Paste Magazine

Alt-country band Karen & The Sorrows are making a name for themselves after releasing The Narrow Place in September. The self-described “queer country trailblazers” have reimagined the genre to create their own brand of Dolly Parton-esque vocals, twangy petal steel guitar and easy-going rhythms, a brand that is demonstrated in their single “Nowhere.” Today, the band is debuting the video accompaniment for the song, exclusively at Paste.

From the sound of her voice, you’d never guess that vocalist Karen Pittelman previously fronted a punk band. However, having grown up on 1970s country rock, she started a band with The Sorrows, and together, they embraced the music of their past, becoming the center of a growing queer country scene.

“Now more than ever, we are grateful to be in community with so many amazing musicians,” Pittelman says. “Country music can tell compelling stories about family, love, heartbreak and strength. Those stories should include all of our families, all of our love, and especially all of our heartbreak and our strength.”

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Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.

Hayley Thompson-King ought to be an artist for whom the doors of musical success will open magically. The one-time classical singer dipped her toes into the realms of roots-rock with her former band the Banditas, and lapped in the trippy thud of psych during her tenure in longtime Boston psych-rockers Major Stars. On her debut album Psychotic Melancholia—being released on her own label, Hard to Kill Records—Thompson-King generates a lot of noise from a traditional instrumental setup. Found within the fissures of her honky-tonk swagger are elements of rock’s more dangerous cousins, as her vacillating vocal prowess easily shifts from songbird elegance to pissed-off shriek. Her songs often follow suit, and on Psychotic Melancholia, Thompson-King gathers all her riotous rock ‘n’ roll flavors and biblical criticism into one big, noisy bowl.

There is an overwhelming essence of roadhouse rock ‘n’ roll abandon on the swinging opener “Large Hall, Slow Decay,” which explodes full-throttle with a searing guitar lead and a potent juke-joint shuffle. Thompson-King darts her crooked tongue in the song’s raucous verses, singing, “So go on, light your candle/Kneel down and say a prayer for me/Cause your little fire ain’t nothin I can’t handle/And I never asked you to set me free.” The song’s break-up vibe doubles as an agnostic front that sets a template for other similarly secular, or otherwise anti-religious ravings on Psychotic Melancholia.

On probably the least bashful indication of Thompson-King’s overarching war against false idolatry, “No Room For Jesus” finds Thompson-King and her band allowing their guitar attack to bloom widely, exploring way outside the Americana, country-rock vein into a psych-rock blitzkrieg. Thompson-King’s vocal mix is very nearly peaked-out on songs with such savagery, with pops and fuzz pocked throughout these more intense tunes like badges of apathetic honor.

On Thompson-King’s purported favorite track, “Dopesick,” she comes through slightly more clear-eyed, despite the song’s inherent, soporific imagery. Through the haze of post-binge clarity, Thompson-King regales the song with the psyche of someone shackled by the doldrums of a poisonous relationship, as she coos, “She don’t let them see she’s livin in hell most of the time/When does it begin to feel like you don’t want to die?”

There’s a palpable feminist roar to the record, and Psychotic Melancholia’s critique of the Old Testament’s focus on “wicked” women is given wide sonic strut on the garage-punk maelstrom “Lot’s Wife.” Here, Thompson-King howls, “You call me wicked woman cause you don’t know my name/Well, he took me from your rib, so you and me we is the same,” coaxing a vaguely bluesy shuffle from the din, and providing a fertile screaming ground for her elastic vocal calisthenics. Somehow, she has the ability to sound just as great in sentimental trill as she does in full blood-curdling scream. The former is best showcased on the dreamy “Soul Kisser,” a mostly unadorned acoustic number, where Thompson-King takes on an operatic vibrato in the song’s soaring chorus, as she sings “Are we Saturn?/Are we Jupiter?/Kill or be killed.”

Thompson-King possesses a seemingly innate aptitude for dressing her lyrics with the grime and gristle of the hustle of life, and in doing so is able to address beauty and ugliness in sharp strokes of songcraft. The intellectual contingent of her writing aside, Psychotic Melancholia is a positively jaw-dropping exposition that celebrates the entire canon of rock ‘n’ roll’s energy, and should be considered an upping of the ante on the gritty sonic real estate of garage, punk, country, and Americana, into some amalgam altogether more apt of Thompson-King’s wondrous artistic aptitudes. READ MORE…

 

Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.

Check out their performance of “Some Ol’ Dolls,” “Church is Burning Down” and “Little Blue Room” here.

 

Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.

The Band Ice Cream’s new LP, Classically Trained (out today via Urban Scandal Records) is a snapshot of early adulthood in the 21st century, full of boredom, heartbreak and a general fuck-it attitude. Sonically, the album marries ’80s punk with modern Southeast garage, creating a Black Lips-meets-Germs composite that breathes new life into the genre…

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Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.

Brooklyn’s Tomás Doncker cut his teeth as a guitarist with such genre-busting groups as James Chance & The Contortions, Defunkt, J. Walter Negro & the Loose Jointz and many more, making him a prime mover on New York’s downtown No Wave scene in the early 1980s. Eventually he went international, touring and recording in Japan with jazz pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, and producing studio and songwriting sessions with Bootsy Collins, Yoko Ono and Grammy-nominated reggae vocal group The Itals… READ MORE

 

Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.