Pennsylvania art-punk outfit This Way to the EGRESS gets downright introspective on their new album RETROSPECTIVA! (out Halloween Day 2020), all the while forcing you to move your body to Balkan beats and burlesque bop. It’s a modern journey through Tom Waits-esque folk-punk junkyards, esoteric worlds of vaudevillian juke joints and underground big band Great Gatsby parties. This is an album of hindsight and metamorphosis. This trickster band of misfits digs deep into their subconscious to find meaning in this increasingly complex world of death, pandemic and societal upheaval. We’re all just wondering if we’ll make it out alive. Spoiler alert, none of us do.
RETROSPECTIVA! is EGRESS’ sixth album. They’ve played festivals alongside heavy hitters like M.I.A., Cypress Hill and The Specials and shared stages with Squirrel Nut Zippers, World/Inferno Friendship Society, Aurelio Voltaire, Red Elvises and The Dresden Dolls, including being Amanda Palmer’s backing band at her New Year’s Eve Bash. The new album was recorded and produced by Dan Shatzky at his NYC Vibromonk studio, a mecha for the NYC gypsy/klezmer-punk scene with credits including Gogol Bordello, Balkan Beat Box & Firewater.
EGRESS is a band that thrives in transformation. They’re genre fluid, where roots, jazz and world music influences meld with punk and the experimental. The band name itself comes from P.T. Barnum grifting his audience to exit his American Museum in New York City, featuring oddball sideshow attractions like the Figi Mermaid, dwarfs and bearded ladies, so they’d have to pay again to re-enter. The music of EGRESS is an indoctrination into secret worlds of underground art and performance. Their live shows are renowned as an immersive experience involving elaborate costumes, props, puppetry and dance, creating a respite and a meeting place for other avant garde bohemian types. RETROSPECTIVA! catalogs their own odyssey into growing older, confronting the death of loved ones and navigating their own physical, metaphysical and spiritual paths forward.
This Way to the EGRESS’ primary songwriters are power duo Taylor Galassi (vocals, accordion, cello) and Sarah Shown (vocals, keys) who live, work, love and psychonautically explore together—creating the framework that holds up the skeleton of the larger EGRESS body. Jaclyn Kidd (guitar) brought the only other track not written by Galassi or Shown on this record with her “Shower Song.” John Wentz (tuba, vocals) and Nick Pecca (drums) round out the remainder of the core band, but Ian Francis LeSage (trumpet), Joe “Bone” Lynch (trombone) and Rachel Galassi (violin, iola) also brought their talents to this record.
RETROSPECTIVA! is an upbeat, fun record built to be danced to, but that often contrasts with dark introspective lyrics. That’s exactly what makes this such an exciting album. The members of EGRESS already have side projects and solo projects waiting in the wings as we patiently await the next record. Until then, we’ll continue to listen to RETROSPECTIVA! with our friends and family on the astral plane.
Today Glide is excited to premiere the album closer “Last Call,” a song that seeks to bring us all together in these uncertain times, with gang vocals in the style of traditional drinking ballads. Similar to the drinking ballads of Tom Waits, the song carries an accordion-laced sense of nostalgia as it conjures images of the bar at closing time. This is a song for swaying along with a drink in your hand and raising a toast to life, even at a time when it seems like the world is going to shit and we can’t actually congregate in crowded bars. Nonetheless, the band offers a sense of musical escapism with this song.
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One Response
Thank you for a thoughtful article about one of my favorite bands.
I finally gave the full album a complete listening to this afternoon and while melancholy at times, it helped to lift my spirits in these uncertain times.