Style: Jazz Fusion, Jazz, Orchestral, Comedy (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Thank You Scientist, Clown Core, the Fallout series of games, Frank Zappa, Radiohead
Country: New Jersey, United States
Release date: 18 July 2025

I like a fruit salad as much as the next guy. You’ve got your apples, your limequats, your pawpaws – all the good ones. But inevitably, someone will say “well, a tomato is technically a fruit, you should add that to your fruit salad”. Because we are weak-willed we acquiesce, but that is the primary and unforgivable misstep. Because from that point forward, the floodgates are open, and all varieties of avocado, olives, and peas come tumbling out. You like jalapeños in your fruit salad, huh? Do you, punk?

We Used to Cut the Grass is a band from New Jersey, led by Cody McCorry (of Thank You Scientist and others), who just released their sophomore effort, We Used to Cut the Grass #2, an album which would definitely argue that some pumpkin¹ belongs in that salad.² #2 spans a huge range of genres and moods, opening with a stately orchestral piece, ending on some smooth lounge jazz, with an uptempo post-apocalyptic radio bulletin about (an obviously fictitious) Buffalo Wild Wings’ chicken milk delivery service in between.

#2 continues multiple thematic elements from the Grass‘s debut album, #1, including the characters Shep and Scully,³ the radio station WKRM the Kream, and the traditional jazz group Captain Cream & the Forest Fires. #1 was a fairly straightforward jazz album which—by its conclusion—descended into a kind of silly chaos; #2 continues and expands on that silliness. The most obvious manifestation of this is in the lyrics, which discuss the ethical implications of adding oat crumbs to a vegan croissant, podcast charlatans radicalizing your family, and the aforementioned chicken milk delivery service.

Instrumentally, #2 shares much of its DNA with #1 and with Thank You Scientist, with the Grass being effectively a superset of TYS, sans a dedicated vocalist. If you’re looking for something to scratch that TYS itch while they recoup from the loss of their original vocalist, Salvatore Marrano,⁴ #2 might do the job. #2 features McCorry‘s impressive bass (particularly notable on the irreverent “Hot Vegan Summer”) and guitar playing (he does his best Jonny Greenwood impression on “Shep’s Encounter”), Joe Gullace‘s trumpet and Alex Blade Silver‘s saxophone (most prominently on “Lights, Camera, Ham!”), and Ben Karas‘ excellent string work, among others. As we’ve come to expect from the Greater Science Community,⁵ there is truly nothing negative that can be said about the instrumental performances on #2. These guys are the real deal.

The album opens on “The Play Shep Wrote in ’92”, a moving orchestral piece performed by the Sofia Session Orchestra in Sofia, Bulgaria, which showcases McCorry‘s talent as a composer. The layering of gentle bells,⁶ followed by strings and horns which unfurl into a rolling landscape of brass and percussion builds to a dramatic tension and then settles into a quiet reprise and fades. This track is followed by McCorry‘s bass ushering in “The Comet Is Not Coming”,⁷ a heavy, energetic, sax-and-theremin-heavy jazz-rock fusion track which—like a later track, “The Hatman Cometh”—sounds like it could be an instrumental off of any TYS album. But the musical smorgasbord doesn’t end there…

“Lights, Camera, Ham!” is the meaty next course: a rolling jazztronica track, which alternates between busy horns-and-drums sections and airier electronic sections. The music video for the single is almost entirely footage of landscapes passing by, taken out the windows of trains and cars, the slowly-moving mountains in the background echoing the long notes held by the horns and quickly-moving foreground mirroring the repeated arpeggios of the other wind instruments and electric violin. This is definitely a lofi hip hop radio beat to relax/study to (that is: it’s a chill vibe), but does it belong on the same album as the traditional jazz of the closing tracks?

If “The Comet Is Not Coming” and “The Hatman Cometh” are the cantaloupe and watermelon, “The Play Shep Wrote in ’92” is the grapes, and “Lights, Camera, Ham!” is the tomato, then “Hot Vegan Summer” is the eggplant which really starts to shake up this fruit salad of an album. Trust Fund Ozu is co-credited on this track, delivering a rap verse about veganism. “Uh oh, everybody’s having fun at Buffalo Wild Wings” is sung over absolutely frenetic slap bass. I mean, I dig it, but I wonder if the Sofia Session Orchestra were ever expecting to appear on the same album as something like this.

When I joined The Progressive Subway not too long ago, I was ribbed for being someone who listens to all my tracks on shuffle; I don’t always listen to albums all the way through. With We Used to Cut the Grass #2, I get to have my salad and eat it too—no more bullying at The Subway, but also I get to listen to the most haphazard sequence of genres I think I’ve ever heard on a single album. We Used to Cut the Grass #2 is the jalapeño-pineapple-chickpea fruit salad of music, and I am here for it (in moderation), but I think it is probably an acquired taste. If the trend continues for #3, I’m looking forward to a pop country track next to gamelan next to dissonant death metal. Your move, Cody.

Recommended tracks: Lights, Camera, Ham!, Shep’s Encounter, Hot Vegan Summer
You may also like: Adam Neely & Ben Levin’s How I Loved My Cat, Trust Fund Ozu, mouse on the keys
Final verdict: 7.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Independent

We Used to Cut the Grass is a flexible ensemble which at times has included (alphabetically)

• AJ Merlino: vibraphone
• Alex Silver: tenor saxophone
• Ben Karas: violin, viola
• Cody McCorry: bass, guitar, keyboards, synthesizers, theremin, hand saw, guitar
• Daimon Alexandrius Santa Maria: disc jockey
• Faye Fadem: drums, percussion
• Ian Gray: trombone
• James McCaffrey III: guitar
• Jennifer DeVore: cello
• Joe Gullace: trumpet, “electronic valve instrument”
• Kevin Grossman: drums, percussion
• Matthew Trice: alto saxophone
• Sam Greenfield: tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, clarinet
• Seamus Leonhardt: drums
• Sean Marks: baritone saxophone
• Timothy Adedigba Ogunbiyi: fender rhodes
• Tom Monda: guitar

1. Which is not only a fruit, but also a berry. ︎
2. Either before or after asking you to join Keatonics, the cult of Michael Keaton. ︎
3. Check out my accompanying interview with Cody, where he explains where these characters come from and what they mean (or don’t) in the context of the album. ︎
4. Daimon Alexandrius, of Karmic Juggernaut, has been named as Sal’s replacement. ︎
5. At The Subway, we’ve started referring to a group of bands which feature one or more of Cody McCorry, Ben Karas, Tom Monda, and co. as the Greater Science Community. This group includes Thank You Scientist, Slaughtersun, Glass Garden, We Used to Cut the Grass, Karmic Juggernaut, Civilians, and many more. ︎
6. What sounds like bells here is actually a celeste, as can be seen in the music video for this track. ︎
7. The Comet Is Coming ︎

The post Review: We Used to Cut the Grass – We Used to Cut the Grass #2 appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

We Used to Cut the Grass, a jazz-fusion ensemble lead by Cody McCorry (of Thank You Scientist, Glass Garden, Slaughtersun, and many others), recently released their second full-length record, We Used to Cut the Grass #2. I had a chat with Cody where we discussed the new LP, how he manages to balance his many projects, touring with trash instruments, and his favorite fruit.

You’re wrapping up a tour with Thank You Scientist now aren’t you?

Yeah, Thursday, September 4th in Stroudsburg, PA, is our next show. We’re opening for Symphony X, which is going to be cool. It’s the first time we’re doing that. The drummer from Symphony X [Jason Rullo] was actually Kevin Grossman’s drum teacher growing up.

So between now and then, what are you busy with? Working on the new Thank You Scientist album? Or are you focused on your other bands?

Tom and I both have a ton going on right now. We’re doing a lot of jazz gigs together with our friend, Audra Mariel, who’s a vocalist. We’re both just gigging a lot, working around town, doing all kinds of things to keep the lights on. But yeah, Tom is working on the new Thank You Scientist album and we’re getting together intermittently. I’m working on the next We Used to Cut the Grass album which is already pretty much written—we’ve been performing some of it. But other than that, just kind of writing and recording and a lot of gigs: jazz gigs, cover gigs, whatever pays the bills you know?

You’re a busy guy. You’ve been with Thank You Scientist for a decade now and started touring with them again this summer, you joined and toured with The Number Twelve Looks Like You last year, and your bands Glass Garden and We Used to Cut the Grass both just released their second LPs. How do I stop doomscrolling and become a motivated, productive person like you? Is there a secret?

I mean, there’s always time for doomscrolling. I still get lost doing that stuff, too. But I think one of the things that helped me get organized in terms of composing a lot and managing different projects and balancing everything was this book called The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. It’s a twelve week series of exercises that you do to organize your creative life. During the pandemic, I worked through them with some friends. You write a lot and organize your thoughts and see what really matters to you and how to focus on it, while also balancing the things that pay your bills and all that.

It’s something that a lot of writers do, but it’s good for really any creative medium. I would say that before the pandemic, and before I went through that course, I was really disorganized and things were happening in a very oblong way. I would mostly work on Thank You Scientist and then maybe Karmic Juggernaut would put something out and I would devote all my time to that, and so on.

