The Sideshow Tragedy dig a deep alternative blues rock cut on "Hold On It" from their emotionally entrenched "After The Fall" album

"my mask is falling off my face" 

The Sideshow Tragedy digs deep, mining the dark (really dark) and the light too. This propensity to exorcise demons, to burn life's beautiful highs and blistering lows into cathartic rock flames results in songs as confessionals with hard artistic edges. In a world that likes to dabble in the quantized perfection of glossy pop, that prays to the latest culture of personality, displaying your guts is daring. This outfit is not prone to jump on current trends, on indie rock tropes. Generally you won't hear telephone / magaphone stung vox or trap beats just because, well, trap beats are the "thing to do". You will, instead, hear organic rock as Nathan Singleton and Jeremy Harrell cut through with sinewy bruised and busted up rock, "I got tattoo's and I know how to sing" as Singleton croons on "Capital Crimes" from The Sideshow Tragedy's latest album release "After The Fall".

As press notes indicate: [In the summer of 2018, for the third time in five years, The Sideshow Tragedy’s Nathan Singleton and Jeremy Harrell drove the 1,820 mile sojourn to Kenny Siegal’s Old Soul Studios in Catskill, New York, their truck crammed with the tools of their trade: vintage resonator guitars, pedals and effects boxes, backbone drum and percussion kits, for starters.]

There is so much to love on "After The Fall" but what presses on your heart the most is the rock and roll candor here. Life is a blessing but it can be a pressure cooker as well. There are moments on this record that feel like the unexpected bloody pain of biting your tongue hard while eating. Many of the tracks have a heavy sheer of anger or, at least, visceral images of pushing through the muck of life, maybe while at the same time not know why or where you are going.

"Faking my way // it's nothing new, promising nothing // I swear it's true // got nothing to say but I still got the blues // something to live for // just something to do"

That lyrical passage from "What I Mean", a heavy blues rocker that somehow made me think of early Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and early Ted Nugent at the same time, feels like it is soaked in guilt as much as a clenched fist resolve.

Maybe the most feral and furious track on the album, "Hold On It" percolates and burns seemingly uncontrollably on Ben Senerfit's bari sax and Marc Ribot being so unpredictable on lead guitar. They add to a cacophony of sounds, a mayhemic bass heavy framework, collisions in dance moshing as Singleton spouts bitter self aggrandized pills spit out instead of swallowed, 

"stepping like a monster // my gate is high over the street // I got my black leather jacket on // and I'm sharpening my teeth // Oh I'm the mother fucker // the million dollar man of the year". 

There is more, even x rated attributes, that make this track audaciously bold (and fun) and I wonder if it is about an asshole he knows or the asshole in all of us.  

Of "After The Fall" Singleton says: "This record was born of an emotional hellscape/rollercoaster and my memory of it is foggy in places. We recorded it on and off for a year and a half. During this time, my marriage of 16 years fell apart, ending up in divorce. I lost my mooring; it was an extremely heavy time.”

The title first track on the album is a song on fire with a rock bottom anchored in a deliciously heavy classic sound of 60's or 70's rock when the blues was almost always melded. I thought of Faces, Rain but I also thought of the staggering vicious punches of urban proto garage rock of artists like Lou Reed.

Singleton sings "wore a mask so long it became my face" along sprinkling guitar and huge down beats with pounding piano in the background. The Sideshow Tragedy pushes, compresses a lot of emotion and sound into this record and while these smattering of thoughts are not a traditional "quote / unquote" album review (it began as a song review for "Hold On It") I recommend "After The Fall" highly. Maybe the best albums are born out of pain. It is a high price to pay for great art. 

-Robb Donker Curtius 

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THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:

THE SIDESHOW TRAGEDY Lands AFTER THE FALL on SPACEFLIGHT RECORDS RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 30, 2020

Austin, Texas -- In the summer of 2018, for the third time in five years, The Sideshow Tragedy’s Nathan Singleton and Jeremy Harrell drove the 1,820 mile sojourn to Kenny Siegal’s Old Soul Studios in Catskill, New York, their truck crammed with the tools of their trade: vintage resonator guitars, pedals and effects boxes, backbone drum and percussion kits, for starters.

