I remember going to my friends house when I was around 9 years old. His stay at home mother offered us cookies one day which meant we got to step into the kitchen. My friend Alex pointed at the cookie jar displaying a smirk and an eye roll because it looked incredibly weird. Some might say garish but I thought it was pretty fascinating. His mother had made it at a community center pottery class. It had an irregular shape sort of like a stumpy tree trunk and even though it could of been adorned like a tree trunk which would of made sense, his adventurous mother painted it bright yellow with shapes on it. Alex told me those shapes were supposed to be ponies which I eventually could see because some of the shapes had a palomino color scheme.
Not only was the cookie jar irregularly shaped, it contained sugar type cookies of all shapes. The smaller ones were harder and sort of burnt (my favorite) and Alex's mother later explained that because the cookie jar (which you could tell she was extremely proud of) was so oddly shaped that making cookies of all sizes worked better for it. That irregular shapes fit better when packed together. The cookies were built that way because they were more efficient but I admired how Alex's mother thought about things. As I got a little older there was an object lesson there about how imperfect people of all shapes and sizes and colors are vastly more interesting and when brought together those differences filled the spaces between them.
Listening to Gag Salon and I can see that fucking garish, whimsical, beautiful cookie jar. Listen to their latest "Don't Eat Stuff Off The Pavement" with it's stabbing energy, rabid cat on the piano keys and Joseph Mumford's wonderfully bi-polar vocal aesthetic that feels sometimes manic and sometimes so artistically endearing and it is exquisitely evident that they are not a cookie cutter band. They are wonderfully irregular, an amalgam of artists like Sparks, Devo, Modest Mouse, Television, Bruce Wooley and the Camera Club, post punk, avant pop, art rock experimental artists that don't fit in a tidy box.
Of the song Mumford shares:
"'Don't Eat Stuff Off The Pavement' is generally pretty good advice - it bears no relation to the song itself though. It's a sad song about nostalgia and living vicariously. I wrote it at the peak of Covid in 2020 when my brain was very much stuck in wistful mode, looking back on my school-years and the days of our previous band, and feeling a lot of regret for bad decisions and friendships lost. Can't take anything too seriously though, so I had to give it a stupid title."
The amazing Gag Salon is comprised of the aforementioned Joseph Mumford (vocals / guitar), Tom Dimmock (backing vocals / synth / piano), Seb Bowden (bass) and Ayden Spiller (drums / percussion).
-Robb Donker Curtius
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THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:
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Introducing Gag Salon: the surviving members of a function band gone up in flames, the guinea pigs of experimental surgery and new age psychotherapy. Fundamentally a pop group, Gag Salon invite you to interrogate the undesirable and exorcise your demons via LCD intensity and Beefheartian wonk.
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Gag Salon, UK, irregular cookies, indie rock, jangle pop, avant pop, art rock, post punk, experimental, progressive punk, art punk, "Don't Eat Stuff Off The Pavement",
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