Gay Angel is a project lead by Jake Bellissimo from Rochester in New York, a raggedy band of musicians who create experimental and theatrical chamber pop which is at turns extravagant and intimate, think sad and angsty bedroom pop with scores of eccentric flourishes.
The liner notes on Bandcamp list 28 contributing musicians who provide everything from electric guitar, drums and vocals, to saxophone, harp, marimba, flute and cello. There’s even a credited conductor! Bellissimo himself provides vocals, autoharp, balalaika, banjo accordion, viola, piano, acoustic and electric guitar, bass guitar and celeste, and that is on top of writing, recording and producing (almost) everything. Add to this snippets from the film ‘alt-berlin’ and an Edith Piaf recording of ‘polichinelle’, and you’ve got an album quite unlike any other. In fact, this isn’t actually an album at all, but the first part of a larger album, or as Bellissimo puts it, “each track is a flower, and this is the first of four bouquets making up the 100-track album Floral”. So these 25 songs are the first quarter of something huge and ambitious, and it will be interesting to hear how the whole thing fits together once it is all completed.
The album opens with ‘tempelhofer flughafen’, a slice of anxious sadcore, telling the story of a visit from an old friend and the subsequent experiences of worry and guilt. It’s full of lines like:
“Two times i’ll call him, two times i said…
two times i thought that i’d never see him again.
i’m so afraid that he won’t like me because one time he said that he was in love with me.
so two times i’ll hang up, i’ll put down my phone…
i’ll put down the vicodin that got me to pick up the phone”.
The second track, ‘the words i read’, introduces some of the array of instruments, including drums, piano and trumpet, and deals with the collapse of a relationship Bellissimo had with an older man, with how things (including people) change with time and how actions and events are open to ever-changing interpretation. The album then takes its first foray into instrumentalism, from guitar-based compositions to toy piano lullabies. ‘silly river’ is a song about solipsism, about how the bad things disappear when you close your eyes, but also about how you can’t close your eyes forever:
“If I blink my eyes the world goes away
but if I leave them closed the solitude never does stay
…So I’ll keep them this way
because no matter how much I sleep
the birds still sing the river still rings
and there are still four seasons.”
Floral continues in this vein across its 25 tracks, alternating between lo-fi pop and rather more experimental touches. ‘i refuse to fall’ sounds like early Casiotone For the Painfully Alone, while ‘trouble in tahiti’ is all screeching noise and unintelligible voices, like whale song for the industrial age.
If all this sounds weird and scattershot, well that’s because it is, and that in turn is because people can be weird, and the thoughts and anxieties which swirl around in their brains are nothing if not scattershot. Floral pt. 1 is a deeply personal piece of work from one man, blown up to billboard scale by a bunch of his friends and the desire to be heard.
You can get Floral pt. 1 on limited release CD, made by Bellissimo’s Drunk With Love Records, via the Gay Angel Bandcamp page. That should also be your destination if pay-what-you-want downloads are more your thing. Note that the CD comes a selection of random extras, including old sheet music, photographs, letters, postcards and flowers.