It’s never easy to break away from what’s comfortable, especially when that comfort comes in the form of bandmates. Going solo, after being one of a few, is a tricky endeavor, and leaving the pack to pave new or different ground comes with no built-in assurances. It works for some (Sting), and not so well for others (basically anyone in any boy band from the early 2000s except the lead singer).
Multi-instrumentalist Kellen Wenrich is known for his role as fiddle player in Apache Relay, but now he’s witnessing a bit of a rebirth as Kellen of Troy — his new nom de plum. And thus it makes the title of his forthcoming LP, Posthumous Release, all the more amusing: It’s death and birth, all at once. And “Victim of Apathy,” the new single from the collection, shows his love of well-crafted folk-rock with a pop-ish sheen and built on the classics, like the Beatles with a surfy gloss. Here, he studies a very modern plague: apathy. In a world with lots of opinions but little substance, it’s easy to be a victim of it — in relationships and simply in life. Or even in a band. Through “Victim of Apathy,” Kellen of Troy discovers, in some infectious melodies, that an existence cut down the middle is a life not worth a damn. Nothing apathetic about that.