For example, We Used to Cut the Grass has been around for over a decade. We’ve actually been together for like thirteen or fourteen years. So the fact that we’re just putting out our second album now goes to show how unbalanced my life has been for a long time. Because this is the thing that I really love, and I love to write for it; it’s a house for all my compositions. But it really wasn’t until after 2020 that I got organized and was like “right, we’re doing this. We’re putting out records now.”

Do you ever feel burned out with all these different projects you have going on?

Yeah. It’s a constant struggle and a balancing act. And that’s why I had to do a twelve week course to help organize it all. There are definitely months where I feel like I have to devote a lot of time to other things. It’s really only the past few years that I was like “you know what, I’m going to start putting We Used to Cut the Grass toward the forefront”. Because writing music is the thing that I love the most. I love playing bass, I love playing really complicated music, and being in bands, but that is secondary to just creating new music. Especially hearing that new music for the first time with a large ensemble, or any ensemble really, that’s what excites me.

So I’m trying to put that first and put all the bass playing and being a side man in other people’s bands second. Even in roles where I’m co-composing. I’m trying to rebalance so that creating new music comes first and being a bass player for a whole host of different projects comes second. 

You play, you compose, you gig… you do all sorts of stuff related to music. Have you always been “all in”? Or was it a side gig for a little while where you had a day job that paid the bills?

Yeah, I worked in food service for close to ten years, and then I had an office job for two or three years. But around the time I joined Thank You Scientist in 2015, when I went on my first big tour with them, it became untenable to hold down a job and then also leave for three months at a time. So that’s when I took the leap and thought “alright, I’ve got to figure out how to make this music thing work”. So that’s when I started taking any gig I possibly could, whether it was covers or jazz gigs… I played a lot of jazz gigs. And a lot of gigs I really didn’t like. I had to play in a Top 40 country cover band for a little while, and, like, no shade to them, but I hated that. 

Do you do a lot of session work?

Totally. I actually love doing session work even more than just gigging. Because it’s more relaxed and you can try different things and you get a bigger variety of music. And frequently it’s original music. So I vastly prefer working on other people’s original music versus showing up and playing a cover gig. Because I like to help people make new stuff.

Do you have any advice for new musicians who are trying to decide whether to go all in or keep it as a side gig?

The only piece of advice I have is to stay on the bus and you’ll get where you’re going. It gets bleak sometimes, and the balance can be hard to maintain, and it can feel like you’re gonna be trapped in a certain type of musical life forever. But the longer you stick with it, things do get better, and your network expands, and opportunities you would never expect in a million years will appear. And maybe it’s not something you wanted or expected but you’ve got to roll with it. You just have to be open to the possibilities; and don’t give up.

Balance is another big idea from The Artist’s Way. You do have to pay your bills and the thing you love the most may not do that. So you have to strike a balance somehow.

Coming to your creative process, when you’re in a creative headspace, do you start more generally and then think specifically? Do you come up with a melody or a riff and think “that’s a Thank You Scientist riff” or “that’s more Homeless Apians”? Or do you work in reverse and get into the headspace of a particular project first, and then start composing?

I would say it’s probably the notes that come first. When I compose, I don’t frequently sit down and think “I’m going to write a song today”. I’ll sit down at the piano—as often as I can—and just improvise. And once I find something in that improvisation that’s a bit of an earworm or something that’s resonating with me, I’ll loop it a few times and it will gradually start to take shape out of this, like, improvisational mud.

And once there’s an idea that’s a little more clear, then I figure out what box to put it in. And lately that box is We Used to Cut the Grass, for the most part. But before, like for Terraformer and Stranger Heads and the Karmic Juggernaut stuff, if I was working on something proggy and complicated I’d be like “alright, this is Thank You Scientist”. If it was something more ethereal and moody, or something that I just knew would not work with vocals, I’d think “this is probably We Used to Cut the Grass”.

I’m sure it’s stressful, and busy, to have all those different projects going on at the same time. There are lots of artists who have their main gig and spin off side gigs in order to express themselves in different creative ways. But you already have those ready to go, you can just plug them in.

Yeah it’s a lot of different boxes. And they all take a lot of upkeep. It’s not easy to maintain the Thank You Scientist catalog; it’s a lot of material. And Glass Garden, too, that music isn’t super easy, either. But some months are busier for one band, another month will be busy for the other band, so it kind of balances out.

About Homeless Apians: you put out an EP with that group in 2018, Humour as a Defense Mechanism, and a few singles since then. That project seems to have been on the back burner for a while, but you did recently re-record “Shep’s Encounter” for We Used to Cut the Grass #2. I know the first We Used to Cut the Grass EP came out first, but do you see Homeless Apians as a sort of stepping stone to a more fully-realized We Used to Cut the Grass? Do you think you would work with a smaller, more experimental group again?

Homeless Apians was a super fun project, but it’s definitely on hiatus right now. Not for any specific reason other than that we’re all doing different things. I would say that the leader of Homeless Apians was really Matt Brown, and he has a new project called Heavy Mouth. I also play bass on that project; the rhythm section is kind of rotating. That band is really led by Matt Brown and Mike Rainone. And they’re repurposing some stuff that never got put out for Homeless Apians. So I would say that’s probably the next incarnation of that band.

Homeless Apians started out as a whole ethos that Matt Brown had where we, like, built all our instruments out of trash and recorded using only solar power. And we did all of that; it was really fun. We worked really hard on it for like three years. But that was right around the time that I was joining Thank You Scientist. So things really picked up with Thank You Scientist and it became difficult to put adequate energy into Homeless Apians.

So we did those two records, and it was really fun. But I think we got tired of the limitation of the trash instruments. Also, Matt wanted the band to be busier because he’s an amazing composer and writes a lot of cool music. But me and Kevin having scheduling discrepancies with touring and everything else was difficult.

So, yeah, Homeless Apians has sort of hung up the spurs for now. I don’t know, I mean, I still have the trash washtub in my basement. So maybe one day we’ll pick it back up. But Matt’s doing Heavy Mouth now.

And yeah, I’m glad that you noticed that “Shep’s Encounter” existed before this record.

Yeah, I was going through your back catalog and I was like “oh, this one’s familiar”.

That’s one of the oldest We Used to Cut the Grass songs. That was written when we started the band. It was just me and Seamus Leonhardt on drums, and that was We Used to Cut the Grass. We had some songs where it was just bass and drums, and we had some songs where it was just guitar and drums.

And we loved the band Hella. We were like, obsessed with Hella. So we wanted to do stuff that sounded like that. So I would just grab my guitar and put a bunch of distortion on it and we would try to write cool, complicated, guitar-and-drums music. But yeah, “Shep’s Encounter” was one of our first songs. And We Used to Cut the Grass never recorded it because we just never really got our shit together. So when Homeless Apians was recording, I was like, this is a chance to just get one of my compositions down on tape. So I did it with that band.

Kevin already knew the material because he had joined We Used to Cut the Grass at that point, and Matt and I were composing together a lot, so it made sense to do it then. And that recording was cool, with the trash instruments and everything, but years later, I was like, I really want to give this the full glow-up of, like, real instruments, and, you know, not recording in a field with solar panels. As fun as that was, it didn’t produce the highest fidelity recording, necessarily. So we decided to do it again.

Plus, I feel like Faye’s drumming, her whole ethos, really works well with the track because it’s also inspired by electronic music. It’s very rigid and almost feels programmed in a way.

Yeah, I saw the music video for Shep’s Encounter, her drumming is intense. Almost drum and bass style.

Yeah, she’s out of control. I feel like her drumming really brought it to life in a different way. It was super fun to revisit that.

Did you ever gig with the trash instruments? Were you worried, leaving them outside the stage door, that some garbage men would come and pick them up?

We gigged with that band a lot. We toured with Homeless Apians a few times, actually. They weren’t big tours; it would be us going to play in someone’s basement in North Carolina, or whatever, but yeah, we gigged with the trash instruments all the time and they would break all the time, and it was super annoying. That band was so much work, and we loved it, we really did. We believed in it. But it had a time and a place and we’re all working on different things now.

Coming back to Karmic Juggernaut, with Daimon taking over Sal’s role in Thank You Scientist, do you think that Karmic Juggernaut is also going to take a backseat for a while?

Karmic Juggernaut has always had this kind of on-and-off nature to it. In the list of bands we’ve been talking about – Thank You Scientist, Grass, Karmic, Homeless Apians… I’m pretty sure Karmic is the oldest. Karmic started when Kevin Grossman and James McCaffrey were in high school, and it was just the two of them and Randy Preston and they had a string of bass players until I joined. But that goes back to—I want to say, like—2010 or something.

They were gigging as Karmic Juggernaut and they would work really hard on it, put out an album, play a bunch of gigs, and then take a few years off. They also do other projects and have a lot of life stuff going on and so that project has always had this ebb and flow. But it’s been really constant since, like, 2010. So I’m sure Karmic Juggernaut’s going to do something because we’re all friends and we like hanging out together. And that’s more the vibe of that band. It’s run less like a business, in any kind of organized sense. Thank You Scientist is a well-oiled machine. Karmic Juggernaut is the opposite of whatever that is.

A poorly-oiled machine?

