Branson Anderson – Shake Your Bangs
Country music, for at least 80 years or so, really sends out a message each time that it is played. It’s not about the lyrics to the song, the person doing the singing, or even the quality of those two things in tandem. It’s what it represents in the U.S. and outside of it.
For most of the people living out in the big cities in the U.S., who pride themselves on being sophisticated and well-travelled, country-music has always been old-hat. It’s always been the music that they’d rather ignore.
For the people who do not live in hellish urban sprawls, it is music that reminds them of their roots. It’s also a sound that gets them to do things such as – vote, buy products, sign petitions against the president.
Country music is charged with meaning as well as with powerful energy. It is, after all, together with the blues, the place where rock n’ roll music started. Branson Anderson understands these things all too well. “Shake Your Bangs” sounds fun and riotous. But there’s a bit of humor to the way that it is presented as well. “Shake Your Bangs” almost resembles the 1980s DEVO playing country in its demented way and trying to pull a fast one on the people who love it.
Ben Denny Mo – Purple Face
When The Beatles first started producing their own songs, they were shocked that they could copyright something like this. After all, they’d lifted some of the chords from a Little Richard song and a few of the melodies from a Buddy Holly tune. The rest of it was just kind of made up on the spot and seemed to come straight out of nowhere. How was it that you could really make money with this?
All these years later, songwriting is a thriving industry. The old rockstar sells the songs that they came up with in a similar way as the Fab Four for hundreds of millions of dollars to companies who’ll make money off of them from product placements.
In other quarters, the record companies will get 3-4 teams of 3-4 people working on a single song for a top-name artist. The goal is to create an algorithm for writing a hit single. It’s no wonder it all sounds so counterfeit, so spurious.
Sometimes you just need to hear a singer-songwriter with great potential finding a song as they go along. Ben Denny Mo’s modern folk-rock song “Purple Face” sounds like a tune being discovered just as it is being poured onto tape. This strategy allows for having to double-guess or edit out choices. It’s just a tune about love, loss and acceptance that pours out. And, when you listen to Ben Denny Mo’s convincingly singing his own tunes, you know that it’s not an army of 12 people involved in making it. I, at least, breathe a sigh of relief at knowing this.
