Videodome.
Two releases by two of New Haven’s currently active bands — Videodome and Wally — show how bands can reap musical success in two very different ways.
Wally’s FELOPZD starts with a growling bowed note, ominous and open. The horns that join it pile on the foreboding — but only for a moment. A half-second later, they’ve harmonically found their way to a rich moment of resolution — followed by a dense, jazzy departure. It’s only 44 seconds long, but in its twists and turns, it promises emotions and intelligence in equal measure, a promise that the rest of FELOPZD has no problem delivering on.
Wally bills itself as “a dream-pop/indie rock band,” anchored by brothers Teo and Lucas Hernandez and lifelong friend Alex Blair. But they are in some sense more like a collective, and one that reaches easily beyond dream pop and indie rock into several adjacent genres at once. Their 2023 release Day by Day featured Colin Dooman on bass, Alex Yoo on drums, Miles Keingstein on trumpet, Declan Sheehy-Moss on tenor sax and ewi, and Isa Orozco on vocals, and while the personnel on FELOPZD are unlisted, one suspects some familiar names would appear if they were revealed. This is so because FELOPZD finds Wally sounding simultaneously as exploratory and as comfortable in its music as the band has ever been.
The second song, “Bell Weather,” begins with an easy lope from a guitar and lush, relaxed three-part harmonies. Then the drums, along with chiming electric guitar, kick up the energy. “I just want to know you,” they sing. “I just want to know you.” The sense of joy rises even further, as a trumpet and piano fill out the song, which then rides wave after wave of music to crash, satisfyingly, to a close.
“Bandicoot” then gives the listener a dreamy, country-inflected introduction that veers suddenly into walls of distortion and echoing voices — then veers again into peaceful keyboards, and then veers again into a space that somehow combines all of those elements. “Equivalence” starts on a nervous, floating rhythm that opens out into a shimmering pop sound that, just as it settles, takes a few surprising harmonic turns, keeping the ear engaged before suddenly diving into a pool of distortion.
The album’s closer, “Wide Awake,” meanwhile, comes out of the gate like an update to a lost 1960s ballad we didn’t know we were missing until we heard it. Then the rhythm picks up, turning it into something else. The final third, with cowbell as harbinger, suddenly acquires a Latin tinge in its surging rhythms and harmonic density — which is where it leads us.
FELOPZD is only five tracks, but has enough ideas for 10 or 15 songs. It takes listeners far and brings them home again, and does it with seemingly so little effort that it’s surprising how fast it moves. The album shows Wally continuing to develop, and with musical horizons this wide, there’s still no real end in sight.
Where Wally covers a broad landscape of music, Videodome finds power in picking a sound and digging deep. On “They Killed the Giggler,” the first track on The Incidental Homosexual... Or, A Hate Crime in My Bedroom, the band — Kilian Appleby on drums and backing vocals, Rebecca Kaplan on vocals, Keenan O’Connor on guitar and backing vocals, and Mike Tobey on bass and backing vocals — announces its musical intentions within the first couple seconds, with gnarled squalls of guitar, growling bass, punishing drums, and snarling vocals, all culminating in a big, chanting chorus underpinned by enormous power chords. “I’m gonna be the queer-coded villain in someone else’s story someday,” Kaplan wails. “Sorry, honey / Girls like you / Fail to measure up every single day.” Videodome describes itself as noise rock and post hardcore, and the band means it.
But they find plenty of ways to surprise within that sound. “Giggler” ends with a brooding quiet section that packs as much power as the volume that preceded it. “Don’t worry, everyone will love you when you’re dead,” Kaplan sings.
The second song, “Third Eye,” rages with the kind of velocity that could create a mosh pit that tears a place apart. But the monstrous riff that propels “Catheter Blues” happens to be an odd time signature, and “Robot Bathhouse” pulses with a more coiled energy that lets Kaplan’s vocals relax a little. The energy peaks again with “Have You Tried Speaking to the Manager… Within?” but it also drops into a quieter section in which Kaplan delivers the lyrics like a secret message.
“Peter Lorre” is a straight-ahead rocker that dissolves into chaos (aided by tenor sax from Mark Kaplan) with appropriately brief and funny lyrics (“I think about you / Every time I get the spins,” Kaplan sings. “Was it this drink / Or was it the one before / I’ve seen how the sausage is made / Let’s have a fucking cookout / I’ll man the grill.”) “Isle of Man” struts on a stalking beat for its first minute before it explodes. “Model Citizen” is a ball of white-hot anger that sets the listener up for the album’s high-energy closers, “Hair of the Dog” and “TERF War.”
Wally and Videodome have divergent approaches to making music, but both find gems along the way. New Haven’s taste is broad enough to accommodate it all.
Find FELOPZD and The Incidental Homosexual... Or, A Hate Crime in My Bedroom both on Bandcamp.
