Buddy Wynkoop – Serotonin
Genre: Garage Rock, Alternative Rock
Similar artists: Devo, Talking Heads, Squid
Rock music is under collective ownership. We’re all responsible for it, some amount or another. It’s just that we all have very different ideas about what should happen with it. It’s the very same issue that we all have with collective spaces. The majority of people would like to see something nice and clean. There are some, however, who can’t find any rest before those places are wrecked.
It only makes sense that music, and art, in general, would function in the same way. Straight lines get very dull for some, and coloring within the lines can’t even be considered. Dissonance, distortion, and ugliness are things to be considered with all seriousness and used as tools to create something powerful.
Buddy Wynkoop’s Serotonin is a beautifully ugly little song, much like the modern world itself. It twists and folds on itself like demented funk music. It’s rock reconstructed and thrown back into the faces of the people that dared love it in the first place. And overall, it’s a neat little fright session, the kind that keeps one on their toes.
LJ & The Sleeze – Ain’t Easy Bein Sleezy
Genre: Punk-rock
If you were trying to rip off The Ramones immediately after their first couple of records came out, you might have thought that it would be a breeze. After all, it wasn’t hard to understand the formula that they were using. Three power chords and 50s doo-wop melodies. Sure. Dress in a tough-guy uniform. No prob. Write songs about the sort of things that would fill up the pages of pulp novels. Yeah, that’s easy.
But, somehow, nobody ever managed to give The Ramones a run for their money despite the numerous copy-cats and tribute acts. It got so bad that people just stopped trying altogether. It seemed that the combo that had been perfected was a mix of idiocy and genius that nobody could truly grasp.
LJ & The Sleeze’s Ain’t Easy Bein Sleezy finally gives us a band looking to be stupidly brilliant, or the other way around, perhaps, and the world is a better place for it. Their music is direct, in bad taste, and designed to be as catchy as can be. The playing seems to be produced by people that have learned their instruments on the way to the studio immediately after robbing a music store. And LJ looks like a comic-book New York punk-rocker. It’s a brilliant combination.
This might all be a little too much in our day and age. And so, the video aims to give audiences a glimpse of LJ & The Sleeze. The comedy and grime are captured in the ambitious B-movie-tribute music video. It’s just as over the top as the band’s music. But, mark my words, somewhere, there will be high-school kids grinning from ear-to-ear and planning their own music store heist.
