Son of the Velvet Rat is the alter ego of songwriter Georg Altziebler and his wife Heike Binder, who a decade ago left their hometown of Graz, Austria and the cloistered safety of the Continent for the endless highway of America. They came to rest in Joshua Tree, on the edge of California’s Mojave Desert – an alien, alluring landscape that no less than Neil Armstrong once christened the closest to that of the surface of the moon.
This spectral, off-world character has finally found purchase in their jagged folk-pop melodies and forbidding ballads, infusing the cabaret traditions of Old World masters like Georges Brassens, Jacques Brel and Fabrizio De André with the Old Testament prophecy and Kabbalistic visions of Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan.
On their new album, Ghost Ranch (due out March 22nd, 2024 via Fluff & Gravy Records), drum loops and saloon piano, violin and cicada drones, hanging chimes and pounded metal combine to create a jittery soundtrack for all the true believers and false messiahs, county fairs and shooting ranges, feral banners fluttering atop battered pickup trucks, and the roadside carnage of an accidental police state ratcheting into focus. All delivered in what fan and collaborator Lucinda Williams once called Georg’s “great sexy-gravelly voice,” leavened by Heike’s translucent harmonies, like desert roses circling a tattooed heart.
Today Glide is excited to premiere the video for “Beautiful Day,” a standout track that finds the duo collaborating with folk artist Jolie Holland. With its black-and-white imagery portraying scenes from a fair, the tune is a dreamy work of Americana-laced folk-rock that finds them leaning into a sound that is quietly rocking. The simple drum beat provides a backbone to the hushed harmonies and bursts of jagged electric guitar that seems on the edge of spiraling into a blistering solo to give the song an element of suspense.
“This is a song about a dream where the dreamer realizes he’s reliving somebody else’s life, seeing things through somebody else’s eyes,” states songwriter Georg Altziebler. “In this dream death doesn’t mean a thing. We all come and go and come and go again. The song was inspired by the passing of 2 close relatives.”
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