off the recent Wilco/Waxahatchee double bill for jamming out too long. (That’s just an image that came to me, they were not on that tour, but now that I have said this, I wish that they had been.)

To add to all these references, I hear remnants in this jam-session-not-jam-band sound of the jangly and subterranean at the intersection of the 1980s cowpunk and Paisley Underground and SST scenes. You know, sounds like twangy punk rock, floating above the stage on things even stronger than those THC gummies of today, maybe a heroic dose or several, spiraling and giggling off the sky on acid and shrooms. That last sentence sounds like I feel dangerous, yes dangerous to even write for this sober but still crazy and psychedelic consumer of dangerous sounds. You know, “Sounds like . . . “ sounds like I might tell my sponsor that I don’t need a white chip from just listening to this album, but the sounds are simmering, I am definitely buzzed. 

Florry songs are fierce in their intimacy, drifting from sex to death to prayers. Early single “Hey Baby” growls with heartbreak and regret before chug chugging into dorky refrains sing-chanted over bar-rock burning guitars. “Truck Flipped Over ‘19” is a haunting meditation on highway fatalities. In fact, track 8 called “Say Your Prayers Rock” is a revision of “Say Your Prayers” from the band’s 2021 “Big Fall” album. “Dip Myself In Like an Ice Cream Cone” is a sexy summer skinny dipping song, dripping with more innuendo than the plaintive sad song simply called “Sexy,” as “Ice Cream Cone” slips into a slinky squelchy steamy conclusion. 

Florry are a band for whom albums are mere captures of the in-person in-real-life thing, only an audio placeholder for fans waiting to tap into their more free-flowing, far-flung, and feral live sound. Mind you, I have not seen Florry live yet, but looking up some live recordings of festival sets in 2023 and 2024, these sets really gave tangible traction to the trippy vibe that has me wanting to start spinning like on the lawn at a Dead show.

Yes, there are at least six people on stage, seven in this press photo. Yes, I hope that their van is spacious enough for them all. Yes, there’s fiddle and pedal steel. Yes, this sounds like the alt-country hippy-punk hoedown that this summer needs. 

Florry sound like all the 1970s albums in the discount bin, all the private-pressings that give a contact buzz from just fingering the moldy cardboard, all-wrapped-up in the primitive design of snapshots and scribbles, back when actual ball-point-pen doodles were better than fonts, long before the day of fonts that try to look like ball-point-pen doodles. 

But all the bluesy woozy shambolic and shamanic aforementioned antecedents aside, the amazing part is that Francie writes songs and lyrics that actually don’t sound like anything before Francie and Florry existed, being wholly new, even in how old they sound. Florry sounds like they don’t give AF that Francie especially doesn’t sound like anyone else that I can think of, defying even our best hopes to capture what “Sounds Like . . .” sounds like in the flawed format of a record review. 

Following the album’s late May 2025 release, Florry are going to spend most of June on the road, hopefully packing-out the smallish venues where they are scheduled throughout the east, south, and midwest, and I sure would love to capture one of their sets, to continue to aspire to and joyfully capture in rapturous prose what Florry sound like.  -Andrew/Sunfrog

Wandering with Wonder on the Streets of the Lonely World with My Politic

When I left my suburban upbringing as a young adult, I immediately sought urban life. On first moving to Detroit from its suburbs back in the late 1980s, I immediately took to long walks of exploration. Even earlier in the last century, radical philosophers celebrated the revolutionary implications of such wandering as “an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban.” 

On the title track to the new My Politic album (out everywhere since May 23), I sense a visionary & vibrant connection to urban pilgrims everywhere. Just as I walked to discover Detroit decades ago, singer & songwriter Kaston Guffey is seeking surprises on the streets of his new home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, & in this case the psychogeography is boldly & blissfully infused with psychedelics. Pittsburgh provides setting & character for the new songs, a special city that blends east coast & midwest with an always Appalachian mystery. 

Guffey sings, 
I’m gonna take me a bus
Out to the museum of art
And eat just enough mushrooms
to have my mind blown apart
Follow the crooked streets
All the way home
Talk to strangers & bury my phone

The song “Signs of Life” (& the rest of the album too) narrates magic & wonder inside the same world so often wrought with uncertainty & grief. The entire set invokes “all this joy & all this misery.” Guffey builds emotional universes that are alternately cosmic & claustrophobic, sometimes saying the loud part quietly in that way that folk singers are wont to do. With the title track, that gift is singalong infectious, inviting listeners to return again & again to the rambunctious font of embracing said uncertainty & celebrating the urban wild. 

