Mokotow on the devil meets angel, gothic folk meets psyche rock seether "Running On All Fours" (Official Video)

AP Track Review

"I do not pray and just make things do, while life fades to black and you know not where you’re running to" sings Mokotow on the devil meets angel, gothic folk meets psyche rock seether Running On All Fours. Mike Mokotow, founding member and front-man of the blues outfit Butchers of Sky Valley has set forth as Mokotow and released his debut full length album "Domino" on Heeled & Heavy Records. Call me crazy, but amid the chunky surf punk guitar notes that hang in the fog and brooding nature here, I thought of Jim Morrison. There is sultry shimmy within Mokotow's vocal scowl that made me think of the Lizard King. I hear this croon on other tracks like the blues rock noir of Universal Masquerade and the psychedelic baroque rock of Desperation Suite No.1 but this is not an album review and it is best to leave much more to be discovered. I plan on doing so during the darkest of night in the near future. 

Of "Domino" and the Running On All Fours Official Video, Mokotow offers:

Fatherhood. Lost legacies. Survival. Fundamentally this album has been about being remembered. It’s an exercise in creating something to explain and reveal to my son, a way to preserve parts of myself in lines and melodies. It is for him to discover later in life when he’ll be ready to make of it what he will. A diary of sorts. This video culminates the idea in a powerful way that I could not have imagined when starting to write this record. For that I cannot thank David Gross and Rob Trela enough for their talent, vision and dedication. I am forever grateful to them and the tight team behind the video for how it came out. I’ve been looking to right something for some time now. To give my son something I don’t have, a song from my father. There is a mystery I’ve been grappling with since his death, about who he was, with many questions I would have asked him if I had the chance. His passing before I had that opportunity to do so has left a mystery and a pain that I live with today. And it’s that pain I don’t want my son to have to grapple with. I’m looking to create a different experience for him and my family. But the most cathartic way to finally put to rest those feelings of wanting to know my father was to become a father myself and to lay it all bare for my son to see.

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Robb Donker




THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:

The illegitimate son of musicians fleeing Cold War torn Poland for the United States, an obsessive gambler (not in the monetary sense), firm believer in life's one guarantee (his father died in his teens), founding member and frontman of the bombastic blues outfit Butchers of Sky Valley, Mike Mokotow has staged another introduction into his small world meant for those that understand the necessity of solitude, unabashed vulnerability, and the underlying nobility of soul that comes from opposing the odds.

Released mononymously as Mokotow, his cinematic ten song set is an ode to the outsider and challenging disillusionment. Written, recorded, and produced by Mokotow in his attic studio, mixed by Jeff Berner (Shilpa Ray, Psychic TV), the album's ghostly hymns, raw production and instrumentation add to the record's off-the-cuff charm, intimacy and slow burn arrangements. There is an honesty to the lonesome defiance of Mokotow's varied croons that only further the album's claims, "falling out of place out of time / once in a while I'm falling in line / even as the lights go down with no where to go / a brave man will come to terms with what the darkness is willing to show."

”It's not some storied celebration of the desperate man, it's the voiced contempt of someone living among desperate men."