East River Pipe Podcast

Merge Records has jumped into the whole podcast thingy and their first offering is a nice little 20 minute song-n-speak by East River Pipe’s meticulously downtrodden F.M. Cornog.

This is kind of cool to actually hear Cornog speak, because we were involved in a fun web interview with him last year on Shmat. (East River Pipe interview is here). The interview contains five songs from his latest and 6th release “What Are You On?”: “What Would T.S. Eliot Say?”, “The Ultrabright Bitch”, “Drug Life”, “I’ll Walk My Robot Home”, and “Life Is A Landfill”. If you haven’t already heard his music before you can already guess from the titles that he often writes about the seedier side of life using insular little song capsules that are recorded at home using primitive but effective tools.

Although he’s always been known for his bare bones production, the vocals on these songs seem especially telephonized like he’s singing through a tin can almost. For me, a few of the tracks even start to cross over into Sparklehorse territory. But these are just as great to me as his older work; naked and immediate semi-autobiographical songs without the window dressing. (Side note: “Life Is A Landfill” contains a keyboard line that sounds an awful like it is using one of the synth modulators from Reason.)

The actual podcast contains the abovementioned songs sandwiched between Cornog delivering what sounds like a nonchalant and even deadpan sermon about the origins and inspirations for them.

East River Pipe “What Are You On” Podcast

(Footnote: You might notice this is not exactly a “CD review”. Well, Palebear is going to start including podcast and music news coverage from time to time to supplement the reviews that are coming out. We also may be adding coverage for local indie shows as well as band interviews. Stay tuned.)

by Tyranosaur