The new album Malbec and Gingerale serves twists, turns, and a brainy fizz
Jack Simons hasn’t just put out a new record. He’s concocted a psychedelic spritzer. Bright bubble-fizz for the brain.
It’s an eight-song album called Malbec and Gingerale, twisty-turny pop music that’s playful in both words and sounds. Fans of Todd Rundgren, XTC, and Frank Zappa should definitely clickety-clack their typing fingers over to the Hadley native’s Bandcamp page, where the new record is available for free (as is his entire back catalog of self-released albums).
Simons’ songs aren’t “heard that before” music. They leap over typical boxes. They’re funhouses full of trampolines and seldom-seen colors and dream logic.
“Tara” hopscotches along like a Ben Folds ditty mutated by ’70s-era Genesis prog, synthesizers burbling between your eyebrows. The jaunty and off-kilter mood is magically able to turn the phrase “ride your Segway home” into a wistful refrain.
“Pretty Little Feet (Trapped In Lines!)” grooves calmly on a hip-shaking beat and jazzy guitar chords, though a tense whispering voice keeps interjecting phrases like “attention deficit disorder” and “obsessive compulsive disorder.” When the song blooms into a warm, catchy, and melodic chorus with Simons’ voice up in the falsetto stratosphere, it’s a breathtaking mood shift, like walking around a corner and being walloped by a sunset.
The angular power-pop highlight “Wacky Berets” comes bursting out of the gate like a prizefighter at a punching bag and ends with a spoken story excerpt that speeds past quizzical signposts: a farm-to-table meal, an abandoned parking lot, ocular muscles, a majestic Honda Civic, a forest of cardigans, a first kiss, late-2000s French art house cinema.
One listen to the album and you long for a lyric sheet, though snippets peek out: “Does it matter when we’re such tiny french fries?” “Polka-dot socks and weather-worn black lace.” “Steely Dan cover band.” “We just know about turpentine.”
I misheard one phrase as “Tupperware renaissance,” but Simons was happy with my goof. “The lyric is ‘self-aware renaissance,’ but I kind of want to turn it into ‘Tupperware renaissance’ now!” he said with a laugh during an interview.
Simons currently works as a production assistant at Storefront Music in NYC and shares a place in Queens with his friend and musical collaborator Michael “Izzy” Isabella, who cowrote “Pretty Little Feet,” produced/recorded/mixed/edited the album, contributed the drums, and programmed some synths. Simons wrote, sang and played everything else.
“Malbec and Gingerale” was Simons’ first time relinquishing production control, and he thinks he and Izzy are a good team because they’re “extrovert and introvert sides of a similar eccentric coin,” he said. “As a producer, he absorbs and transfuses ideas and influences quickly with his high energy; because I tend to be more insular with my creative processes, I wanted to inject his creative agility into my work. He turned the album into something I couldn’t have envisioned independently.”
Simons mentioned one of the album’s main influences: anxiety. “It has had an incredibly powerful grip on my personality throughout my life, mostly in the form of self-diagnosed OCD. It felt as if it reached a bit of a peak this last year, and thus, it sort of forced its way into my songwriting for this album, both lyrically, in cryptic ways, and musically — each song is pretty frantic in some way!” he said.
Malbec and ginger ale is an actual drink, which Simons learned about from Izzy’s girlfriend Edie.
“The two components mix into this bizarro bitterness that translates into a strangely satisfying celebratory beverage,” Simons said. “At first, I thought it was an appropriate title for the album because it acted as a lighthearted conceptual reminder to myself (and other likeminded folk) to avoid too much alcohol, as it makes anxiety worse. But then I realized it also seemed to describe the musical contents on an almost synesthetic level: dissonant pop songs.”
Simons said his concept for the new album was for it to act as a “musical anxiety cleanse.”
“My OCD is still pretty bad, but it feels very refreshing to have documented it!” he said.
“Another idea that kept coming up [during the making of the album] was how both the random absurdity of reality and the realization of how unfathomably small we are in the grand scheme of things can be incredibly freeing. So there’s a couple of songs about these little characters with big surreal goals and they’re not letting the magnitude of the universe get in their way!”
For more information about “Malbec and Gingerale” visit jacksimons .bandcamp.com
Ken Maiuri can be reached at clublandcolumn@gmail.com
