Liz Cooper | Dari Bay | Slark Moan at The Stone Church
On the porch of her one-time Nashville home, Liz Cooper had a multimedia project that combined two of her loves: lips and cigarettes. She painted her own lips with red paint and kissed a canvas two or three hundred times, later dotting them with the detritus left behind in ashtrays by her friends. An overlap of intimacy, indulgence, cheekiness, and sensuality, the piece complements Cooper’s roiling second record, Hot Sass. Over jagged, frenetic guitar parts, Cooper sets expectations aflame with the record’s title track. Her songs unfurl like smoke spiraling off an incense cone late in the afternoon, with Cooper pushing deeper into psychedelic openness, punk ferocity, and beyond.
On new album Longest Day of the Year, Dari Bay is a perpetually shifting art project posing as songs, an ongoing thought experiment disguised as a band. Burlington, Vermont-based artist Zachary James launched Dari Bay as a solo vehicle in 2015, acting as sole songwriter, producer, player of every instrument, and exacting architect of how each sound was placed. Early output was raw and often unhinged, but Longest Day of the Year finds Dari Bay assuming a new form as James folds his experimental spirit into what at first appear to be neutral, unassuming tunes.
When Nashville based singer/songwriter Mark Sloan records albums, he takes the word “solo” seriously…and literally. He’s a true Renaissance man, one who plays every instrument, pens the tunes, produces/engineers the proceedings and releases the results on his own imprint. Call him a one man band or the definitive do-it-yourselfer but Sloan—who goes by the barely concealed pseudonym of Slark Moan—gives new meaning to the concept of indie. He’s truly independent of many pressures generated by the music machine that other, often lesser talented artists, are subject to. All of which explains why the uniquely titled Superstition for the Consumer Romantic, his sophomore full length, took about a year and a half to craft.
