Every week, the Milwaukee Music Premiere sponsored by Density Studios connects the city’s artists with our listening audience. If you’re an artist with a track you’d like us to debut exclusively on Radio Milwaukee, head over to our Music Submission page to learn how.
After so very many years doing Milwaukee Music Premieres, it’s astounding that we keep finding new ground to cover. And yet here we are, pulling off our own The Jetsons Meet The Flintstones moment, with a premiere that could’ve easily been today’s “5 O’Clock Shadow” on the Midday Show.
The song is “A Tricky Sin” from Collections of Colonies of Bees. And also “A Tricky, Lonesome Sin” from Collections of Colonies of Bees. It’s two songs, is what it is, but also the same song covered by the same band that recorded the original, except in a different style that called for a slightly different title.
If that’s not CoCoBees earning the title of “experimental rock band,” then I don’t know what is.
This unique approach to releasing a single — or singles — requires some context about the album on which they appear, which I will valiantly attempt to do now.
So CoCoBees started recording Celebrities in 2019, but then the bad thing happened and we all had to stay inside. The group’s members continued working separately, pulling every thread on every track and then knitting them back together. Except, again, everyone was doing this independently and essentially created a series of giant, shapeless sweaters with arms sticking out every which way and maybe no head hole anymore.
In need of a seamstress, CoCoBees called on Todd Rittmann of similarly experimental rock band Dead Rider and pretty much said, “Hey, see what you can do with these sweater monsters.”
Leaving our pained metaphor behind, Rittman received the following task from the group: “take the chaos of hundreds of unpoliced layered tracks on every song, untangle them, wrangle them, and tame them.”
The ranch hand reference works perfectly in the case of our two premieres (remember them?), with “A Tricky Sin” being a dancefloor-adjacent bop and “A Tricky, Lonesome Sin” going in a country-and-western direction. The former pushes Marielle Allschwang’s vocals down a bit as part of a duet that includes some grounding lower-register work, while the latter puts them front and center in a pining track that would make Patsy Cline proud:
She talks in dangers, too
Like a dream come true
She sends light to you in the dark
And one little spark
Could rip you apart
So just keep on dancing
In a slight deviation from our usual approach, you can listen to the rock-friendly “A Tricky Sin” via the player at the top of the page and the countrified “A Tricky, Lonesome Sin” via the standalone player below. Both tracks will be part of Collections of Colonies of Bees new album, Celebrities, when it comes out June 3.
