Someone Will Take Care of Me
Corey Dargel is joined by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), pianist Kathleen Supové, and drummer David T. Little on the art-pop double-CD album Someone Will Take Care of Me. The album contains unconventional love songs from Dargel’s two acclaimed music-theater pieces about hypochondria and voluntary amputation — Thirteen Near-Death Experiences and Removable Parts. Dargel uses a mix of witty lyrics, humor and compassion to create quirky love songs that earnestly celebrate the ways in which abnormal behavior leads to more diverse interactions with the world, new approaches to creativity, and unconventional definitions of sanity.
Here are places to preview and purchase the album:
New Amsterdam Records (physical CDs & high-quality Lossless download. Ordering physical CDs gives you immediate access to downloads, but you can also purchase only the downloads.)- The album is distributed by Naxos of America and is in stock at many record stores in the U.S.. Check with your local independent record store.
- Naxos Direct (physical CDs only)
- eMusic.com (download only)
(download only, includes an exclusive bonus remix by Seth Gordon and an exclusive iTunes digital booklet)- Amazon (physical CDs only)
Here’s what the critics are saying:
“Intimate, witty, and often kinda creepy, Corey Dargel’s songs strike an uneasy balance between art and pop. Using some top-shelf musicians from New York’s contemporary music scene and singing in a pop style (usually multitracked), Dargel spins quirky, lyrical tales of dysfunction and delusion…Imagine Franz Schubert composing a song cycle about hypochondria after listening to AM radio Top 40 and studying Thelonius Monk…” -eMusic Editor’s Pick, review by John Schaefer
“These recordings are wonderful… [s]ongs about love as something to enthrall and survive, as an unavoidable illness, songs in the voices of people who, despite their deficits, love and want to be loved. If that sounds too much like the bathos of Morrissey, Dargel has so much more charm and wit, as well as an effortless touch.” - The Big City
“[T]his album, like all things of true beauty, teeters on the brink of madness.” - The Indie Handbook
“These songs are peopled by twelve-year-old alcoholics; a Ritalin-stunted child who feels no emotions; a man longing for castration… I saw [Corey Dargel] perform selections from this album the other night, and was impressed with the balancing act he pulled off; he was playful, but never tipped completely over into mean-spiritedness; he was empathetic, but not manipulative; he made people uncomfortable, but didn’t seem interested in empty provocation.” -Jayson Greene at 17dots
“Dargel’s pop-song trappings are a façade that lulls you into a false sense of security as a listener; before you know it, you’re bopping your head to a very complex series of beats, humming a melody that doesn’t quite line up with those beats, and thinking about the world in a way that you most likely would never have thought about it before …[W]ith Removable Parts and Thirteen Near Death Experiences, Dargel is doing much more than writing extremely well-crafted songs. He is creating larger arcs of meaning, both musically and lyrically.” -Frank J. Oteri, New Music Box
“a brilliant collection” – WNYC’s New Sounds
“The songs are terrific.” - Huffington Post
“Dargel’s [voice] is well-suited to the songs, which in some ways could be heard melodically as fairly conventional, but whose accompaniments… are wittily skewed enough to situate this music in the realm of the very odd… In spite of its veneer of simplicity, Dargel’s music has a sophistication that should give it strong appeal for fans of the intersection between experimental rock and classical.” -Stephen Eddins, All Music Guide
“Dargel’s songs are wryly witty and often hilarious, crafted with a charming, angular lyricism, the deft lyrics recalling the best work of Warren Zevon and Randy Newman… What lifts these songs from merely comic throwaways is their graceful charm, mixing a lyric delicacy with an unsettled rhythmic line that reflects the hypochondriac’s nervous tension… Dargel’s scoring for sextet shows great skill and ingenuity.” - Chicago Classical Review on Thirteen Near-Death Experiences
And here’s what Corey Dargel is saying: (more…)
Every Day Is the Same Day (Free 3-Song EP w/violinist Cornelius Dufallo)
Download all three songs in one zip file (MP3 files @320 kbps)
Corey Dargel’s Every Day Is the Same Day — scored for voice, violin, and digital looping, and performed by Dargel and Cornelius Dufallo — presents worst-case scenarios as possible solutions for boredom and loneliness. This free EP represents the beginning of what will eventually be an evening-length song cycle about clinical depression (yay! & cue drum machines!).
01. On This Date Every Year (3’16″)
02. You Can Say a Prayer (2’53″)
03. The Opposite of Love (3’01″)
Here’s a stream of “The Opposite of Love:”
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“a bite-sized work of art that will get lodged in your brain for the next year” -Daniel Stephen Johnson, Daniel Stephen Johnson dot com.
“Dargel’s fierce ruminations on death are accompanied by the ecstatic violin loops of Cornelius Dufallo, a truly wonderful eight minutes of music. It’s Kafka Fragments for the SoHo crowd.” -Will Robin, Seated Ovation
Download all three songs in one zip file (MP3 files @320 kbps)
Other People’s Love Songs
Other People’s Love Songs is based on an earnest and sentimental concept: All thirteen songs were commissioned by individuals as gifts to their significant others. Corey Dargel – composer, lyricist, and singer – interviewed the couples and learned all about their histories, personalities, quirks, private jokes, and emotional lives. He spun this tender data into music and lyrics that encompass a wide range of feelings. The real-life subjects of these songs range from celebrities to the “couple next door.” Newlyweds, long marrieds, gay couples, siblings, daughters, mothers, and others stepped forward to commission these songs. At times, the results are almost voyeuristic in their intimacy.
Listen/Purchase
- Naxos Direct (physical)
- Amazon (physical/virtual)
- eMusic (virtual)
- iTunes (virtual)
Press Coverage
Listen to NPR’s Weekend Edition segment on Other People’s Love Songs.
Time Out New York interview (issue 682, october 23-29, 2008)
Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane interview (mp3)
“Dargel play[s] the role of a sardonic-hipster Cyrano, translating his patrons’ tangled and intense feelings into artful, sophisticated pop songs… merg[ing] the dreamy synth-pop of The Postal Service – cooing female background vocals and quietly sputtering percussion and all – with Dargel’s slyly romantic lyrics.” – 17 dots
“invigorating, innovative but immediately approachable… [with] an unguarded quirkiness and (more…)
Less Famous Than You
Corey’s debut solo album released in May, 2006, on Use Your Teeth records (London).
New York based composer/performer Corey Dargel releases Less Famous Than You, a collection of songs about falling in love with famous (or semi-famous) people.
Trained at the renowned Oberlin Conservatory, Dargel creates deceptively simple and achingly vulnerable art-pop. Even though it’s not new for a classical musician to embrace the use of a laptop, drum machines, and synthesizers, it is rare for one to embrace the pop song with such unabashed intensity.
Dargel’s gentle assault on the pop idiom creates a tension which pervades the music: Deadpan and detached vocals reveal heartbreaking intimacies, awkward and obtrusive drum patterns struggle against fragile harmonies, vocals and music uneasily opposing each other as songs stumble to their ends.
Emotional and intelligent, Less (more…)
