In a previous time, Joe Geni would have been a crooner; his rich and dynamic voice would have lent itself to the big, chamber-pop anthems and delicate ballads of the day. Thankfully, we encounter him in an age where many more options are open to him musically speaking. So we find him making more intricate, ornate, adventurous, and exploratory music than such a previous age would have offered him.
“City Where The Sky Subsides” is a song as sweepingly gorgeous as it is unexpected and original. Although much of his work to date has been guided by electronic sounds, here, Joe opts for a guitar-driven anthem, but it is more than a simple rock song—much more.
It may be a song built on a scuzzy garage-rock guitar, but it is one smoothed and washed by silkier sonics, digital dexterity, and bursting with vocal crescendoes, the like of which you will not have heard in a long time…if ever.
This ode to staring out of the window waiting for the rain to stop, literally waiting for the sky to subside, is representative of the themes in Joe Geni’s work, music that soundtracks the Anthropocene, the age of mankind and particularly the urban experience of humanity in such a time: the album that this single foreshadows, Cities Built Upon Cities, is a musing on the gentrification of his Long Island home, of man’s relationship with his environment and our search for home in an ever-changing world.
Singles are there to sell, or at least draw attention to, a forthcoming album. Well, this fine and finessed single has not only sold the idea of the album, but has impressed on me the need to check out Joe Geni’s previous work too. I’d say that is a single succeeding at the task at hand. Wouldn’t you?
City Where The Sky Subsides
Spotify
City of Energy
Cities Built Upon Cities album order
