Deep Voices 119

Riffing

Deep Voices 119 on Spotify
Deep Voices 119 on Apple Music

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Deep Voices is a weekly newsletter featuring a one-hour playlist from me, Matthew Schnipper. These playlists and their accompanying text are always free. On the weekends, I publish an additional newsletter—musical revelations, recommendations—just for paying subscribers. Consider them the Deep Voices equivalent of a public radio tote bag for your donation. I know asking for a paid subscription is a big request. No pressure to do it. If you can afford a subscription, and you feel like paying for one, know that I am hugely grateful for your support of this project, my writing career, and the quest to spotlight more artists who deserve it. Thank you.

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Playlist notes:

• Bardo Pond is my platonic ideal of what a rock band should sound like. Heavy, but not unapproachable. Lots of riffs, with repetition mixed into the jam. The Grateful Dead if they were a Black Sabbath cover band. Or vice versa. They are the type of band I could listen to forever. “Shadow Puppet,” comes from Melt Away, a recent compilation of miscellaneous tracks. The song was recorded in the late ’90s and quietly released digitally four years ago. I’ve certainly never heard it before and it is a monster.

  
  Why do good things linger in the dustbins of recent history? I suppose the band was prolific enough that one track was as good as another. But everything on Melt Away feels as vital as their album work. If by chance you like this track but are not familiar with the band, take a listen to Amanita and Lapsed. The latter’s opening track, “Tommy Gun Angel,” is about as good as it gets.
  

• Straw Man Army are interesting in that they strongly remind me of a few groups—the Ex, the Minutemen, Dead Milkmen, Bad History Month—while sounding entirely original. The NYC duo are nimble, fervid. Both members sing in unison, giving the songs, all political in nature, the feeling of a protest march. The lyrics are somewhere between Woody Guthrie and Aus Rotten, which makes me think that maybe they’re all onto something. On “Spiral”: “America! It’s not a country it’s a business/NYPD, KKK, IDF they’re all the same/Just different names.” A great band. Praise to Chris Richards, who has long been beating their drum.
  

• I think Betty Hammerschlag may be Gen Z Grouper. Her guitar is icy, her voice drops in and out at irregular intervals. It’s music that is trying to imitate the wind. I find this music to be extremely compelling and very heartbreaking.

  
  Curious about her, I googled her name and found an article about a woman named Betty Hammerschlag, a German Jew who escaped the Nazis by fleeing to Argentina in 1938. Betty’s son Jose wrote about the difficulty his parents had adapting to their new country. “Life was hard in Argentina,” he said, “Without knowing the language, which they barely learned to speak by the end of their lives, they continued to live like immigrants.” Jose notes that Betty’s parents died at Auschwitz. Betty herself lived until 1994. By all accounts, she went by the nickname Berny. I have no idea if the musician Betty Hammerschlag is using her real name, if she is named after this woman, if she lifted her name from her, if they’re related at all, or if it’s just an odd coincidence. Whatever it is, knowing about the elder Hammerschlag makes the music of the younger feel distinctly eerie.

  
  Writing about her EP Cold, Hammerschlag the musician, says it was recorded at an AirBnb in Tokyo. A world away, in more than one way, from the one the first Hammserschlag would have ever experienced. It sounds like the set up for a short story, something haunted but poignant. “One night, while wandering the empty streets of Shinjuku, I stumbled upon an old VOX guitar amp in the trash—abandoned, yet somehow still alive,” she writes. “The amp wasn’t really an instrument; it was a relic for me, something I left untouched, a reminder of things I wished I could remember but never can.”