Throughout her near 30-year stint recording music, NYC-based experimental alt-rocker Kristeen Young continues to be loudly unrepentant in her dedication to sonic eccentricity, something embodied with flying colors in her new single, “Numbers.”
Releasing today, it’s the second single leading up to her new album, Full Scrotal Scorpio, due out October 23rd. Along with drummer Jefferson Wayne “Baby Jef” White, the record was entirely written, mixed, and produced (save for the cover of “Muleskinner Blues Blue Yodel #8”) over the span of a year by Young.
“Numbers” is hypnotically surreal and entirely emblematic of the duo’s chaotic, DIY quality. It is captivatingly jarring, as the piano remains authoritative and delightfully disorienting amidst thunderous drums and impassioned yells. These moments bounce between instances of occasional whispers or sparse guitar pluckings, rounding out the track’s beautifully dizzying quality.
Central to the unique sound is Young’s use of “bashing” piano, a motif picked up in her youth in her adopted home in St. Louis, Missouri. Piano acts as a main melodic and rhythmic force in much of the duo’s music, largely replacing the more conventional choice of guitar with a distinctly commanding presence. Intertwined with White’s contributions on drums, the two are able to commandeer a sound that puts the “art” in “art-rock,” creating tracks as deliberately disordered in their constructions as a Pollock painting.
This avant-garde approach has proved irresistible to figures of music myth, holding attention basically since the inception of her sound. Emerging in the late 90s and 2000s, Young has held a collaborative relationship with Grammy award-winning producer Tony Visconti, known for working with the likes of David Bowie and T. Rex among others.
Bowie himself sang on Young’s song “Saviour” off of the 2003 album Breasticles, while Dave Grohl contributed drums and guitar on the 2014 album Knife Shift, while Young was touring with Morrissey in the same year. Most recently, Billy Corgan enlisted the help of Young for a promotional video for the upcoming Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness 30th anniversary Rats In A Cage Tour, for which she arranged a cover of “Bullet With Butterfly Wings.”
Young is has shows lined up in New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, and more this fall, with her album release show slated for October 23rd at TV Eye in Brooklyn.
