composer, singer, songwriter

Franz Nicolay on Someone Will Take Care of Me

Franz Nicolay of The Hold Steady and World/Inferno Friendship Society founded the new-music collective Anti-Social Music, which celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2010; and is co-leader of the Balkan-jazz quartet Guignol, whose Fight Dirty came out in 2009. Also in 2009, he released his solo debut Major General (Fistolo/Decor) and vinyl-only EP St. Sebastian of the Short Stage (Team Science); and in early 2010 the short-story collection Complicated Gardening Techniques (Julius Singer Press). He made Luck & Courage in Brooklyn in two weeks in spring 2010, with producer Jim Keller (Willie Nelson, Franz Ferdinand). After completing the new album, he spent the past summer as a touring member of agit-punk band Against Me!.

On the indie-music reviews site Adequacy.net, Nicolay writes about his top 5 albums of 2010.  This is what he says about Corey’s album Someone Will Take Care of Me:

This is a two-disc set from the post-classical splash-makers New Amsterdam Records, which compiles two of Dargel’s song cycles: “Removable Parts,” a collaboration with pianist Kathy Supove on the topic of voluntary amputation; and “Thirteen Near-Death Experiences,” an ironic meditation on hypochondria and pathology with the International Contemporary Ensemble. It’s the latter that interests me most, in which Dargel’s customary soundworld – electronic cross-rhythms, skittering piano obbligato, and deadpan despair that lies somewhere at the intersection of art song, early Magnetic Fields, and Momus – is re-scored for acoustic chamber ensemble and drum kit, and holds itself, coyly, just short of anthemic. (Or maybe I’m just into flutes this year?)

Franz Nicolay photo by Miles Kerr