Posts Tagged ‘Oliver Kalb’

TOLD SLANT – ” Run Around the School “

Posted: January 20, 2021 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Told Slant is the songwriting project of Felix Walworth , Brooklyn based lyricist, producer, and founding member of The Epoch arts collective. Walworth started the project in 2011 as a means of marking a stylistic shift in their song writing, specifically a shift toward understated, ambling arrangements and simple, illustrative lyrics.

Told Slant’s debut LP, Still Water, was self-released in 2012, then re-released and pressed to vinyl by Broken World Media in 2014. The band released their follow full-length record, “Going By”, with Double Double Whammy Records in the summer of 2016.

Though Told Slant functions more like a “solo project” in its recorded state, its live incarnation is arranged and performed by Walworth and Epoch co-collaborators Emily Sprague of Florist , Oliver Kalb of Bellows (He/Him), and Gabrielle Smith of Eskimeaux (She/Her). Sprague, Kalb, and Smith bring their particular sets of influences and intuitions to the band’s live sets in a way that draws out more energetic and dynamic arrangements from the songs.

Told Slant’s members live in Brooklyn, NY,

Told Slant has released the new single “Run Around the School” from their first new album in 4 years, “Point the Flashlight and Walk“. Of the song Walworth says: “Run Around The School’ is about the allure of loving another regardless of reciprocity or the promise of being loved. It explores the beauty and delusion of pining, and of love’s power to satiate us even with its table scraps.”

Album Released November 13th, 2020

BELLOWS – ” The Rose Gardener “

Posted: March 18, 2019 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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bellows

The Rose Gardener, Bellows’ fourth full-length album and the project’s first for Topshelf Records, is a four-part journey through the uncanny valley of deep psychological disorder and pain. Self-recorded over the course of a single winter while Oliver Kalb was living in Woodstock, NY, The Rose Gardener invokes a bright and pastoral landscape of Americana and folk, with lyrics influenced by a strange pairing of Romantic Poetry and deeply modern interrogations of internet pop-culture discourse. The uncanniness of The Rose Gardener comes from the odd pairing of this bright Americana musical foundation with the album’s dark, bubbling substructure of noise, synthesizers, sampling and vocal manipulation that together create a feeling of paranoia and danger around every corner; as if the album’s narrator cannot escape his plummeting into the dark however much its songs push to remain in the bright rose garden of beauty and creation.

This time around, rather than present great coloured skies and vistas, The Rose Gardener feels more pin-pointed, an exploration of what’s directly around us; a world within a world (the proverbial garden), but also lingering dark corners, the parts of our brain we don’t often find ourselves in.

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Musically, The Rose Gardener finds Kalb and co. in similarly stylistic mood to what’s come before, this aforementioned world brought into life through a series of skewed, odd-pop signatures, both light and dark, shaped by the manipulated vocals and the playful and plentiful rhythmic instrumentals that burst into bloom with the most graceful of touches.

The kind of record that feels tenderly consuming when you’re inside of it, and strangely dream-like when you’re not, the new album is another adventurous and emotive collection of songs, earthy and raw but idiosyncratic too; a maze-like allegory of pop songs, full of twists and turns you can’t explain. 

The Rose Gardener is released on Friday, via Topshelf Records

BELLOWS – ” Thick Skin “

Posted: June 27, 2016 in MUSIC
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Bellows -

Brooklyn art collective The Epoch already has three great releases to its name this year — Florist’s The Birds Outside Sang, Eskimeaux’s Year Of The Rabbit mini-album and, just last week, Told Slant’s Going By — and it’s about to add a fourth in the form of Bellows’ Fist & Palm. Bellows is the recording project of Oliver Kalb, who also plays in Eskimeaux and Told Slant, and Fist & Palm is the follow-up to 2014’s fantastic Blue Breath, and it also marks something of a stylistic departure. While Kalb flirted with more synthetic elements on his earlier work (or was at least focused on making the organic sound synthetic) — most memorably on tracks like “Blue Breath, Rosy Death” and “White Sheet” — nothing approached the bombast or immediacy of “Thick Skin,” Fist & Palm’s lead single.

“Thick Skin” is imbued with wonder from the jump: “Staring out your car window, I feel my size,” Kalb sings, his voice glossy and buoyant. “Hudson Palms, the Catskills Gulf Stream — the world’s alive!” It’s about wanting to open yourself up to the vastness of the world, knowing that the great big unknown can be harsh and terrifying and deciding to embrace it anyway. At one point, the whole band chimes in: “Don’t wanna leave the earth, even for a moment!” That radiating optimism reminds me a lot of fellow positivity purveyors Terror Pigeon; coupled with Kalb’s penchant for Sufjan Stevens-style dramatics, “Thick Skin” feels pretty invincible track.

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