I discovered this prophetic folk duo in early 2022, right after their 2021 record Short-Sighted People In Power had dropped. Known as the duo of Guffey with Nick Pankey, their albums include guest musicians to fill out the sound. The first time I saw My Politic at Nashville’s OG Basement, they shared a bill with Adeem The Artist, & I approached & reflected on that evening with an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the incisive pertinence of the protest lineage with indie folk music. That protest tradition shows up most prominently on this outing with the blazing “Will We Ever Make It Out Of Heaven Alive.” 

Theologically & poetically, “hell” is often the preferred metaphor for the place from which the world needs a prison break. But not with this song. With this song, we are trapped in an unholy heaven of the hateful remnant. Due to the toxic certainty of the fundamentalists & nationalists crowding the churches, it’s no wonder that heaven suddenly feels even more carceral, an eternal punishment not fit for fugitive folksingers & all their freaky friends. 

This track reminds me of an old, old Flaming Lips number where the narrator rebuffs a street evangelist with the truism that “hell’s got all the good bands.” This might be the only proper full-stop protest anthem within the album’s 13 songs, so war, religious hypocrisy, gun violence, & capitalism all get their due. The track’s title is a question & the album vibes an authentic appetite of holy desperation that we might not have all the answers. We might be losing against authoritarians, but we aren’t giving up, we are at least singing with truth & revelation from within the confines of a live-streamed catastrophe.

I saw My Politic in person at another Basement show a couple years after that 2022 introduction. In early spring 2024, I brought my 80-something mother. We had struck out on getting Bob Dylan tickets in Georgia, & this show felt close enough to Dylan, but much more intimate, like the early Dylan we would soon see reenacted by Timothee Chalamet on the wide screen. After that experience, my mother genuinely wanted to know why folk songs are so sad. She might have said “depressing.” I didn’t have a good answer, except to say that sad songs make me happy. “No Other Way” certainly fits the bill for the sad-happy paradox in this collection. 

But perhaps the most collectively-rendered version of that on this record is “The Lonely 21st Century,” which tracks our addictions to addiction, our data-mined daily expressions, & our “connected isolation.” Yet the gut-punch beauty of that track is just this: I am less lonely & isolated from having heard it. I am even grateful to my dreaded phone & excellent headed phones for bringing these songs directly to me. All this, of course, makes me want to pierce the isolation on the social, physical plane, which means I need to see My Politic live again, which I hope to do soon. 

As good as this new My Politic album is, & it’s extremely good, the best way to experience Kaston Guffey & Nate Pankey is in their live set. The first tour with this new record starts in just a few days. You can get all the details on the album & the tour at their website www.mypoliticmusic.com -- check it out. 

Celebrating the southern gothic jangle punk of Murray Attaway

 

There are many trails, threads, & backroads that feed my adopted southern identity, but several travel through Georgia. In early 1987, my nineteen-year-old self spent about 8-weeks in an urban intentional community seeking solidarity with our neighbors living on the street. Something about winter in Atlanta changed me. 

By then, I was already an R.E.M. freak, & I was still a decade away from my first deep-dive into classic southern literature, which at first meant Faulkner, even though Flannery O’Connor always seems to be falling off the shelf & into my soul, much more recently in the Maya & Ethan Hawke biopic. But if I am transparent about my near-magnetic attraction to the rural south that had me settling down in Tennessee within a decade of that Atlanta stint, it wasn’t short stories & novels, as much as I love them. It was the civil rights movement's history, it was milder winters, it was mountain backroads, & it was outsider folk art like Howard Finster, & it was music like Guadalcanal Diary.

To say I was obsessed back then (& now) with Guadalcanal Diary’s punked-up ecstatic-mystic rendering of “Kumbaya” would be an understatement. They were one of many mid-80s bands that I simply fell for & hard & their version of Kumbaya was always central. 

As the Diary’s front-person & primary songwriter, Murray Attaway mentioned in a podcast interview, that Kumbaya was then in-the-mid-80s an obscure campfire jam & not the common parlance pejorative jab that it has become. My response to the cynicism around “Kumbaya” as a concept has been to retort with earnest glee, “but have you tried it, have you really tried singing kumbaya?” Lotta of contempt-before-investigation going around about such an incredible song. 

But none of the cheese-&-cringe scout-camp tape-loops that birthed the cynical cliche to wield like a rhetorical baseball bat against “Kumbaya,” none of the purveyors of this miserable recycled trope probably have any idea what kind of primal glory could be obtained by a jangle-punk version of this song, especially when just unapologetically jammed out by some 80s-alternative kids in a sweaty club. 

