Market—the Brooklyn-based band of songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/producer Nate Mendelsohn—today announced that their new album and debut for Western Vinyl, The Consistent Brutal Bullshit Gong, will be released on April 29TH, 2022. Co-produced by Mendelsohn and frequent collaborator Katie Von Schleicher, the album was recorded between Brooklyn, New York’s Figure 8 and Monterey, Massachusetts’ Gravel Mountain studios, with mixing by Sam Owens (Sam Evian). The Consistent Brutal Bullshit Gongshowcases Mendelsohn and his core band of collaborators (Von Schleicher, Natasha Thweatt, Stephen Becker, and Duncan Standish) as they create a dynamic musical world that is at once uneasy, energetic, and beautiful, and one in which its bandleader’s lyrics cut through with humor and intensity.
The album’s boisterous lead single “Scar” out today arrives alongside a surreal, Matt Strickland-directed video. In the visual, Mendelsohn wakes up with a grotesquely enlarged middle finger and gets attacked by his bandmates, initiating a laser tag battle and a choreographed dance routine between them. “‘Scar’ was written about a very turbulent month of my life where I was relaxing upstate with friends for a luxurious month making music, but also my grandma died, my relationship dissolved, and a tick bite put me in the hospital overnight on an IV,” Mendelsohn reflects. “The resulting song is fever dream country punk: pretty but thorny, sturdy but anxious.” The album is now available for pre-order HERE.
After college, where he met most of his current bandmates, Mendelsohn became an engineer/producer at Figure 8 Recording, where he expanded his community by recording artists such as Frankie Cosmos and Wendy Eisenberg, and playing with the likes of Yaeji, Vagabon, Von Schleicher, and Sam Evian. But Market serves as Mendelsohn’s own outlet as an impressive lyricist and songwriter as introduced on the home recorded debut LP, Not Good At Spending Time Alone a.k.a. Cleanliness, and 2020’s Yuy. His plainly biographical, humorous, and relatable lyrics are delivered free of any added melodrama over meticulous (and occasionally athletic) arrangements that thoughtfully uphold his earnest tone.
While writing The Consistent…, Mendelsohn grappled with long-gestating OCD, watched a formative relationship dissolve, and experienced a mental health crisis that lasted a full year. During this time, Mendelsohn began to consider the ways he has approached friendship, partnership, and especially family. Those observations and partial conclusions make their way into the songs in an essential capacity, as he mixes the small with the very big on a dogged search for empathy. Creating intimacy out of manic self-reflection requires a delicate balancing act, and it is one Mendelsohn tackles with abandon. The resultant record is an obsessive look inward in which Mendelsohn simply asks himself if he is good to those he loves. It’s an act of trust between the artist and the imagined listener he takes with him.
