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STEREO EMBERS EXCLUSIVE VIDEO PREMIERE – Shimmy-Disc Artist Lumberob’s Joyous, Strange, Perfect “Maybelle” from Upcoming Album ‘Hunter Gather’

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So, regardless of our passion for music that in its expression borders on adolescent giddiness, the tone in the SEM offices, the demeanor, if you will, is pretty button-down. There’s work to do and all the research and communication with artists and/or their publicists and the occasional outreach to the labels themselves that comes with that (assuming there’s even a label involved given the wholly reorganized landscape that’s evolved since pretty much day one of the internet), past which there are adjectives to summon, comparative stylistic references to nail down, coffee pots getting dangerously low, editorial panic being quietly suppressed. Sure, one or the other of us will jump up every now and again with a ‘You gotta hear this!’ but even that’s rare as we’re sensitive to our fellow scribes’ already-frayed state of play, you never know what train of thought you might derail, never to be righted again. However, it’s not all solemn intensity, our brows furrowed in some sort of Gorkyesque scowl as we wrestle with still another knot of garbled syntax. Sometimes, like a light coming in through the windows at a new, unexpected angle, a new track/video from an artist we adore sidles in sideways and proceeds to draw everyone’s attention away from whatever task is at hand and into the kind of dreamstate we basically all live for, one where a skewed intelligence is balanced by an abiding pop sensibility all of which is in turn leavened by a level of a particularly peculiar delight that feels as unforced as it is utterly crucial, necessary even. Welcome to the latest from Lumberob, an artist seemingly Shimmy-Disc-bound from birth and whose work we’ve been fortunate enough to feature before and whose brand of near-childlike absurdism provides an image of what Samuel Beckett might’ve been like had he been raised by Laurel & Hardy (serious but seriously playful, in other words).

Prefaced by a minute of off-hand cinéma vérité minimalism that’s equal parts disorienting and grounding (and is thereby pretty much the perfect primer for what’s forthcoming), the video for new single “Maybelle” from the upcoming Hunter Gather LP has us in its grip from the first frame. But, really, it’s the oddly understated gist of the one-person performance that follows that swallows one’s attention whole. How it manages to be both beguiling yet, somehow, unabashedly guileless is a mystery that at first hangs like an existential shrug over the proceedings before it rather completely evaporates as the comfy, cloud-covered exuberance that, to us, seems to serve as an embrace of the artist’s unbridled spirit no matter one’s surroundings (a featureless, flat warehouse rooftop abutting the Manhattan Bridge does not a classic, painterly scenario make) gives the gifted, solitary dancer/choreographer – and longtime Lumberob collaborator – Laura Peterson all the support they need to get that point across.

Symbolism and its interpretation aside – and we fully admit that ours may very well verge on the batty – the fact is that the spirit and artistry behind all this, that uniquest-of-the-unique Lumberob sensibility (not least when mixed and mastered by Kramer), is a rare quantity indeed. Blessed with an idiosyncratic finesse that in our semi-fevered imagination has us pondering the prospect of the Residents producing a masters-level Dr. Seuss-based concept album, it seems safe to say that the state of mind that most accurately reflects our response here is…flabbergasted. We could add something along the lines of ‘they don’t make many artists like this anymore’ but the fact is they don’t make any like this anymore. Not to be too flip, but what a trip.

[Hunter Gather released July 12th on Shimmy-Disc, available here]