It’s just a bunch of friends getting together in a garage, having a good time, and then very slowly making a prog album. It’s very much like we’ll work on one song for three months and then just pivot and forget about that song. It happens very slowly because we just have fun together and it’s not super organized.

I have a few questions about specific songs on the new We Used to Cut the Grass record. Can we start with “who are Shep and Scully”? Because they’re mentioned in like half of the song titles, but not in any lyrics.

On We Used to Cut the Grass #1, we had a song called “Lay Down, Scully”. That song was originally about Agent Dana Scully on The X-Files, but then I adopted my dog and named her Scully, and so then it was obviously about Scully the dog. But before that, it was really about The X-Files. But now, obviously, all the future Scully songs that we do are going to be ballads about my dog and how much I love her.

Shep goes back to the beginning of the band, where we had these weird drum-and-bass, guitar-and-bass songs, with no idea what to call them because they’re just ethereal, instrumental music. It always feels kind of silly to slap a name on an instrumental song. So we decided to do it as a series of, like, “Shep’s this”, “Shep’s that”, just as a bit, to say “we don’t know what to call these”. So they’re all Shep’s. They’re just, like, Shep’s songs.

Rather than calling it “Composition in B minor” or something like that.

Yeah, or, you know, putting some long title on it. Which we now do, anyway.

But similar to how “Lay Down Scully” was about Agent Dana Scully and then later became about my dog, we had these Shep songs. My girlfriend at the time worked at a coffee shop in Convention Hall in Asbury Park and we found an injured mouse on the ground and got it into a shoebox and took it home for a couple weeks. We named that mouse Shep. It was present at a lot of the rehearsals when we were putting together some of these early Shep tunes, and that’s how those songs got their names.

All the Shep songs are old, too, I guess I should clarify that. Anything that’s a “Shep’s something” was probably written around 2013, 2014.

But they’ve just been recorded now for the first time?

Yeah, we’ve been a band for (getting close to) fifteen years, but we’re only just starting to put out records. So we have this back catalog of stuff that we’ve been playing live for a few years, shelved, worked on, replaced…

I think almost all of the Grass albums, even going forward, are going to have some stuff that was written like ten years ago that’s only just seeing the light of day now.

So you have enough material to release another album? Are you planning on releasing them in a quick cadence or are you going to drip feed it to people?

The idea is to do it quickly. The first album took five years and that was way too long, but we weren’t super organized about it. This latest album took three years, which is better, but we’re definitely going to do the next one faster than that. Especially since it’s all written, too. And there’s going to be a lot of new compositions on it, as well.

But I think I’ve gotten a lot more organized. Like, once we’re in the mixing process of one record, I can get started on writing the next one. For the first album, I was just working on the album and when the album came out, I really had nothing new for the second one. Whereas we continued to perform while we were mixing and mastering this one.

So we got together and it gave me the chance to workshop the new ideas, so that by the time this one actually came out, the new one’s already written. So I’m trying to have them kind of roll over each other like that going forward.

Another question about another track on the new album, “The Play Shep Wrote in ’92”, I heard that was partially recorded over Zoom? Can you tell us more about how that was coordinated?

Yeah it was almost 100% recorded over Zoom. When I was doing The Artist’s Way during Covid, one of the things that I discovered while I was going through these exercises was that I really wanted to write orchestral music. And that was something that I’d never gotten to do. I had mixed it into We Used to Cut the Grass a little bit by having brass and strings and orchestral elements, but I really wanted to take the plunge and just write a full orchestra piece.

So I applied to take a course at Juilliard’s night school and I studied orchestration there, and the culmination of that studying was writing the score for “The Play Shep Wrote in ’92”. I had two professors there who helped me review it and prepare the score. And another composer friend of mine helped me find this organization in Bulgaria that does remote orchestra recordings. Mostly for films and stuff like that. Projects where you gotta get it done really fast, and you have a limited budget.

So he gave me this organization’s info and I hit them up and they were super cool, super professional, and the whole thing was, like, how clean can we make this score so that we can get this recorded in an hour. Because they don’t look at it, they don’t practice. The way that that orchestra’s day works is that they get in the studio and nine to five, every hour they’re looking at someone else’s composition and just reading it and recording it. They haven’t seen the music before. So whether or not your thing is going to sound good after that hour is really dependent on how clean your chart is. You know, how clean the score is and how well the conductor can communicate it to them and… it was a lot, man. It was very stressful.

It was just like a one-hour-long Zoom call with the orchestra, and you’re just communicating with them through the chat box.

I was going to ask how you ended up working specifically with the Sofia Session Orchestra and not an orchestra in New Jersey or something like that.

I definitely had considered maybe trying a local orchestra or something like that. But my friend, Brian Lawlor—he’s a composer who lives out in Vienna now—he was like “I’ve done stuff with this orchestra, they’re super fast, they’re super professional, the recording quality is amazing”. They’re just set up to make tracks really fast and really efficiently. And honestly, the price… it was expensive, but it wasn’t insane, you know?

So you’d recommend them for anyone else looking for an orchestral recording?

Oh definitely, yeah. I think, more than likely, unless I get some kind of commission to do something with another orchestra, I’ll probably work with them again on whatever next orchestra thing I have to work on. I’d probably use them again, because they were great.

My next question is about “Hot Vegan Summer”. This track is co-credited to Trust Fund Ozu. I know that you’ve collaborated with lots of other artists—one that comes to mind is Ben Levin—in an unofficial capacity, but this is the first track of yours which was co-credited to a different artist. So is this a trend? Are you going to move towards more official collaborations with other bands?

Yeah, I think so. Faye and I co-wrote that song and we had a lot of fun. Obviously it’s a total, like, silly goof song, but we just wrote it together and had a lot of fun. But yeah, we’ll definitely do more collaborations in the future.

And actually, there’s a track on the new Glass Garden record that is a collaboration between We Used to Cut the Grass and Glass Garden. And we performed that song at a release show with Idris, the vocalist from Glass Garden, and it was super fun. That one’s called “Mapping the Cage”, and that one was a good time to put together. But yeah, we are trying to do more collaborations going forward.

I know you toured alongside Bent Knee, and I don’t know how much you have your finger on the pulse of r/progmetal, but there’s a jazz fusion contingent there that are huge Bent Knee and Thank You Scientist fans. I feel like they would have a meltdown if there were ever an official collaboration between Thank You Scientist and Bent Knee, even if it was just a one-off track.

Touring with them, to me, was probably the most fun Thank You Scientist ever had on the road. Because Ben Levin and Courtney and Jess and all those guys are just so much fun to be around. When Thank You Scientist was touring with Bent Knee it literally felt like summer camp for adults. We were just having a great time.

And both bands were in their prime at that point. We had just put out Terraformer and Bent Knee was putting out amazing stuff at that time. And they still are. I’m not sure what’s going on with Bent Knee. I know they’re still touring and they put out a record since Ben and Jess left the band, and that record was really cool that they did just as a quartet.

I think because Bent Knee is going through changes and Thank You Scientist is going through changes… I feel like if there was going to be a collab between those bands, it would have happened back then. I feel like the window for that has probably passed. But there will absolutely be more collaborative stuff, you know, with Ben Levin and Justice Cow and other people from Bent Knee, for sure, because we’re still tight with them. We still hang out with them and do gigs together.

Like, Justice Cow was at our release show [for #2], so Jess was there and performing. And Jess is coming down with her friend Kate’s band, Kit Orion, and they’re playing on Tuesday, with Faye [Trust Fund Ozu]. So we’re still doing gigs together all the time. It’s just that Bent Knee is going through some transformations and Ben and Jess aren’t in it anymore, and you know, Thank You Scientist has a new vocalist and is slowly putting together this new record, so I think both of those bands are figuring out what’s happening with themselves individually.

Are there any other artists in the Cody McCorry universe that we haven’t mentioned yet that you think our readers should check out?

[Ed. Note: Cody also sent us a list of recommended bands, which we’ve put at the end of this interview.]

Oh man, there’s a lot. Justice Cow is Jess’s band, Ben Levin’s putting out cool stuff all the time. The Ben Levin expanded universe is insane. I love the arc of how Ben Levin went from a music YouTuber to making these videos about the existential void with like, adorable 3D creatures. It’s really cool. He’s just one of a kind, man.

Yeah, his work with Adam Neely, too. I love those albums they put out together, where they wrote and recorded them in twenty-four hours.

Yeah, and Adam was just on his last record, which was really cool. Courtney Swain‘s doing amazing stuff, too. She did a collaboration with the Bluecoats, the marching band that Thank You Scientist collaborated with a while ago, which was incredible. They did some of her original stuff; they also did “Creep” by Radiohead, in a beautiful arrangement.

Your bands We Used to Cut the Grass and Thank You Scientist share many of the same members. In fact, I think We Used to Cut the Grass is a superset of Thank You Scientist. But are the group dynamics quite different between the two? Thank You Scientist feels like Tom’s band and the Grass like your band?

