Review: Colin Frangicetto’s “My Brother’s Ears / My Sister’s Eyes”

Posted on August 20, 2011 by Adam Susskind

From guitarist Colin Frangicetto comes “My Brother’s Ears / My Sister’s Eyes,” a ten song album released under the moniker “Psychic Babble”.

The music combines one part melancholy with two parts eerie, and the haunting, echoing vocals leave the listener reaching for something by which to balance themselves, yet enjoying the confusion all the while.

Multi-part harmonies and fluid guitar work come through on all the tracks, and are particularly impressive on track five, “You Said It”. The driving drum beat, sliding bass guitar, and backup vocals move the album along quite nicely and remind the audience that, while the immanently singable softer songs make up the majority of the record, there is a strong backbone to Frangicetto’s compositions. Right in the middle of the album, “You Said It” spurs the album along firmly, while retaining many stylistic similarities to the other pieces, and thus creating a very coherent whole. This ability to write music in a variety of flavors while using repeat ingredients is what we come to know as character, and is rare indeed, as many musicians are ultimately singular in their sound.

Mournful as Frangicetto’s music seems, there are undertones of hopefulness and lightheartedness, or perhaps awe and adventure. With an almost child-like sense of wonder, songs like “Nothing Familiar” and “Let Me Change” remind one of the fantastic and bizarre – a trait common in the music of Frangicetto’s most well known group, Circa Survive.

Drawing from moods of the alternative, experimental, and folk variety, “My Brother’s Ears / My Sister’s Eyes” is quite a creation to behold. As track one (“Five Fold Kiss (Don’t Sleep)”) suggests, many listeners may be left conscious through the late hours of their days, dazed in the wake of Frangicetto’s new album, a work reminiscent of the best kinds of modern music.

Find Psychic Babble on facebook HERE.

Poem: The Local Newspaper

Posted on October 14, 2010 by Adam Susskind

Trying new things again. Working on the short story pretty heavily right now. Took a break to do this.

“The local newspaper
is in everyone’s mailbox
and less than half of them read it.
And when the front page
announced the fifty dollar first prize
for the library raffle,
I wonder if anyone cared.
And I wonder if they find
a copy of that paper
in fifty years,
if our little town’s big news
will matter then.”

Ficly: The First Step

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Adam Susskind

A ficly about pre-performance anxiety. Thanks to my good friend for the idea.

The crowd murmured while we watched from behind the curtain, dancing around the backstage in a kind of nervous strut. Stage left, stage right. Looking out, trying to get a sense of the size of the audience that night.

Blue and red lights hit the cymbals on the kit, a kind of mixed purple hue sent splashing across the wood floor that seemed to have seen so many shows before us.

The amps were set. Guitars. The microphone on a thin stand like a nervous young girl in the spotlight. I fidgeted in my seat, unsure of whether to sit or stand. A pencil of a man with a headset stepped past our manager and looked at us as a whole, not making eye contact with anyone in particular.

One minute.

We lined up. Jim always walked out with his pick already in his hand. It was kind of a tradition of his. I didn’t have any traditions. Each night was new. I was asleep, and with the start of every show, when my stick hit the metal of the ride, I was reborn. Kevin had sweaty palms. That first note was always the most important. We had to nail it or the show was more or less shot.

The floor lights dimmed, the effect lights overhead started to flash, we looked at our respective instruments, and in one perfectly synchronized motion, took the first step.

Ficly: Eat the Vegetables

Posted on September 15, 2010 by Adam Susskind

It’s late. I’m posting this. I don’t even know why. I’m so tired. Lots of homework and I’m not even done. Just gotta laugh it off. Here. Maybe this Ficly will make you laugh. I doubt it, but if it does… well… Go find help.

“Have you had enough, son?”

The man nodded, juice dripping from his chin as he glanced up at the older man. A wrinkled old hand lent itself to the younger gentleman’s shoulder.

“Are you sure you’re full?”

The man smiled with an blank gaze. He turned back to the brown mush in his bowl, the iron spoon listing slightly out of the bowl before clattering to the stained table below. Deep, hollowed knots in the wood of the counter on which the man ate. Sometimes he ate with a utensil, sometimes with his fingers, but always for the past month here, he had eaten twice a day, the same brown salty meal the texture of warm oats and milk.

The rooms of the house were always well lit, those that he had been allowed to explore at any rate, and the carpet clean, the furniture brushed and flowers placed out each week on the small glass coffee table by the couch, but the priestly old figure refused to entertain guests whom were not inclined to spend any more than two weeks. Well, that had been alright for those many who had passed through the door. A long stay was perhaps just what they were looking for.

The juice fell from the younger man’s chin. He had grown fat in the month, and slow. And while everything seemed the same that morning, there was now a change in the older fellow he had not seen since right before the last guest left.

“Well.” The quivering voice said, a kind of desperation in anticipation waiting immediately below the surface. “If you’re quite finished, perhaps it’s time I show you the basement, hurm?”

Ficly: While the World Sleeps

Posted on September 7, 2010 by Adam Susskind

Posted from the bus on the way back up to Ithaca.

I pulled the phone out of my pocket. The bus was quiet. 3 A.M to Buffalo. Everyone was asleep save an older man with a newspaper in the back of the bus and the pretty girl with the laptop behind me.

We cruised across the pavement, a cough here, a grunt there, all drowned in the white noise of the air conditioning.

There it was. On the phone. My feet, her feet. A picture I took three years ago. Maybe I forgot to delete it with all the others. No faces, just our lower legs, my shoes, and her sandals at one end of a hammock. I would never know why it popped up. Maybe I had shifted in my sleep and hit a button. It didn’t matter.

I took two seconds to look over the image, and then deleted it. I needed to know that the world was going to forget about her before I could let go. I wanted to be the last person ever to think about her, but I wanted to stop thinking. Cancer had done his dirty work over two years ago, and with that last picture gone, I was hoping her memory was going to disappear as fast as she had.

Originally on Ficly: http://ficly.com/stories/20843

Ficly: The Field Again

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Adam Susskind

The first post from Ithaca, NY.

When I started this one, I had something else in mind. I kinda wanted to write a different style of story, but this is what came out. The next one I do will probably be more in vein of the last one, “Single Socks,” which is to say, more ordinary, slice-of-life kind of thing.

I would have to send them in again, or replace them.

When I looked out the window of the third floor, I saw them in the field again, staring upwards to the sun like they were about to drown in a sea of UV. They had burnt out again. Fried. Something inside always snapped.

I watched for a while, sipping slowly from a straw through the mask. If I was going to bring them inside I was going to have to lather myself in that white ooze, and at my age you just lose interest.

This was all very routine for the most part until one of them stopped and looked around at the other two. They were strong. Male figures, all of them, although not particularly correct in that sense. Naked, pale white flesh that bubbled and oozed after a few months of sun. They stood on the cracked clay with their shovels.

And then he laughed. A full, convincing laugh, before clutching and ripping a sheet of skin from his left cheek. There was no blood, just a little sap, which dried before he hit the ground.

Originally on FIcly: http://ficly.com/stories/20745

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