Around a month ago, the Bellport, New York singer-songwriter Maxwell Demon uploaded a track called “Tears” onto his Soundcloud page, and I intended to post something about it here in a timely fashion, but could not until now, due to my travels, some uncommon local weather, and life generally – anyhow, excuses aside, it is a song with the odd appeal of several of those he included on his album Strange Being a few months back.
The lyrics of his eerie tune might repel some listeners, comprising as they do a succession of lines that sound on first hearing like nothing other than sexual banalities, at best; but precisely because their content is so overbearing and obvious, one soon notices that these would-be erotic poncifs are not meant to be taken at face-value but were instead uttered in an expansive ironic spirit – if they have not simply been scornfully thrown back into a waste of shame – and then at a stroke the whole song is revealed as a bemused-bitter reflection on the suffusion of our imaginations by the masses of pornography everywhere, and on the soft or hard core of lust in action and inaction these strive to arouse into being in us, issued by a musician whose taste for pensive contemplation is pronounced.
And indeed, beginning late last year, Demon has been developing a new website, Indépendante Nautique, Rock Musique, as a forum for his thoughts, and several of the articles may be recommended for their music-historical and even theoretical interest – not to mention how resonant they might well be of the general mood of the young generation, which is to say, in other words, of our Zeitgeist altogether.
Postscript. His Twitter feed, it turns out, is also worth consulting for its pointers to artists new on the independent music scene.