Yeah, I would say that’s accurate. Tom is in charge of Thank You Scientist, and that’s always gonna be a set, seven-piece band: trumpet, tenor sax, violin, guitar, drums, bass, vocals. Whereas We Used to Cut the Grass is a shape-shifting-type ensemble. It’s basically just, whoever is available to come do the gigs and whoever is available to come record. People have a lot of life stuff going on and people have different projects happening…

We used to record with Sam Greenfield, who was the former tenor player from Thank You Scientist, but he is super busy touring Europe and the world with his own solo project now. So he hasn’t played with We Used to Cut the Grass in quite a while. But he’s an example of how people come in and out of We Used to Cut the Grass very casually. We rarely have the same lineup from one gig to another. Even the shows we’re playing later this month are going to have a different set of people than the release show we just did.

I feel like a lot of people don’t realize how much Thank You Scientist’s lineup has shifted since it started.

Yeah, there’s been a lot of turnover. It’s a bigger deal for Thank You Scientist because that’s more of a “band”. There are seven people who are touring and making the record. Whereas with We Used to Cut the Grass, it’s an informal roster of musicians who come together to make music. And even on the record, Faye plays drums on some tracks, Kevin’s on other tracks, they’re both on a few tracks together. I play guitar on a few songs, Tom plays guitar on a few songs. It’s much more casual.

I actually didn’t realize until the music video was released that you were playing guitar on “Shep’s Encounter”. The guitar there sounds very Jonny Greenwood [of Radiohead].

In terms of inspirations, I’d probably put Jonny Greenwood at the top. Maybe Frank Zappa. But they’re real close, maybe neck and neck. They’re probably my two biggest musical inspirations.

Well you did a great job of channeling his spirit into that song, because that’s the first thing I thought of.

When we started We Used to Cut the Grass, there was a while where I was just ripping off Radiohead as much as I possibly could. I got so much of my tonal vocabulary from that band. I love Jonny’s compositions and everything, he’s just such a cool composer.

“Shep’s Encounter” is probably the most Radiohead-like We Used to Cut the Grass song. It makes sense because it’s from the beginning of the band, which was me getting out of high school and into college when I was listening to nothing but Radiohead.

Coming back to your creative process, do you feel like you have more creative freedom in the Grass than in Thank You Scientist?

We Used to Cut the Grass is a house for my compositions and Thank You Scientist has always been a collaborative compositional band. Which is not to downplay Tom’s role in it, because I would say he’s the primary composer. He brings in most of the ideas. But it’s a case-by-case thing, too. There would be whole songs that Sam Greenfield would bring in or I would bring in… so it’s very much a collaboration.

Another question about Thank You Scientist: I saw footage of you guys at Cruise to the Edge. It looks like you were having a blast. How’s Daimon settling in? Do you feel like he’s fully gelled with the band now?

Yeah, Daimon’s doing a great job. I have a lot of experience working with Daimon from Karmic Juggernaut and also from his previous projects, like Bone and Marrow. That’s his project with his wife, Jen. They toured with Homeless Apians and we used to travel together a lot. So I’ve been working with Daimon in some capacity or another for over a decade. And yeah, he’s doing a great job. He’s a great vocalist.

I mean, there’s no replacing Sal, you know? Like, that’s just not happening. So I think that idea, that we wouldn’t even want to “replace” Sal, means that the band has to go in a new direction now. Daimon’s going to do Daimon, and he’s not going to try to replace Sal.

A new direction vocally? Or a new direction instrumentally, as well?

That’s hard to say. So far, the new material for Thank You Scientist has largely been composed by Tom with Daimon and Tom writing the vocal parts together. And I think that’s probably going to be the pattern for most of the record. I mean, every Thank You Scientist record is different, so I imagine this one will be different, too.

Obviously, without Sal, it’s going to be super different. You can’t really downplay what a huge role Sal played in the band. He has such an iconic presence and voice that I really think is irreplaceable. So the band has no choice but to develop in a different direction.

Yeah, one of the two guys who had been there from the very beginning is gone.

Straight up the only two original members. And now Tom is the last remaining one. It was always his project. If there was no Tom, there would be no Thank You Scientist.

A previous coworker of mine said “teams are immutable”. You can add or lose team members, but then it’s a different team, with different dynamics. Do you feel like that’s the case for Thank You Scientist?

Oh, yeah. I’ve been through a lot of different changes with that band. I performed with one of the original lineups with Odin, Andrew, and Ellis on Stranger Heads. That was a set band with its own dynamics. And then the turnover for the Terraformer lineup, that band had its own dynamics. And then after Faye left, this version has its own. It’s a huge change when someone comes or goes from the band, but as long as Tom wants to keep doing it, it will keep going.

He’s the core thread throughout all the different iterations.

Yeah, similar to the way that We Used to Cut the Grass started. Tom could probably verify this, but I believe Thank You Scientist was originally an instrumental project. And I think Tom sang in a very early incarnation of the band. Similar to my band, it was just a place for him to work on his compositions. I don’t think it was really until they started touring and they put out Maps of Non-Existent Places that it was, like, “we are a seven-piece prog band”.

But yeah, I would say the future of Thank You Scientist is still somewhat nebulous, but we’re working on the album for sure.

Plague Accommodations feels like it was released yesterday, but it somehow came out four years ago already.

Yeah, time flies.

I know that you have one more tour date in September, but then you’re back to working on the new LP, right? Or you’re working on it right now?

We were working on it even before Sal left the band. Since Plague Accommodations, we’ve been working on new material. Some stuff is sticking, some isn’t. We’ve been performing one of the songs live a lot. So for sure that song will be on the record, no doubt.

The rest of it remains to be seen. We’ve been working on it, but Tom has a lot more stuff that he’s been working on with Daimon. And I think Tom has a bunch of compositions that he’s about to roll out, so it’s been less collaborative than it was on Terraformer.

Do you know when we can expect a new single or a new EP?

Oh man, I wish I did. Thank You Scientist is a very slow-moving machine. But I’m trying to focus on my work with We Used to Cut the Grass. Tom has also started a new fusion project with a rhythm section from the west coast: Zach Westfall and Ray Belli, a trio fusion band called Now This. And he’s been flying out there to work on that with them. So Tom’s got a lot of irons in the fire, too, but I think he’s super motivated to be doing the new Thank You Scientist record.

Daimon’s really excited about it, too. I think it’s gonna come together. But yeah, Thank You Scientist has always been a slow-moving machine.

So no Progressive Subway exclusive single announcement date?

I wish, but no. It’s hard to give any kind of estimate. I would say safely that there’s still a lot of work to do on that record. But Tom has written a lot of stuff for it already.

It felt like we were so close to a new LP when Plague Accommodations came out in 2021 and then, of course, Sal left and things went off the rails a bit.

Yeah, I think Plague Accommodations would have been an LP if it wasn’t for Covid and the world going to shit… and also so much life stuff happened, and people joining and leaving the band… I think Plague Accommodations would have been a full record.

This isn’t really a question, but please, please, please tour in Canada again. Have you ever been to Halifax? It’s a nice place.

Haven’t been to Halifax, but we have toured Canada quite a bit. We’ve done Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, and some other places.

I saw you guys perform in Montreal, opening for Between the Buried and Me on their Parallax II Tour.

Yeah, that was a fun tour. Dan Briggs is the man. Dan and I still talk every once in a while.

It would be awesome if we could get a Tommy guest vocalist feature on the next record.

Yeah, Tommy’s awesome. And Dan has been doing some really cool stuff. He just did that record, Obverse, with Emily Hopkins, the harp player, and Chris Allison, the drummer for Plini. Dan always has some cool stuff cooking with somebody. He does a lot of collaborative stuff.

Anything that came out recently that you’re jamming to? Anything you think our readers should check out?

I really like the new Cocojoey record. Cocojoey’s an electronic, hyperpop producer and artist. They rip on the keyboard. They’re a classically trained keyboardist. And they make really cool hyperpop / electronic music and their live shows are insane. And Faye has been playing drums for them recently, on their most recent tours. Faye also opened the show as Trust Fund Ozu, and they have some shows this weekend. But yeah the new Cocojoey record is sick.

Obviously, I have to plug my partner Faye’s (Trust Fund Ozu’s) new record, Ozumaki. She always has like three albums ready to go at any given moment. She makes music so fast.

You guys are all so prolific, I don’t know how you do it.

Yeah, Faye especially, though. She’s constantly on her laptop making a new record. I think she has one that’s being mixed right now. Yeah, so Cocojoey, Trust Fund Ozu, for sure.

The new Cocojoey has gone over really well at The Progressive Subway. A lot of us are really digging it. We reviewed it when it came out. It’s probably one of my favorite releases of the past year or so.

It’s intense. It’s wild. Cocojoey, they went to college for composition, and it really shows because the themes of that record are very much intertwined and it’s a very symphonic-type album, even though it’s presented on all electronic instruments. Like, a theme from the first song comes back in the last song and it’s organized in a very classical kind of way. And yeah, I love it.

Anything else we should keep an eye out for?

Be on the lookout for more We Used to Cut the Grass stuff. We have two more live videos we’re going to be putting out. We’re doing shows in various configurations over the next few months. It’s a difficult thing to tour with this band and we’re figuring that out. Because, like, we’re not going to tour as a nine-piece band. That’s not happening. Even at the Thank You Scientist level, it’s hard to tour as a seven-piece band. So we’re going to be doing some tour dates as a trio.

