SOUNDTRACK: NICOLE BUS-Tiny Desk Concert #882 (August 21, 2019).
Nicole Bus is from Amsterdam. Everything about her makes it seem like she has been around for a while. Her style of music, her raspy voice (which makes her sound older than she is) and her choice of instrumentation (the horns and flute melodies sound old school). But she is an emerging artist:
Nicole Bus’ sound is nostalgic. It’s reminiscent of vintage R&B, yet still feels current, and can transcend age and demographics.
Her style is R&B, but her singing style is far more reggae influenced. It’s really fascinating. The first song, “You,” opens with spooky piano from Eugene “Man Man” Roberts and slow horns from Chris Stevens (trumpet) and Aaron Goode (trombone). I love the addition of the flutes from Korey Riker. More and more I can’t get over how good flutes sound in rock. Her delivery is quite reggae until she lets out with her powerful raspy voice. The song is really catchy.
Nicole followed by premiering a new song about women’s empowerment, “Love It.” Drummer Mark Thomas starts with drums and then switches to hand drums. Anthony DeCarlo adds acoustic guitar while Jasmine Patton sing high note backing vocals. I love in the middle of the song when Eugene “Man Man” Roberts play a very 70s-sounding fill on the keyboards. Riker adds more great flutes.
She ends the set
with “Mr. Big Shot,” an up-tempo banger mixing high-energy rhythms with ragga-influenced vocals.
Nicole plays acoustic guitar and there’s a cool, catchy four note bass riff from Ray Bernard that propels the song along. Lamarcus Eldridge joins Patton for some great backing vocals. This melody has been stuck in my head for days now.
I’d never heard of Nicole Bus, but I really enjoyed her set and her energy.
[READ: September 1, 2019] Paper Girls
This book turned out to be so much more interesting than I imagined.
The title was strangely puzzling and the cover had a kind of 1980s look to it.
It didn’t occur to me that “paper girls” meant newspaper delivery girls.
It’s coincidental that this book starts out with the main character, Erin, getting up at 4:40 to deliver papers since that’s almost exactly the same way as Middlewest in which Abel gets up at 4:30 to deliver papers.
Anyhow this story is quite different form that one because it has a cool feminist attitude, although it is also supernatural.
It begins with Erin asleep and dreaming of Christa McAuliffe in heaven. Then she wakes up at 4:40 and gets ready to deliver the Cleveland Preserver. It’s also November 1 (1988) as evidenced by The Far Side calendar (nice touch). The calendar has “hell morning” written on it.
Why? Because at 4:40 on the morning after Halloween there are still hooligans roaming the streets. One dressed as Freddy Krueger harasses Erin immediately. But while he is giving Erin a hard time, three girls pull up on bikes and harass right back. One girl uses some very inappropriate language which Erin (who goes to Catholic school) chastises her for. The girl, Mac, waits for a thank you.
But as soon as Erin realizes who Mac is… the first paperboy around here who wasn’t a … you know. You opened a door for lots of us.”
The three girls Mac, Tiffany and KJ are all paper girls. On Nov 1 they all ride together–safety in numbers. They invite Erin along. While they are riding we see three guys in dark bandages carrying a sack–trick-or-treaters or something else?
Mac and Erin set off and Tiffany gives them each a walkie-talkie (very expensive, don’t break it). Soon after, Mac gets a call on the walkie–they’re being harassed–then the walkie cuts off. When Mac an Erin arrive Tiffany has a skinned knee and the jerks took her walkie talkie. Mac speaks into hers: we’re coming to get our shit back.
The girls think they found where the punks are hiding–a building under construction. They sneak in but in the basement they find a gigantic contraption that looks like it’s from outer space. KJ says it’s the fiftieth anniversary of The War of the Worlds, it must be some prop. But then it starts humming and the power goes out all over town.
The girls run outside only to see the creeps who stole the walkie talkie (it was the guys in the black bandages). Mac runs up to the guy and takes a hood off–he is part zombie, part robot and he speaks in a totally made up language (I love the look of it–I wonder if its translatable. It must be).
They tussle, Mac is hurt but the guys dropped something with a symbol on it. And in the greatest reveal I’ve seen in a long time, Erin picks it up and says, its not a symbol. She holds up the square which has an apple on it. It’s an iPod. Awesome.
The girls head back to Erin’s house, but no one is there. Where could everyone be? Mac says they should go to her house–her dad has a gun. They try to call the police, but the phone is out too. Then someone communicates through the walkie-talkie. But not in the made up language, this guy is speaking a kind of disjointed English. “U lurked solong, but endcredits for de lots, masters.”
The girls go outside and the sky is pink. There’s a loud noise all over town and there are dinosaur type creatures flying in the air.
The girls get to Mac’s house and Mac’s stepmother is there. She is drunk and believes that it is the rapture. She takes out the gun and puts it to her head. Mac grabs it out of her hand but it goes off. Erin is hit and Mac’s mom has disappeared.
The guy speaking disjointed English appears in front of them in a white suit of armor. They try to communicate. Finally, he puts a translator up to his throat and says “Children your questions will be answered but it’s very dangerous for you to be out during Ablution.”
He is then killed by the guys in bandages. One of them picks up the translator and says “trust us, help is the last thing these old-timers would have given you.” He continues, “we’re just like you…we’re teenagers.” This threw me because it gave it a kind of 1950s sci-fi vibe of teens versus adults, which I was not expecting.
The alien teens escort the girls through the sewers where they are attacked by a big green orb. The orb sucks onto Tiffany’s head where her life plays before her eyes and all she can remember doing is plying Arkanoid (I can relate).
The aliens unexpectedly whisk Erin away in a ship (the same ship that the girls found earlier. So the other girls rush to the house where they found the machine.
En route they meet another person in white armor whom they manage to knock out. The person calls her commander, a bearded old man wearing an Apple Records shirt.
Moments later he is standing with the girls as Erin simultaneously plummets through time (it looks like she’s going to 1999).
On the last page Mac, Tiffany and Erin stand in the road. Where is KJ? A car pulls up and when Erin Tieng introduces herself to the woman, the woman, who is an adult says My name is Erin Tieng.
Woah!~
There are six books in this series and I will definitely be looking for the next one.
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