‘Appendix’ runs eleven minutes across four songs, and it comes less than a year after Joel Cusumano’s debut, ‘WAXWORLD’ (_Dandy Boy Records). It’s made of leftovers, songs in various states of completion that were sitting around during those sessions. Material like that often sounds hesitant. This doesn’t. If anything, these sound like the songs that wouldn’t fit anywhere else because they were too prickly. Cusumano has talked about going through a dark stretch and about a world he sees as burning, and you can hear both. You can also hear what’s missing: no love songs, no breakup songs. Just the sour aftertaste of both, with the bitterness outlasting the relationship that caused it.
“Buying Time” opens with no warm-up. Owen Kelley’s bass walks along nervously, and Brett Eastman drums like he’s heading to an appointment he’d rather skip. Cusumano sings in the tired, knowing voice of someone who reads too much and sleeps too little. The title says it all: putting things off, taking comfort in a delayed reckoning. Ella Keilt’s guitar and harmonies thicken the chorus until it sounds like a roomful of people stuck in the same waiting room. At 1:34, “Mortal Fool” is the shortest track and the most reckless. It’s over almost before it starts. Cusumano plays bass here and on the next song, and his lines are thick and a little rude, the way good punk-leaning bass should be. Julie Barwick’s keyboards sit at the edges and add color without softening anything. When it ends, you’ll probably want to hit replay.
“Stigmata” slows down, but the intensity stays. It’s a little over three minutes, which gives the band space to stretch out, and the arrangement (credited jointly to Cusumano, Barwick, Eastman, and Keilt), shows how much work went into it. Guitars criss-cross at odd angles; a keyboard hums low in the background. The title is about wounds that appear from nowhere, and so is the song: a hurt you can’t trace, personal at first, then widening until it swallows more than you can name. Rob Good (The Goods, Ryli, Yea-Ming And The Rumours), backs the choruses, providing extra weight to the track. Good, who also engineered the EP, keeps things close and dry, with no gloss. You can hear the room, the amps, and the players.
“7×7” closes things out, with Kelley’s bass back at the front. It ends the EP with a shrug that sounds like a shout. The title suggests a grid or a cell, a fixed amount of space, which fits what Cusumano has been writing about since the last album: the structures that hold a life together and the low panic of noticing the walls. Eastman drives it so hard that the despair starts to feel athletic. The angular guitars nod to early-’80s post-punk. However, none of it feels like tribute. The band, whose members have played in Andy Human & the Reptoids, The Letterwriters, Cyan Pools, and Latitude, sounds like it has really lived with these songs. They land the downbeats together, and they land them hard.
Cusumano’s best quality is that he’s a smart writer who doesn’t use that as cover. The cynicism is real, but so is the decency underneath it, the part that still cares enough to be angry. Keeping that balance for four songs is hard, never mind a whole career, and he does it loosely, like he isn’t trying to impress anyone.
Learn more links: Dandy Boy Records | Link Tree