It’s funny, because we’re taking this band that started as a duo, eventually grew to be a nine-piece monstrosity, and now, in order to travel, we have to shrink it back to what we started with, basically, and rearrange the music. Also, we’ll be playing a ton of new music. But we’re gonna be touring as a trio. We will be doing some tour dates as a large band, but only where that logistically makes sense, like in cities we’ve been to a bunch of times, and at clubs that know us, and stuff like that.

Sound guys are typically not very happy when you show up with two drum sets. So we’re going to stop doing that so much. I mean, we’re not going to stop doing that, but we’re going to stop doing it all the time.

Better than showing up with trash instruments, I guess?

Honestly, I think it’s worse. I think a sound guy would rather mic up a wash tub bass than to have to do changeover for two drum kits. Especially if you’re not even the headlining band, you know? But yeah, it’s logistically tough, so We Used to Cut the Grass will be touring as a trio. And just doing weekends and regional stuff.

Are the tour dates on the website now, or will they be posted shortly?

Well, not all of it’s been announced yet. Most of our promotion is through Instagram. But I would encourage people to join the mailing list. That’s the best place to keep up with the band. Because these days, you know, every post gets suppressed no matter what it is. The mailing list is the only way to avoid the algorithm completely.

[Ed. Note: you can sign up to the We Used to Cut the Grass mailing list at codymccorry.com]

Which is what we all want to do, really, isn’t it?

Yeah, ideally.

Very last question: what’s your favorite fruit?

I think it changes from year to year. Right now, I think it’s bananas.

That’s a good one. A classic.

In my house, it’s like a bit that we buy too many bananas. Like, we always have a mountain of bananas in the kitchen. And then it’s kind of a race to eat them before they all go rotten. Which is good, because it puts pressure on you to eat bananas. It’s a healthy cycle.

A similar theme to your musical endeavors, where you have so many things going on that you have to do all of them at all times.

Sort of, yeah. You find ways to put pressure on yourself to stay organized and get shit done.

And eat bananas.

And eat bananas.

—

Cody also sent The Progressive Subway his list of recommendations, repeated verbatim below

• Trust Fund Ozu (Hyperpop by Faye Fadem; I’m on bass)
• Slaughtersun (Progressive death composed by Ben Karas; I’m on bass)
• Civilians (FFO Joe Gullace)
• Flowmingos (FFO Alex Silver)
• Now This (Tom’s new fusion trio, they have an instagram but no recordings out yet)
• Justice Cow (Super raw heartwrenching alt rock by Jess formerly of Bent Knee! Ben Levin on the record as well)
• Fire-Toolz (Angel Marcloid, our mastering engineer, is an all-time musical genius)

New records I’ve been diggin’:

• STARS by Cocojoey
• Ozumaki by Trust Fund Ozu
• my dad died by Justice Cow
• Havdalah to the Blank Without by Ben Levin
• Bottle Grin by Kit Orion (Ben Levin and Jess Kion are on this record)
• The Common Task by Horse Lords
• About Ghosts by Mary Halvorson
• MOHINI DEY by Mohini Dey

Thank you again to Cody McCorry for the interview and make sure to check out the new LP We Used to Cut the Grass #2 on Bandcamp and wherever else good music is streamable!

Links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Album review

The post Interview: Cody McCorry (We Used to Cut the Grass) appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Avant-Garde, Prog Metal, Experimental
Recommended for Fans of: Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Native Construct, Subterranean Masquerade, The Dear Hunter, Pain of Salvation, Igorrr
Review by: Ryan
Country: Israel
Release date: September 1, 2013

Shame on you. Shame on all of you. How this incredible piece of music has flown under the radar for ten years is irreconcilably ridiculous. What should be the gold standard of experimental progressive music has instead found itself as a footnote. Even worse, OMB has never released a follow-up to their debut album, SwineSong. Imagine a world where this band had found its audience and subsequently influenced our modern prog scene. Maybe the world we live in would be a greater place for us all, but instead, we have only fifty minutes of their collective genius and may never see anything on par with it again.

Israeli collective OMB  (Of Marble’s Black) unleashed their only album SwineSong in September of 2013, and a decade later, SwineSong is still one of my absolute favorite pieces of music. Over the years I’ve watched their Spotify monthly listeners fluctuate from one monthly listener (me) to currently fifty-one, which may be the highest I’ve ever seen it. People throw around phrases like “ahead of its time” constantly, but I don’t know how else to describe SwineSong. OMB set a precedent with this album that I’ve yet to see surpassed or even matched when it comes to avant-garde prog metal. You may recognize the vocals of Davidavi Dolev from his more recent work with Reign of the Architect, Seventh Station, Gunned Down Horses, and Subterranean Masquerade. Despite being a fan of all of the aforementioned acts, I’ve yet to have the same itch scratched achieved here on SwineSong with its passion for over-the-top experimentation.

Genre-bending tends to be a tricky mistress, but OMB has created an incredibly fluid piece of music here that flows seamlessly through muddy waters. To quote Chris Parnell in Walk Hard, “It’s like some kinda concerto,” and SwineSong is better for it. OMB takes the listener on an unrelenting and surreal journey through a beautiful demented world—structure, be damned! OMB rarely repeats themselves, instead opting to keep moving forward with their abstract art. 

Genre barriers are brutally ripped apart limb by limb throughout SwineSong. With a firm avant-garde and progressive metal basis, OMB incorporates elements of musical theater, flamenco, black metal, virtuoso, jazz, bossa nova, traditional percussion, psychedelia, thrash, djent, post-rock, and on and on—they’re all here wrapped In a firm but comfy prog metal blanket. On first listen, it may seem disjointed and random, but given time, the music becomes incredibly clear just how impeccably planned this record actually is. Every moment serves its purpose and flows directly into the next section. Even when the changes sound sudden, every piece Tetris-es its way into an obscure myriad of moving pieces. From horns to violins to sitar, OMB continuously challenges the listener to keep up with them as they travel through a strange auditory universe. If ever an acid-induced fever dream was put to music this is it; SwineSong is simultaneously a terrifying bad trip and the most enlightening beautiful journey ever recorded. 

I find it extremely difficult to do justice to SwineSong with mere words. It is beyond a simple music review and can only be absorbed properly as an auditory experience. There has never been anything like this record and the genius herein may never be seen again. It may be humanity’s greatest shame that SwineSong never managed to find its audience and instead was birthed into obscurity and ten years later still orbits that same ghostly veil. 

SwineSong is a piece of high art. Its heartbreaking finale “The Cricket’s Broken Violin” ends with the lyric “Through all my life, through all my times, I try to write my next creation.” Yet, this ending vocalism was the nail in the OMB coffin. If only we could pry open that casket and find good old Stan S. Stanman inside offering to sell us a brand new OMB record. I, for one, would solve a litany of obscure and punny puzzles to finally unearth that treasure.

Recommended Tracks: These Walls…, An Ordinary Caveman Sings Ode to Obsession, Someday My Prince Will Come, The Cricket’s Broken Violin

You May Also Like: Vulture Industries, Schizoid Lloyd, Gunned Down Horses

Related Links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube | Facebook
Label: Ward7 Group

OMB is:
Davidavi Dolev – Vocals
Yuval Kramer – Guitars
Or Rozenfeld – Bass, Contrabass
Yuval Tamir – Drums, Percussion

The post Lost in Time: OMB – SwineSong appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Experimental Black Metal, Free Jazz, “World” Music (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Blut Aus Nord, Neptunian Maximalism
Review by: Cooper
Country: Japan
Release date: 4 August, 2023

Oftentimes, when one is tasked with describing their own music, promises are made that are rarely kept. Every day, I read Bandcamp album descriptions promising me nirvana if I were to just listen to these few songs, yet I still suffer in this mortal world. So when an album refers to itself as “an enigmatic and playfully formulaic quandary of deconstructed, visionary counter-music reminding us a simple concept: that reality is dictated by perception” and “an exploration of the notions of self-reflection, intuition, phobia, luck, and failure in the context of the evil eye, its historical, cultural, physical and metaphysical meanings, as well as its psychological effects, carefully unraveled and revealed,” it’s fair to understand why I may be a bit skeptical; after all, those sound more like the abstract for someone’s thesis than it does an album description. And yet, despite how doubtful I may have been of the promises made by the album’s description, here I sit, wonderstruck, by the magnitude of what was achieved on Skopofoboexoskelett, the fourth EP from 夢遊病者 (pronounced “Mèngyóu bìng zhě” and Chinese for sleepwalker).

Within the first moments of opening track “Mirrors Turned Inward”, 夢遊病者 makes it abundantly clear what sort of audio experience you’ve gotten yourself into. After a brief industrial soundscape, you are submerged into the dark and murky waters of amorphous free jazz-esque guitar and drum work, only able to come up for air on the rare occasion that the instruments lock into a perceptible rhythm, orienting you beneath the dark surface. But even when the song forms into rhythmic normality, its harmonic content is still jarring enough to always leave you uneasy; you may now be treading water, but something still lurks beneath the surface. Slowly though, “Mirrors Turned Inward” moves closer to the realm of what most may refer to as music, jagged guitar motifs blooming open and saxophone entering to bring the song to its more melodically driven conclusion. After just the first song, Skopofoboexoskelett’s goal of unraveling the nature of music itself is coming to fruition with its deeply opposing elements that only work when in conjunction. Like a chef slaughtering a cow in front of his guests before feeding them a burger, it is as though the EP is capturing the essence of anti-music in its entirety by not only showing us music’s deconstruction, but by then showing us how intensely beautiful music can simply be.

