RobMoro TV | Hannah Georgas – ‘Just A Phase’

Toronto’s Hannah Georgas shares a new offering called ‘Just A Phase,’ a gracious track that blends electronics with Georgas’ balanced tones.

The accompanying video pieces together a view of the album’s recording sessions and what came after. Filmed at The National’s upstate New York studio and during Hannah’s time on the road in 2019 and features Aaron Dessner’s Long Pond studio — recognisable…

On Thursday, March 12, 2020, The Sultan Room hosted a show featuring sets by acts from New York City (Fusilier and WSABI Fox) and Washington, DC (Bartees Strange). Strange released an EP of covers by The National the next day (Friday, March 13th) called Say Goodbye To Pretty Boy and performed them during his set. Since the show took place during the COVID-19 epidemic, the acts addressed it during their stage banter. WSABI Fox asked if everyone washed their hands before playing her first song, Strange thanked the audience for risking their health by attending and Fusilier also expressed gratitude for people attending despite the circumstances.

Bartees Strange doesn’t look a thing like Matt Berninger, and if you were to ask the average National fan what a fan of their music might look like, he’d probably not be the first to come to mind either. That’s a problem, and he’s aware of it. To fully grasp where he’s coming from, it might help knowing where’s he’s walked as well. At this point, Strange lived all over the world -- He was born in Ipswich, England to a military father and an opera singer mother, moved around globally before their family settled in Mustang, Oklahoma just ahead of turning 12, later immersed himself inside of Brooklyn’s diverse modern artist scene, and now works in D.C. as an environment lobbyist.Exposure to all kinds of music and communities is something he’s experienced first hand.

One thing that stuck out to him while attending a National show was how few people people of color were in attendance. Despite the National being an indie rock band defining of a generation more woke and less bound by genre lines (or any other labels, for that matter,) it felt like there was something missing in that space at that very moment of time. With Say Goodbye to Pretty Boy, his debut EP, Strange reimagines these spaces with the black community and its contribution to indie rock in view. Not only that, but he creates something with his own identity with these prexisting creations that proves how universally bound human emotion and art can be when we reflect them into our own experiences and culture.

On the EP’s early previews “About Today” and “Lemonworld”, Strange exchange melancholy tenderness for gleaming soul with dramatic post-rock arrangements as well as emotive synth texturizing. The listen also highlights some of his own original with tracks “Going, Going” and “HAGS” exploring his personal catharsis through a lifelong sonic voyages. Collectively, the EPs amounts to a political statement that focuses in on the once-hidden figures of black voices in indie rock, now brought to the front of the stage through Bartees Strange’s work.

Say Goodbye to Pretty Boy by Bartees Strange

Blame it on the White Stripes, maybe, but since the turn of the millennium we’ve been living in the golden age of the indie rock duo. From the entrancing Japanoise racket of Baltimore’s Lightning Bolt to the Akron blues explosion of the Black Keys to the trebly, maximalist skronk of Sacramento’s Hella, the Husker Du-meets-MBV Zen Arcade of LA’s No Age, and the gleefully unclassifiable theatrics of Seattle metal heads Big Business, stick a pin almost anywhere on the map and you could find a couple of musicians making a convincing argument that they don’t need more than two people to make a sound vastly larger than the sum of its parts. To that list of inimitable pairs, you really ought to add New York’s Buke & Gase.