With those first two trips, they were also packing nine original songs primed for tracking and production. But this time around, the duo arrived with just a handful of songs, all in various stages of completion.

Front-man Nathan Singleton said scheduling those sessions was a “deliberate attempt to keep our hand in.” The Sideshow Tragedy’s live show, described by New York Music Daily as “a serious jolt of adrenaline,” was starting to tap their own adrenaline dry. They arrived at Old Soul two exhausted souls, only a few weeks off a European tour. Nathan’s psyche was frayed and his personal life in tatters.

“I was seriously considering quitting,” Nathan says, “but I just called Kenny and told him we had some ideas we wanted to get down and we’ll see where it goes.” The Independent Music Award-winning producer Kenny Siegal (Chris Whitley and Langhorne Slim, among others), was game as The Sideshow Tragedy’s sound and sensibility was always dead center in his wheelhouse.

Their new record After the Fall follows the internationally acclaimed The View From Nowhere (2018), which Laurie Gallardo/KUTX described as: “a gritty, unhinged jolt of blues-rock emerging from the searing wreckage of an apocalyptic frenzy” and Capital (2015) which PopMatters proclaimed was “a strong display of thinkers’ rock and roll.”

Feral ferocity intact, along with some new colors in a funky/pop/rock groove palette that reflects a new mood rising, Singleton says: "This record was born of an emotional hellscape/rollercoaster and my memory of it is foggy in places. We recorded it on and off for a year and a half. During this time, my marriage of 16 years fell apart, ending up in divorce. I lost my mooring; it was an extremely heavy time.”

No question, After the Fall takes a deep dive into a hazy-hellscape-derangement zone. The songs rumble out reeking of swagger, sarcasm, delusions of grandeur and gallows humor, but there’s often somber anguish lurking beneath, as we hear in Singleton’s lyric in the title track:

“I wore the mask so long it became my face I ran in circles for years just to get to this place

I wore my best suit, I even combed my hair And shaved….

I'm walking with a limp these days I got chemicals to take as needed for pain To silence the words that just won't go away I can't go away

Sideshow’s affinity for pop-rock popped up much more to the surface on this record than any other. On “Same Thing”, the over-the-top party-time saxophone solo flies high with the wah-wahs, culminating in a tune that’s simultaneously humorous and reflexive about loss, finding gold in the juxtaposition of dark lyrics with dancey-pop bubbles in the brew.

The masterful Marc Ribot got the spirit, cutting loose on lead guitar on “Hold On It”, while Ben Senerfit’s bari sax bucks up the bass, even as Singleton sneers: “How long can I keep it up?”

An exquisite Brian Wilson-esque choir rides an epic crescendo on “Easy Action” and lays down sunny classic harmonies on “The Lonely One”, tethered to a grim portrait of a hellish eternity:

“My teeth are loose in my head, my gums are bleeding and my breath smells like death, won’t take no medicine no doctor prescribes, but that’s ok cuz you know I ain’t ever gonna die”

In the end, The Sideshow Tragedy’s core sound is always the emotional anchor, the lighthouse and the cure. Singleton and Harrell are the resonator and the beat keeper, breaking through any kind of past or present turmoil or fog.

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The Sideshow Tragedy’s AFTER THE FALL credits: Nathan Singleton – Voice, Guitars, Bass Jeremy Harrell – Drums, Percussion, Programming, Background Vocals

Guest musicians: Kenny Siegal: Producer, Piano, Hammond B-3, Mellotron, Background Vocals, Fender Marc Ribot: Lead Guitars on “Hold On It” Ben Senerfit: Bari, Tenor, Alto Sax Storey Littleton, Casey Ramos, Cally Mansfield: Background Vocals Engineered and Mixed by: Matt Cullen Mastered by: John Baldwin

Cover art: Jeremy Harrell Layout and Design: Rachael Craft All songs © 2020 The Sideshow Tragedy https://spaceflightrecords.com/the-sideshow-tragedy https://www.instagram.com/sideshowtragedy/ https://www.facebook.com/thesideshowtragedy https://twitter.com/sideshowtragedy  

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