“Silesian Fur Coat”, track two, begins with the incredibly addictive musical texture that is the combination of swampy slide guitar, dark, pounding, broody bass, and reverb laden “world” instruments such as the ney, the qanun, and the nyckelharpa – instruments I have never once heard before – and then, using that initial texture as clay, sculpts the rest of the song, slowly adding in layers of strings and inevitably cutting away all unnecessary elements until the song reaches its glorious melodic climax, a climax able to ring so purely only juxtaposed against the squall that preceded it. The next track, “The Eagle Flies”, despite being the shortest song on Skopofoboexoskelett at just 3 minutes, delivers a musical journey of untold length; the use of didgeridoo, worldly percussion, and sleigh bells especially gave the song an exotic and airy texture, a reprieve from the darker tones present elsewhere.

When closing track, “The Bad Luck That Saved You From Worse Luck” finally begins, its more predictable patterns may be surprising after the chaos that came prior, but do not be mistaken; something evil dwells here, too. For after a tasteful guitar solo with an even tastier cello accompaniment, the song turns on its heels as blisteringly distorted guitars and vocals enter to seemingly destroy the song’s established groove only for everything to shift once again, lurching forward into a much quicker pace. It really is stellar songwriting. From here, the tension and chaos build up to the point of no return only to give way to a climax of strings and guitar that will almost certainly go down as the most beautiful musical moment I’ll hear all year.

With Skopofoboexoskelett, 夢遊病者 have left me craving more. The music on display here is powerful and the more I listen and the more I ponder, the more meaningful it seems to become, as though its memory is more poignant than its presence. The fact that I am now pondering the nature of music itself means that this album has more than achieved its desired effect on me and that I will surely return to this for years to come. In 25 minutes, 夢遊病者 have revealed to me more about than the nature of music than countless hours of listening prior, and although I may not be able to articulate it, as though it were something deep and instinctual, I feel its importance. If you have your doubts, open your mind and see for yourself.

Recommended tracks: Listen to it all! It’s only 25 minutes!
You may also like: Salqiu, Imperial Triumphant, A.M.E.N.
Final verdict: 10/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube

Label: Sentient Ruin Laboratories – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

夢遊病者 is:
– PBV (fretted and fretless acoustic and electric guitars, vocals, dulcimer, harmonica, effects, field recording)
– NN (fretted and fretless basses, xylophone, prepared piano, vocals)
– KJM (drums, percussion, objects, polivoks, vocals)

Guests include:
– EB (saxophone)
– IK (ney)
– SH (qanun)
– WY (didgeridoo)
– DSV (nyckelharpa)
– EJ (harmonium, harp)
– SA (cello)
– AN (bassoon)
– DTM (vocals)
– The Plovdiv PVVP Choir (vocals)
– DW (spoken word)
– H/TS (spoken word)
– KK (translation to Polish)
– BB (German translation consult)
– DA (vocals)
– RR (vocals)
– MA (vocals)
– RA (vocals)

The post Review: 夢遊病者 – Skopofoboexoskelett appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Avant Garde Black Metal, Jazz, Heavy Metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Sigh, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane
Review by: Cooper
Country: Italy
Release date: 16 June, 2023

For too long the clarinet has lain dormant in the progressive music scene, overshadowed by its woodwind brethren in saxophone and flute, and for too long have saxophone and flute reigned supreme, content to ride the coattails of the already encumbered King Crimson and Jethro Tull as far as they will go. The time is nigh for clarinet to ascend to the throne of woodwinds in progressive music and put its lethargic predecessors to rest. At least that’s what The Book of Lies – Liber I, the first entry in a planned series of releases, by A.M.E.N. would have you believe with how unabashedly it employs the underutilized reed instrument.

Going into this album, one should expect to hear just as much, if not more, passages featuring clarinet than they’ll hear featuring either guitar or vocals, and much like the other projects (Dawn of a Dark Age, Incantvm, Notturno) of Vittorio Sabelli, the man behind all instruments on this album, Liber I is musically grounded in a rather small area. This means Sabelli, despite the relatively meager 37 minute run time, is able to fully explore the intersection of jazz clarinet, avant-garde black metal, and heavy metal that occurs on Liber I. A delicate balance is struck where each section seems to resolve just as it was beginning to feel boring or monotonous and each section that follows is just fresh enough to re-engage my interest.

As it turns out though, consistently piquing my interest is not enough for me to truly love an album, no matter how intriguing its ideas. In the latter half of the album especially, where the average song length dips below the 2-minute mark, I found my enjoyment waning; it felt as though I was listening to several metal/clarinet proof-of-concepts more than any sort of fully realized songs which is truly a shame because the clarinet does work, incredibly well in fact! Its inherently dynamic and subtle nature juxtaposes the harsh guitars and vocals, and its jazzy melodies brought a sophisticated nature to the music that fans of the avant-garde will certainly love. Despite this though, I still can’t help but feel like A.M.E.N. played it safe on Liber I (I know it sounds crazy calling a revolutionary, avant-garde black metal album “safe”, but I do have my reasons).

For one, once the initial shock factor of hearing clarinet in this context has worn off, there is never another moment where I found myself surprised by this album. Don’t get me wrong; Sabelli is clearly a virtuosic player with damn impressive chops, but I can only hear dissonant staccato attacks and slinky solos so many times before I start to get a little tired, especially when they come at a pace as rapid as the second half of this album. I find myself wishing that Sabelli had dug into the harsher side of the clarinet, embracing the shrill squeaks and squeals the instrument can produce ala Albert Ayler, but Liber I sees Sabelli favoring a sleeker approach – aided by its crystalline production – that would work for a pop hit but leaves this avant-garde black metal ultimately feeling dry and, as I have already said safe. I will say that the production is perfect for the soundscape tracks featuring guest vocalist Erba del Diavolo.

Ultimately though, these complaints are minor in the face of what A.M.E.N. accomplished on The Book of Lies – Liber I, and I am incredibly excited to see what Sabelli and gang are able to cook up in A.M.E.N.’s next installment, provided they push the envelope even more.

Recommended tracks: The Sabbath of the Goat, Dinosaur, Windlestraws, Pilgrim-Talk
You may also like: Salqiu, Dawn of a Dark Age, Incantvm, Demoniac
Final verdict: 7/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube | Facebook

Label: I, Voidhanger – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

A.M.E.N. is:
– Vittorio Sabelli (all instruments)
– Matteo Vitelli (vocals)
– Erba del Diavolo (Vocals on “The Sabbath of the Goat” and “Waratah-Blossoms”)

The post Review: A.M.E.N. – The Book of Lies – Liber I appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Jazz, Avant-Garde Metal, Progressive Metal (Instrumental)
Review by: Mathis
Country: France
Release date: 3 June, 2022

Ya like jazz? Well have I ever got a treat for you, or I guess Ckraft has a treat for you. I am going to assume you have some appreciation for metal as well; you are reading this on a metal/rock blog after all. Epic Discordant Vision is an avant-garde metal album with all the nuance of free jazz and the weight of a thousand tenor saxophones.

To give you a less ambiguous idea of what Epic Discordant Vision sounds like, I need to get you readers up to speed on some history behind Ckraft. Charles Kieny was abruptly introduced to the accordion at a young age. However, he eventually ditched the accordion in favor of more interesting activities. Fast forward a bit and Kieny had taken a liking to metal over the years, with bands like Korn, Meshuggah, and Gojira. He wasn’t even introduced to jazz until he attended a workshop at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris (Kieny’s Alma Mater), which exposed Kieny to the idea of spontaneity in music. The flowing composition of improvisational jazz, a river that always flows in one direction yet explores every possible alternate route, sometimes becoming a soft and graceful stream, other times a torrent of erratic and destructive energy. The freedom to reach the destination without a premeditated path initially sparked Kieny’s fascination with jazz.

In the years after his introduction to jazz, Kieny met many other musicians that shared his appreciation for jazz and metal, and together they formed Ckraft, with Kieny at the helm of the ship. Epic Discordant Vision is the perfect title for this album; it’s a grand feast with fifty minutes of harsh riffage, tenor sax leads, and accordion noodling. It’s in the same realm as T.R.A.M with the bass and guitar creating a thick foundation and the more traditional jazz instruments in the foreground. However, since Kieny is so captivated by improvisational music, Epic Discordant Vision is more chaotic and … discordant. Jazz is commonly thought of as soft “elevator music”, and most of the larger artists in jazz fusion employ a softer, welcoming sound too. Ckraft is different. The majority of their melodies are heavily influenced by Gregorian chants, giving their music a medieval chill. This unsettling gothic tone is one of the few consistencies throughout the whole album.

The other consistency in Epic Discordant Vision is the accordion. Initially, I didn’t hear it as often or as prominently as I expected but turns out I was hearing it all along. Kieny plays an augmented accordion which is essentially a standard accordion that can play directly to synthesizers. It’s like using pedals on guitars or presets on a keyboard. This allows for a very broad range of sounds from traditional acoustic accordion; from the minute-long solo in “Bug Out!” to the oscillating synths in “Haunted Axis”. It’s refreshing to see that the accordion isn’t just a gimmick for Ckraft. It creates a massive amount of depth in the music, whether supplemental or serving as the vanguard it’s much more than a scheme to entice listeners.

