Gumby’s Junk new album Business & Pleasure is strictly not business as usual
It’s strange, you can’t get around that component of the music, something reminiscent of a dissociative fugue state and emotions free from the English vocabulary. Someone once told me, in a heated argument about The Beatles, that they don’t listen to any music that has been done before—only things that are new and/or refreshing. I believe that applies directly to Gumby’s Junk latest album release “Business & Pleasure”.
Photo Credit: Addie Briggs
Gumby’s Junk has eluded me for some time. As a Bay Area native, punk, hardcore, indie and alternative rock flows through the music scene like Biblical rivers of honey. However, the genre-less, the surreal, is harder to encounter. Gumby’s Junk is punk, through the politics of it all, but in the same sense that Frank Zappa is classic rock; through feminine operatic vocals and unusual song structure this band is needfully avante guarde
The newest addition to the Gumby’s Junk’s discography, Business & Pleasure, released on August 29, continues to fill the band’s strange niche. As a whole, the album is a thoughtfully dissonant play into something spooky, a more sinister side of love and hate. As a concept, “Business & Pleasure” is a cathartic obsession with the gothic, primal side of the human experience.
The newest addition to the Gumby’s Junk’s discography, Business & Pleasure was released on August 29.
A 36 second first track, “Something Was Not Done Correctly,” sets the tone. It begins the album with a multimedia audio clip, a strange voice which demands the listener to “press one” as “something was not done correctly.”
Woven into the following tracks is a mournful and inherently feminine demand for answers. “Sophomore Rodeo” is a personal favorite. The song settles nicely on a background of an accordion melody, paired with the band’s classic vocals, painting a picture reminiscent of a seedy underbelly of some Parisian experience.
Photo Credit: Addie Briggs
The previously released “Tender Bender” begins as the softest track on the album, edging more into alt rock. However, the track easily devolves into emotional excitement as the first song on the track including a second male vocalist.
Gumby’s Junk’s music is not for everyone, it may not appear on the average party playlist or uber radio. However, for those of us who have been described as “feeling intensely” who appreciate the art of play and humor, or romanticize the unusual, the band’s newest album is a must listen.
