Running about 6 months late with the new music here, but this one has to go up, better late than never. From Josh Fix, who basically sounds exactly like Freddie Mercury, comes yet another bombastic rock production - I can’t tell whether I like the actual song, or I’m just ecstatic that someone, somewhere, is still making music like this.
As anyone who knows me could attest, I’ve been incredibly down on American music for the last .. well, decade. After a brief explosion of creativity in the early 90s, the mainstream sound has degenerated into endless derivative Creed/Maroon 5 sound-alikes; not my taste at all. Some of the hiphop has been good, but that too started to sound awfully formulaic and most of the innovation has been in the production. There’s no dance output worth the space on one’s iPod and the “alternative” is anything but. Local bands might sound great to the drunken punters at a bar in Boston but don’t cut it compared to the global and historical corpus.
So I’m still down on American music, but like all things American, the average is low but the peaks are high, and one thing that America does seem to do well is produce these “auteur” types who get all depressed, get hepped up on goofballs, go hide in their house for a few years and then come out with some self-produced opus which happens to be fucking amazing. These albums are inevitably one-offs and the artists never live up to their debut. I’m thinking Bryan Scary, Jonny Polonsky, and now Josh Fix. There are probably more; they’re hard to find. My tastes seem to be so dissimilar to the US “music media” that they’re useless for finding new music; I have to rely on “carpet bombing”, serendipity and “guided randomness” in locating new music in an opaque market. Anyway.
This song starts like Radiohead circa “Iron Lung” (ie the last time I liked them), turns into Queen meets ELO, all made in LA in 2008. Awesome. Lyrics after the jump.
Josh Fix - Whiskey & Speed (mp3, 14.5M)
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