Ckraft is composed of musical monstrosities no doubt, and Charles Kieny is an absolute genius. I’m not a genius, however, and this creates a significant disconnect. As per standard procedure, I would typically go through the good, bad, and ugly of Epic Discordant Vision. This album is not quite standard or typical though; I have a hard time discerning one track from the next, and although it is impressive I genuinely can’t get into it. The entwining Gregorian melodies mixed with the abstract free-form jazz sort of blend the album into one large track. There are no softer songs, no heavier songs, no interludes, no guest vocals, and nothing that makes one track more notable than any of the others.

I’ll just say that this album is remarkable but doesn’t tickle my fancy. If ya like jazz, then you need to go listen to Ckraft now, because you will love them! If jazz isn’t your cup of tea, if you like more structure to your music, or if you like to know what’s coming next, then maybe skip this album.

Recommended tracks: ???
Recommended for fans of: T.R.A.M, Panzerballet
You may also like: Wax People, Peculate, Krokofant
Final verdict: 6/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Independent

Ckraft is:
– Charles Kieny (augmented accordion, composition)
– Théo Nguyen Duc Long (tenor saxophone)
– Antoine Morisot (guitar)
– Marc Karapetian (bass)
– William Bur (drums)

The post Review: Ckraft – Epic Discordant Vision appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

In our ongoing efforts to please everyone over the globe, the Progressive Subway Department for Musical Weather Suitability have devised a playlist for you that can at once capture the liveliness of Spring as well as the longing for shelter and a bit of coziness that comes with Autumn: Jazz.

Yes, Jazz. Often raucous and lively, often sombre and contemplative. The ultimate blend of music to suit your needs. Our writers Mathis, Sebastian and Will have tirelessly scoped out the very best the underground has to offer for Jazz-infused Prog music for your listening pleasure, whatever the season. Enjoy.

Will

Though I’m no expert on the subject, I’ve been a fan of Jazz for some time. There’s a lot to like about and engage with in Jazz and it’s always exciting to hear it being incorporated into prog. In selecting tracks for this playlist, I kept in mind the three main “traits” of Jazz that I love (Calm, smoky atmospheres, complete creative chaos and inspired technical musicianship) and found tracks in the prog-universe (“progosphere”?) that best reflected these traits:

Pure creative chaos can be found in Ephel Death’s “Passageway” embodies the creative chaos that I enjoy about Jazz and that Tom Waits used to great effect in tracks like “Midtown”. Ephel Death takes it further in adding overdriven guitar and the primal rawness of the human voice’s scream to create an atmosphere of pure energy. Candiria brings some similar energy with a proggy-jazz infused rap-metal which has to be heard to be believed!

At the extreme other end of the spectrum, Maudlin on the Wall embodies the calm, smooth, melodic sounds of artists like Dexter Gordon or Coleman Hawkins. SE:UM has been a band very close to my heart since I saw a few of their early tours in Seoul. “Abyss” is a smoky, mysterious piece that would make a beautiful soundtrack to a Korean Film-Noir, by effortlessly blending jazz and traditional Korean instruments to tremendous effect.

For the sheer technical brilliance that we so often find in Jazz musicians, I suggest you look no further than Mestís. Technical brilliance as well as heartfelt playing, Mestís is known for a lot of genre-hopping in his work and the track “Menta” is 5 minutes of pure brilliance.

Keeping true to The Progressive Subway’s mission of connecting listeners with underground proggressive music, most of my selection has been taken from smaller bands. However, I couldn’t resist sneaking some more well-known bands into the mix: Rivers of Nihil are well known for their incorporation of Jazzy saxophone solos to be incorporated into their track. And, after the lukewarm fan reception to latest album The Works, it’s important to go back to this band to remember why we fell in love with them in the first place. Jazz lost it’s best new drummer when Brann Daylor of Mastodon first spun up a metal CD. Daylor’s jazz-infused drumming, full of swung beats and beautifully subtle grace notes is sublime and deserves a spotlight in this playlist. Finally, no prog-jazz playlist would be complete without a nod to jazz powerhouse Snarky Puppy who, through the overwhelming force of their incredible musicianship, cannot be denied a spot on this playlist.

I enjoyed my jazzy journey making this playlist. Readers, please send me your suggestions of further jazz prog I may have missed!

Sebastian

For all of my jazz fusion picks, I decided to stay true to my prog metal roots. There is almost no underground band that I think better exemplifies the stereotypical conception of prog metal / jazz fusion than Panzerballett and the lesser-known Wax People. These both convey the complexity and precision of the two genres well and they authenticate the jazz flavor by including full-time saxophone and clarinet players. I also wanted to include the equally impressive instrumental jams from Mental Fracture and Coevality which have strong jazzy elements mixed in with their proggy breakdowns.

Another small but growing field of jazz-fusion metal is the resurgence of zeuhl in prog metal. Back in 2021, I had the privilege of reviewing Papangu’s debut album Holoceno. Not knowing jack about what this sophisticated, jazzy subgenre of progressive rock entailed I was thrown down a rabbit hole of researching Zeuhl history from the classics produced by Magma and Eskaton to modern gems like All Traps on Earth. To the standards of a die-hard zeuhl fan, the compositions in Holoceno are a bit down to earth and digestible but it still is one of the most cohesive fusions of metal and zeuhl to date and I would easily recommend it. I also wanted to include a song from a band nearly nobody has heard of; Odd Fiction may not be the most experienced but they deliver a short EP that provides a challenging listen and a more dissonant approach to the genre.

Mathis

When I think of jazz fusion the first artist that comes to mind is Plini. He played a major role in my interest and love for fusion, and was one of the first prog artists I discovered. I used to think that everyone was just trying to sound like him, but my ears were untrained. Eventually I discovered a plethora of other great jazz fusion acts. Nuclear Power Trio (NPT) is much more grand and energetic than the typical progressive jazz fusion you may know and love. For better or worse NPT is a satirical instrumental fusion band that consists of Kim Jong Un on Drums, Donald Trump as the guitarist, and Vladimir Putin on bass. It really is a sight to behold, and it conveys a beautiful message that music can unify us no matter how different we may be.

Then on the other hand we have Sound Struggle‘s “The Bridge” which is a story to be taken much more seriously. This song is a twenty minute epic that sits halfway through a massive concept album. Sound Struggle takes a different approach to fusion and blends metalcore with blaring horns, synths, and the occasional obscure instrument. Now we have strayed quite a bit from Plini‘s softer ethereal sound, but we can go even further with The Sound That Ends Creation (TSTEC). Who would have guessed grindcore and jazz mix so perfectly together? No one, it is actually nightmarish. TSTEC sounds like the soundtrack to zombie clowns attacking the horns section of a middle school band on methamphetamine. The music sounds kinda cool though, there’s nothing else like it.

Related Progressive Subway Articles

• Wax People
• Papangu
• Coevality
• Von Citizen
• Sound Struggle
• James Norbert Ivanyi
• Umpfel
• Mental Fracture

The post Playlist – Jazz-Infused Prog appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Prog Rock, Psychedelic, Space Rock, Jazz (clean vocals)

Review by: Will

Country: UK

Release date: 1 October 2021

We all know it’s wrong to judge a book by its cover (or album by its artwork). I have to admit, though, I did just that for 4; the latest (and fourth!) release from the British prog-rock sextet Diagonal. Alex Crispin’s gorgeous artwork featuring a penrose square, a levitating orange and liquid floating in a zero-gravity amorphous orb is somehow an excellent summation of the music: abstract, psychedelic, warm and strangely sublime.

Based in Bristol, Diagonal has long been established in the British prog scene having released their first album back way back in 2008. The band has had something of a habit of leaving their fans hanging between album releases: Four years between album one (Diagonal) and two (The Second Mechanism); and a whopping seven years until the third album, Arc. So, by Diagonal’s conception of time, this album was practically released immediately after its 2019 predecessor Arc.

Stylistically, 4 feels like a natural progression from Arc, retaining much of the gorgeous ‘70’s prog sound that has come to define Diagonal, but with enough new ideas to distinguish itself:  4 incorporates more elements of space-rock and post-rock into its repertoire, and there’s also a change in personnel on instruments (Alex Crispin stepping away from the organ in favour of a synth and bass, and David Polmett switching to guitar). The extra synths aid in creating that zero-gravity-space-rock feel and the extra guitar pays dividends on some of the heavier tracks like “Stellate”, giving the songs an extra sense of drive and lays a solid foundation for some of the scorching guitar solos delivered by David Wileman.

I’d recommend listening to Arc and 4 back to back to really appreciate how 4 manages to be a change in sound to and yet a natural progression of Arc: The last two tracks of Arc softly dissolve into ambient noise and harmonised vocals and 4’s first track “Amon” contrasts beautifully with it with its more guitar driven opening.