That I could be returning to this “lord I want to be in that number” kind-of-moment some 40 years later is delicious, not nostalgia so much as homecoming & eternal return. I got to see & feel & sing along with the jangle punk Kumbaya in-person, with Murray's old Guadalcanal bandmate Rhett Crowe joining in (Rhett joined the ensemble on "Vista" as well). But I get ahead of myself, as that was the last-song of a two-song encore at the end of the two-date record-release Georgia tour for Murray Attaway’s first solo album in more than 30 years, almost 40 years since the fiery four-album-run of the Guadalcanal Diary canon & fierce touring years.

The already familiar eight songs on “Tense Music Plays” officially dropped on May 9th (get it on Bandcamp or order the physical album, only three singles are streaming). Were it not for my sibling podcaster & music obsessive friend Scott Greenberg telling me about the album on the April edition of the Music Nerds Record Club, I might not have known about it at all. A new Murray Attaway album just wasn’t on my radar, nope, not really at all. But thanks to Scott & advance listening available to radio folks, I was immediately in. 

Then relistening addictively to all the old Guadalcanal Diary tracks on repeat for a few weeks & discovering Murray’s early-90s solo album “In Thrall” for the first time (which I somehow missed back then) & then seeking out every remote YouTube interview with Murray over the past decade or so, I was tossed into audio-mystical deep-dive sanctum of revelation & discovery. Insights & inspiration knocked me over. 

See, the distinctly southern outsider-poet lyrics coupled with that guitar spangle jangle sparkle tangle is my spiritual musical sweet spot, so much. Both as Guadalcanal Diary & now as Murray Attaway, it’s swelling, hooky, earworms, making meaning & memories. Words & deeply religious sensibilities are simultaneously universal & specific & never dreary & dogmatic. Musically, they are so much a part of my lineage that returns in the 00s with Band of Horse & My Morning Jacket. Lately I have found that sweet spot with the likes of Florry & Fust. 

But when I left I-75 to take the backroads through the north Georgia mountains to Athens on steamy Saturday in May, this is the soundtrack of kudzu climbing in clumps of tall trees & church-signs screaming holy ghost declarations. These are the sounds of places like this. I am grateful I sought this night like a desperate pilgrim. I had to shoehorn this amazing experience in-between two already-scheduled events & add lots of miles to my Toyota to make it happen. The Athens set that I caught included most of the new album & a wide selection of Guadalcanal Diary “hits” that had a gaggle of 50-&-60-somethings singing along & dancing like silly children. 

While I have become much more the devourer of southern lit today in terms of poetry & novels than I was then, southern rock in all its complications & iterations is much more the mother tongue of what southern gothic & southern cultural identity mean to me. My friend Mark Kemp really developed a redemptive thesis about this & I would include Guadalcanal Diary in the bands that deliver the sounds that help redeem our complicated & conflicted southern souls. 

Murray Attaway’s complete catalog is world-building & mood-inducing, always haunted by weird characters but also hopeful & harkening to Georgia as home base. I could scribble for days more about why we need music that is religiously informed & inspired without retching reactionary toxicity, but to find that in what is basically path-blazing southern indie-rock is just incredible. 

Murray Attaway & Friends

The Foundry in Athens, Georgia

May 17, 2025

Setlist -
Little Birds
Stars Behind The Moon
Michael Rockefeller
Trail of Tears
Breath
Old Christmas
Better Days
Under Jets
Never Far Away
You Were There
Litany
Allegory
Hole In The Ground
Always Saturday
Vista
Cattle Prod

Encore-
Cattle Prod
Kumbaya (with Astronomy Domine by Pink Floyd snippet)

Changed (TOTR 497)

 

-originally aired on WTTU 88.5 FM The Nest on Saturday, May 3, 2025
-listen to the audio archive here - 
Stream Changed - TOTR 497 by Teacher On The Radio | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
-this is the concluding show of the 2024-25 academic year; we return in August
-with this episode, Teacher On The Radio celebrates the 16th anniversary of his continuous abstinence from alcohol
-all views only represent the host & the artists played, never the student managers or the Communication department or the university

Miles Caton - I Lied To You
Lonnie Hailey - A Change Is Gonna Come
Valerie June & the Blind Boys of Alabama - Changed
Panda Bear - Praise
Bon Iver - Everything Is Peaceful Love
Palmyra - Can’t Slow Down
Jeffrey Lewis - Tylenol PM
Murray Attaway - Stars Behind The Moon
The Waterboys - Live In The Moment, Baby
My Morning Jacket - Die For It
Father John Misty - Mahashmashana
Jesse Welles - Simple Gifts
Mumford & Sons - Carry On
Ray LaMontagne - Long Way Home
Florry - Drunk and High
MJ Lenderman - Under Control
Friendship - Chomp Chomp
Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band - Flashes of Orange
Fust - Jody
The Snake The Cross The Crown - Behold The River
Jerry Joseph - Days of Heaven
Chris Brain - New Light
The Alarm - I Melt With You