Five new songs for LGBTQ listeners
The Difference Between, feat. Melody Walker & Chris Housman ~ Crys Matthews
Let’s start things off with some righteous indignation. Crys Matthews typically brings a folkie lyricism, anchoring progressive issues and Queer themes in solid songwriting, but here she swaps gentler lyricism for a fed up with your bullshit pushback to bigots who claim exclusive ownership over patriotism and the American South. Southern Rock never sounded like this — but it should!
Don’t Waste A Minute ~ Zigs
This great new song by Erica Zigon, a/k/a Zigs, on her fine new album Full Circle comes across as celebrating her liberation from a committed relationship gone sour. The sense of being freed from unnecessary constraints comes through in tracks like “Never Learn” (or, That moment when you tell yourself I Never Learn, and you do), “Tangled Up” (or, all the work to untangle from a lover looks well worth it), and “Don’t Waste A Minute”. I kept telling myself “that sounds fresh” as I explored the album, and “Don’t Waste A Minute” exemplifies the many ways Zigs and her team pull together a disparate variety of familiar sounds: acoustic guitars strumming the rhythm that drop out for a nearly a cappella moment, for example — to joyously render unique pictures of stages of pulling oneself out of an unworkable situation stronger and reenergized. Some credit for this goes to Zigs’ frequent cowriters Kevin Schwartz and Michael Zigon, and producer Brendan Keenan, but whoever came up with the surprising ideas that power these fresh but familiar sounds, together they’ve made Full Circle one of the best albums of 2024.
On The Floor – THUS LOVE
THUS LOVE (capitalized because that’s how they do it) are yet another Queer-peopled band giving compelling evidence that Rock and Roll is not dead. Their lean, stripped-down arrangement here has a solid rhythm section underpinning riffs that pop and sometimes take flight. Vocalist Echo Mars reminds me of Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr. Watch for their new album All Pleasure available now.
Sing Me To Sleep ~ Matty Marz
Matty Marz, typically confident in her largely studio-generated arrangements, and nearly abrasive in their lyrics’ cutting remarks, shifts into a higher gear of self-confidence and skills on her new EP, m.w.u. (moment with u). They gift us with an entire track of the vulnerability usually just seeping through the jagged sounds of their tracks, “Sing Me To Sleep”. So vulnerable, in fact, that I feel compelled to offer my version of not-quite a trigger warning: Open your heart to all that’s here, to the poetry of competing feelings revealed, to the hope and desperation jumbled and sorted, and how beautiful all the evolving sounds are in here.
Black Mona Lisa feat. Big Freedia ~ Billy Porter
Billy Porter is one of my Out Queer Music heroes. His November 2023 album Black Mona Lisa gets a Volume 2: The Cookout Sessions, and baby it cooks. The revised title song, the only one here that appeared on the previous album, a strut of a track full of well-earned pride, gets a new Afro Pop beat from the band Lofey and a new verse to enhance that pride from Big Freedia.
Also find the playlist on YouTube Music by searching for “New This Week Out Now! Five tracks for OutInJersey.com”.
