“Nevermind the Garbage” is the first single from Reliant Tom’s forthcoming sophomore album Play & Rewind. The song encapsulates the theme of the album: a documentation of singer Claire Cuny’s decent into grief after her father passed away, unexpectedly, on the day of the release of their last album, Bad Orange.
“The song is about trying to return to a semi-normal routine by learning to manage the grief and anxiety that overcame me after the sudden loss of my father.” says Cuny. “My state was complex and somewhat guilt ridden because all I could feel was sadness. Even though I was at a good point in my life, with a loving partner, and reminded daily how fortunate I was when seeing the more severe hardships of other people such as chronic health issues and homelessness… all I could feel was despair, not the love or gratitude – but when you’re in the depth of your darkness it’s hard to feel much else.”
The album also marks a new sonic direction for Reliant Tom that incorporates a full band with hybrid electro-acoustic instrumentation. The arrangement and structure of “Nevermind the Garbage” mirrors its lyric themes through a cyclical chord progression that perpetually darkens with the introduction of piano, electric guitar, and synth layers – darkness, weight, and dissonance. The intro and core instrumentation that carries it are a pair of nylon string guitars layered with piezo contact mic experimentation that are modulated – giving the song an organic yet slightly odd and warbly quality.
Tracing their origins to a chance meeting at DIY show in Brooklyn in 2015, the Brooklyn-based post rock electronic band and experimental performance art Reliant Tom is centered around its core creative duo, Western Massachusetts-born, Brooklyn-based composer Monte Weber and Dallas, TX-born, Brooklyn-based choreographer and vocalist Claire Cuny. The duo’s collaboration is a seamless synthesis of their individual talents and interests – sound design, wearable technology, modern dance and hook-driven, yet genre-defying songwriting.
“Reliant Tom gives me the outlet to explore both pulse driven works while maintaining the other musical elements which I find fascinating – timbre, aleatoric processes, and interactive technologies,” Weber explains. Adds Cuny, “Our ultimate goal with Reliant Tom is to be a multi-media performance experience that straddles the line between pop and experimental music – and philosophizing about what that even means, and is that even possible as ‘experimental pop’?”
