Psymon Spine * Major Murphy

***THIS SHOW IS IN THE THEATER, WHICH IS ON THE 2ND FLOOR & ACCESSIBLE ONLY BY STAIRS. We would love nothing more than to be able to welcome every human into the theater and are working really hard to have an elevator built in the near future.***

Imbued with a sense of disorienting euphoria, Head Body Connector embraces abstract pop as a vessel to explore temporality, togetherness, beauty, and chaos. The latest offering from Psymon Spine (Noah Prebish, Peter Spears, and Brother Michael Rudinski) out on Northern Spy is a gritty, punchy, guitar-forward studio record from a band obsessed with production. “It’s more unhinged than anything we’ve made before,” says Prebish, adding, “Throughout the writing process, we were always asking ourselves how we could make it really fun to play live.” The end result is a little Sonic Youth, a little YMO, and basks in the glow of early 2000s New York-based dance punk and electroclash. If you were to ground it in something more current: Kevin Parker meets Spirit of the Beehive. It features contributions from Deradoorian, Liquid Liquid, and Sabine Holler, as well as recently inducted band members Zebadiah Stern and Sarah Aument.

As Psymon Spine was writing Head Body Connector in 2020, the world was experiencing extreme earthly and psychic disruption, as if we had collectively jumped from one timeline to another, stranger one. The theme of time – fractured, chopped, and screwed – is central both to the songs and album art for HBC. “Head Body Connector is our response to a world even more chaotic than usual,” says Spears, “and an exploration of the little joys, anxieties, and absurdities that world has to offer.”

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Major Murphy explores the beauty of destruction and renewal on their latest release, Fallout. The new 8-song project follows the band’s 2021 shimmering indie rock opus, Access, which garnered praise from The FADER, Stereogum, Uncut Magazine, The Sunday Times and more for its “timeless, universal feel” and the band’s ability to “combine the looseness of 1990s indie with the precision of 1970s soft rock.” On Fallout, Major Murphy extrapolates on many of the ideas and creative practices they established during the making of Access – distilling their sonic sketches with the stirring emotional terrain around parenthood, creative life and empathy. 

The band, made up of songwriter Jacob Bullard, bassist Jacki Warren, who did a stint as bassist for Waxahatchee, and Chad Houseman, who also performs as Tom Hymn, embraced live studio performances to capture a sense of rawness on their newest project. Fallout is the first Major Murphy record to include strings, which, played by Jeffrey Neimeier, add a sense of poignant urgency to many of the tracks. Fallout feels in many ways experimental and like a unique product of our time, highlighted by the psychedelic sonic collages that constitute both the title track and “The Water,” the ode to creative immediacy of “First Thought (Best Thought)” and the punchy, indie rock verve of single “Time Out.”