At a compact 37 minute runtime, the album is in itself an act of self-restraint and discipline so often absent in progressive music. Resultantly, none of the songs have any unnecessary excess and the album never feels like it’s dragging. That’s not to say this is a minimalist album – not at all: “Chroma” has some of the most sumptuous saxophone solos this side of Coleman Hawkins and “Spinning Array” features an eclectic mix of instruments including the Chinese Hulusi, as well as the humble recorder. But that is kept in check by a focused sounding writing process and un-elaborate but tightly executed instrumental pieces.  All this is put together in a beautifully engineered mix which emphasises some of those thick, warm 70’s tones.

Although the album does flow together, it very much feels like each song has its own distinct identity. “Amon”, named for musical collective Amon Düül II, is a tribute to 60s and 70s space rock; “Chroma” is more jazz infused with saxophone solos galore; “Spinning Array” is the most old-Diagonal song with its eclectic instrumental mix and vocal hooks; “Stellate” is the rockier track where the guitars are let off the lead; the sublime track “Totem” rounds off the album with a dreamy space-age soundscape that feels like a warm sunrise on a cold day.

While these distinct song identities help the album feel more focused, it does feel somewhat disparate at times with the tones somewhat separated like oil and water. As I eagerly await the next Diagonal album (give it another few years), I hope they can incorporate these different musical ideas together and perhaps feel more comfortable stretching their instrumental muscles and delivering a more complex work that puts together all the beautiful pieces they lay out in this album. It would have been great to hear some of those excellent guitar solos jamming in a jazzier song, or perhaps some soothing sax being incorporated into Diagonal’s rockier material. 

Just like its beautiful album art, the music of 4 is intriguing and beautiful and definitely worth a listen.

Recommended tracks: Totem, Chroma, Stellate
Recommended for fans of: Hawkwind, Liar, Rush, Jethro Tull, Explosions in the Sky, Amon Düül II, Mogwai
You may also like: SE:UM (for the eclectic blend of jazz and eastern instruments), Acid Mothers Temple
Final verdict: 8/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | Prog-Archives page

Label: Cobblers Records – Bandcamp | Facebook

Diagonal is:
– Alex Crispin – Bass, Synthesiser, Electric Piano, Vocals
– Luke Foster – Drums, Percussion, Organ, Synthesiser, Vocals
– Ross Hossack – Synthesiser
– Daniel Pomlett – Guitar
– Nicholas Whittaker – Alto Saxophone, Soprano Saxophone, Hulusi, Vocals
– David Wileman – Guitar

The post Review: Diagonal – 4 appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Experimental progressive rock (instrumental)
Review by: Nick
Country: UK
Release date: 7 May, 2021

Voronoi is an experimental progressive rock trio hailing from Leeds who just released their debut album, The Last Three Seconds. Coming in at just under 50 minutes, this album blends together avant-garde jazz, contemporary jazz, metal, and electronic music to create a very…unique sound. And while I appreciate the effort for originality, I feel like it doesn’t quite pan out.

There’s a lot that I want to get into and the best place to start would probably be the production. You’ll notice right from the first track that this album is almost painfully bright. It’s well produced, sure, but that focus on the brighter range damns it from having depth in terms of the dynamics in the album. In moments where there’s a big climax like on “Home Could Be Lightyears Away”, the disproportionate focus on the high end leaves the mix feeling like an assault of noise. It’s okay to focus on the high end at parts (the focus there actually benefits the more reserved sections of the album) but leaving all of the focus there and not giving the lower range any presence just ends up hurting the overall sound of the album.

Another point I wanted to touch on is the compositions themselves. Pretty much every track less than five minutes feels almost like a voice memo, like it’s a snippet of a larger track that they came up with that they recorded for future reference. Take the opening track for example, “Interstellar Something”. The entire track is just a couple chords being toyed around with for three and a half minutes. It’s not necessarily bad, it just feels half-baked and uninteresting. Half-baked is actually a great single-term summary for how I feel about this album, because even most of the tracks that try to deviate from their starting point feel like rough demos.

Possibly the worst example I can come up with for this is “Darker The Night” which starts with a haunting synth intro that abruptly leads into a piano part that feels like a song ripped from a video game. This beautiful piano part builds up an intense atmosphere and great tension that is just thrown in the bin by a seemingly progressive metal section. This song could rip, it has all the components to rip, and yet it’s so undercooked that it just sounds rough. The closest they get to a really solid song on the first half of the album is “The Nauseator” which is a sprawling ten minute piece. But even with a full ten minutes to smooth out each section, it still just feels like a mish mash of variations on a certain melody without any real cohesion.

This isn’t to say there aren’t good moments. In fact the final three tracks are actually quite great, especially the 12 minute long “The Outsider and The Priest”. Throughout each of these tracks you can see a strong, coherent approach that was lacking during the five prior tracks. The songs naturally grow and morph into their own beings rather than feel like a taped together collage of takes on one part, and the genres are perfectly combined whereas before they felt splotched together. The title track takes a tense electronic approach with those avant-garde elements and video game music. “The Outsider and The Priest” goes full on jazz for the vast majority of the track and leans back into the realm of progressive rock just over two thirds in. And finally the earlier mentioned final track, “Home Could Be Lightyears Away”, takes a sort of post rock approach to the song structure. It builds up tension until the last quarter of the track where they can go all out in a cacophony of noise.

It’s these three tracks that make me so goddamn disappointed with the rest of the album. These tracks show exactly what Voronoi is capable of. Had these tracks not been on here I may not have been as brutal in this review. I may have been able to chalk it up to a case of an experiment that didn’t work or a band that has yet to find their sound, but with these three tracks I just can’t do that. With these three tracks I just feel like I listened to a solid three song EP with an extra 25 minutes tacked on to the start. It’s a shame, but at the same time I’m left hopeful at what they might do in the future.

Recommended tracks: The Priest and The Outsider, The Last Three Seconds, Home Could Be Lightyears Away
Recommended for fans of: Tigran Hamasyan, avant garde jazzy prog
Final verdict: 3.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook

Label: Independent

Voronoi is:
– Sam Quintana (bass)
– Tom Higham (drums)
– Aleks Podraza (keyboard)

The post Review: Voronoi – The Last Three Seconds appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: adult contemporary, black metal, jazz (harsh vocals)
Review by: Dan
Country: USA
Release date: 23 April, 2021

According to last.fm, I’ve sampled 5,833 artists as of this writing, and I have never heard an album that sounds or cuts like Corpseflower. Period.

I’ve listened through this captivating, magical experience upwards of a dozen times by now, and still haven’t managed to quite put into words anything near as eloquent as what Cicada the Burrower has created here. This is a poignant and deeply introspective story about pain, about hope, and about transition. It’s cathartic and honest, emotional and beautiful, simultaneously haunting and uplifting. Placing myself into the mind of this artist while listening through Corpseflower has quite literally brought me to tears. This is art of the highest caliber, completely unfettered by genre or precedent, completely unbeholden to norms or expectations: pure, honest self-expression.

The full, entrancing experience of Corpseflower is hard to describe, to the point where I’ve missed my review submission deadline here at The Progressive Subway despite listening to this album on repeat, because I’ve struggled to nail it down. It’s a lush, gorgeous blend of jazz, black metal, and – in the artist’s own words – adult contemporary. The album artwork’s juxtaposition of muted, floral beauty with the grim macabre skeleton is quite representative of the soundscapes within: jazzy drums and uplifting melodies paired with gentle washes of distortion and harsh vocals in a wholly new and uncompromising way. Simultaneously familiar and yet utterly unique, it gets better and better with each listen. The hypnotic grooves make the album’s 30-minute runtime feel like a blink of an eye.

Album opener “The Fever Room” sets the tone well, with its soothing, hypnotic clean melodies, rounded, warm distortion, swinging drums, and memorable structure. The emotional intensity and darkness of the tracks gradually builds through the album’s outstanding and nearly continuous track-to-track flow, peaking with the harrowing chorus of “I wish I had never been born” in penultimate track “Psilocybin Death Spiral,” before the lengthy instrumental album closer title track gently returns the listener to a better headspace.

Adding to the richness of emotion within the music is the album’s backstory: Cameron is a transgender woman, and Corpseflower expresses the feelings of pain, self-discovery, and cautious hope that arose from coming out and beginning her journey towards self-acceptance. These complex emotions are real, raw, fresh, and tangible throughout the album. I’m no stranger to albums borne of this struggle – last year’s A Tessitura of Transfiguration by Victory Over the Sun is a particularly excellent and memorable example – but Corpseflower reopens those empathic wounds anew.

On the production side, at a surface level one could nitpick a bit, as the drums end up a bit buried and the vocals are a bit too prominent, but honestly, I wouldn’t change a thing. The unique production choices contribute to the album’s honest presentation, and help it hit home more effectively.

I can’t reiterate enough how unique and captivating this record is, and I can’t encourage you enough to lose yourself in its emotional soundscapes and open your mind to the pain and hope presented within.

Recommended tracks: all of them
Recommended for fans of: Oranssi Pazuzu, Deafheaven, Victory Over The Sun, Holy Fawn, crying
Final verdict: 9/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Metal-Archives page
Label: Blue Bedroom Records – Bandcamp | Website | Facebook

Cicada the Burrower is:
– Cameron Davis (everything)

The post Review: Cicada the Burrower – Corpseflower appeared first on The Progressive Subway.