"what have I done, no god no...."
"Speak In Tongues" from Cleveland, Ohio's alternative rock outfit Pharmacy Key's 2022 sophomore full length "Queen Maybe", feels the part of the album told in a confessional booth (but more on that later). The album, as a whole draws, on organic (analog) tones with sinewy indie rock guitar lines, sprite jangle pop and dark folk laced with poetry of unrelenting dark humor, social commentary and even imagery not appropriate for the wee ones while at the same time creating other moments of subtle tenderness and wanderlust and remembrances of love lost. This totally adult album darkly twists your brain with it's sort of 90's college rock radio. As much as it feeds off folk rock tones, it squeezes in indie rock with punk / busker punk and psyche rock eruptions. I am thinking about "Practice Kisses" and "Take His Teeth" and "Man Alive" and even the addiction riddled "Mostly Blue" that are fetching platinum blondes with dark roots showing, midnight movies that take dark sometimes even violent turns (figuratively speaking of course). Sometimes when Pharmacy Keys get dark I thought of Black Francis exorcising demons on the early Pixies albums.
Other songs like "In the Flesh" or "She Doesn't Know (Talkin' bout you) with their sort of Echo and the Bunneymen post punk vastness sweep you up in their eclipsing stories. Stories that might make you drag in the muck or golden rings of your own life and heap them on, changing Pharmacy Keys' scratched projections.
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THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:
https://www.facebook.com/PharmacyKeysMusic/
https://soundcloud.com/pharmacykeysmusic
https://twitter.com/Pharmacy_Keys
https://open.spotify.com/artist/2KjZUUnaswvXkmRou3XGZi
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz5yGiRZTZmW6Op-4uJWq1A
https://www.instagram.com/pharmacykeysmusic/
https://music.apple.com/us/album/_/1616859821
Cleveland, Ohio's Pharmacy Keys arrived on the scene to positive acclaim with their 2020 debut album “Conjuress." Floated Magazine calls them “a staple garage-bar band with catchy hooks and guitar fuzz dripping with the sweat of 1990.”
With their sophomore release "Queen Maybe," the band displays their evolved songwriting while maintaining their knack for writing infectious indie rock.
* * *
We get by with a little help from our friends
Pharmacy Keys, indie rock, alt rock, psych rock, dark lyrics, storytelling, sophomore album, "Queen Maybe", LISTEN, complex, subtle, metaphors galore, folk ballads, indie soft punk, post grunge, Album Review,
The opening title track, "Queen Maybe" is a great opener. It is the forced card from a magician's deck. A beautiful sort of Lennon meets The Band imagining that makes you feel light and fluffy before the harder punches occur, before the spiral into lost times, addiction, bloody knuckles and vengeance. The aforementioned "Speak In Tongues" with it's jagged haunting construction, that falls into a sort of jangle pop gospel foot stomper (and then back again) feels like a confessional for all the false faces and false acts collectively committed by us all. Maybe the most sort of radio friendly track, the one for grandma is the beautiful kind of garden rocker "Seasons (Jupiter and Saturn)" with a lovely, truly moving guitar break. "Don't Think Twice" with the country rock punches but twisted soft and hard edges is absorbing like a Neil Young rocker and the rustic, wanderlustful, vastly beautifully raw "Indiana Sun" is full of emotional cuts that you pick at too long.
I have so much in my head right now. I cannot say that Pharmacy Keys' album "Queen Maybe" is a happy album but it is deceptively dark and exquisitely transportive. Blending folk, jangle pop, indie rock, psychedelia and punk strains it feels like an amalgam of artists like R.E.M, The Pixies, Echo and The Bunnymen and Cracker. It is such an absorbing album that it sucked an album review out of a track review. I thoroughly recommend "Queen Maybe", there are no false steps on it, just pure beauty and bloodletting. I haven't pasted any lyrics but I haven't heard an album in a long time with so many quotable lines that stick to your brain.
Check out the spotify link to listen to "Queen Maybe" and if you love it like I do- PURCHASE it. Show some love.
-Robb Donker Curtius
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THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:
https://www.facebook.com/PharmacyKeysMusic/
https://soundcloud.com/pharmacykeysmusic
https://twitter.com/Pharmacy_Keys
https://open.spotify.com/artist/2KjZUUnaswvXkmRou3XGZi
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz5yGiRZTZmW6Op-4uJWq1A
https://www.instagram.com/pharmacykeysmusic/
https://music.apple.com/us/album/_/1616859821
Cleveland, Ohio's Pharmacy Keys arrived on the scene to positive acclaim with their 2020 debut album “Conjuress." Floated Magazine calls them “a staple garage-bar band with catchy hooks and guitar fuzz dripping with the sweat of 1990.”
With their sophomore release "Queen Maybe," the band displays their evolved songwriting while maintaining their knack for writing infectious indie rock.
* * *
We get by with a little help from our friends
Pharmacy Keys, indie rock, alt rock, psych rock, dark lyrics, storytelling, sophomore album, "Queen Maybe", LISTEN, complex, subtle, metaphors galore, folk ballads, indie soft punk, post grunge, Album Review,
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