BY BRIAN HOWE
Maybe it’s just because I’d been listening to Graceland right before I first I heard it, but I get a distinct Paul Simon vibe from “Death Kids of the Cuyahoga Valley,” the new single by The Monologue Bombs, the solo-with-friends project of Raleigh’s Scott David Phillips.
There’s something Simonized in the particular combination of perky guitar, toothsome flute, dance-y hand percussion, and polysyllable-friendly storytelling, though the comparison goes only so far before it runs into the undeniably Mountain Goats-y timbre of Phillips’s voice and acoustic guitar.
As it happens, The Mountain Goats’ Matt Douglas produced the song, as well as providing percussion, additional guitar, and bass, alongside Rachel Kiel’s flute, Anne Polesnak’s cello, and Chip Crell’s harmonica. Together, they create an atmosphere poised between the tail-end of summer and the brisk onset of autumn, all skeletal branches and flat orange skies, so that the snowy cover art feels more like a premonition.
“Death Kids of the Cuyahoga Valley” is the first song from the Orchard EP, which Phillips calls “a five-song cycle about coming of age in Northeast Ohio in the 1980s.” It shows in the single’s vivid, bittersweet images of smoking cloves and stadium lights, autumnal rites and sugar highs.
To celebrate Orchard’s release on Potluck Foundation Friday, August 28, Phillips is throwing a virtual party on Facebook at 8:00 p.m. that also features live music from Reese McHenry, John Howie Jr., Bombadil’s James Phillips, Kate Rhudy, and quite a few others.
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Lorain Road, how it could lay us lowWe'd race sundown through the valley
Stars above, an infinite scroll
And we'd scream into the median
As Elijah made his dad's car lunge and swerve
With dark lands & strange ways & the head on the door
Moaning back who we were, we were
Tripped-up and tangled under gossamer skies
Every God-forsaken Friday night
The sorrow gets synthesized
On a black-streaked sugar high
Beads clicking under stadium lights
Mock processions, autumnal rites
Ann says, “hold yourself tight if no one else will--
And no one else will”
So we'd roost in some pavilion until curfew came
Duck away from the cops and sway in the rain
And swear on the Necronomicon that come commencement day
We would commence to get away
Tripped-up and tangled under gossamer skies
Every soul-sucking Saturday night
The sorrow gets synthesized
On a black-streaked sugar high
Faces pale and burning, thrust up into the falling snow
Shivering vandals, too nestled to know
Smoking cloves on the swing sets, jumping hedges through the back roads
Oblivious to the oncoming cold
It's a cold more persistent than any on the North Coast
Shot of Elijah in a jeep, top down
Newly wed and crunching numbers out in Portland town
A clip of Ann out in Boston clowning with her baby girl
Two distant worlds
On the roof of my apartment here on Lorain Road
I'm drinking with my tape deck as down below
Death kids start shuffling toward the promenade
I toast them all as the sun slips away
Tripped-up and tangled under gossamer skies
Just rehearsal for the rest of our lives
And the black-streaked sugar high
Fades a little every Sunday night
Fading out of earshot and sight
Scott David Phillips: vocals, guitar, accordion, Nord
Matt Douglas: beats, guitar, bass
Rachel Kiel: vocals, flute
Anne Polesnak: cello
Chip Crell: harmonica
Written by Scott David Phillips
Produced and mixed by Matt Douglas at The Shed
Mastered by Greg Elkins at Pershing Hill Sound
Copyright 2020 Job or No Job Music
Death Kids of the Cuyahoga Valley (Single)
https://themonologuebombs.bandcamp.com/track/death-kids-of-the-cuyahoga-valley-single
