Reviving highlights from his long-running downtown theater career, the Music for Downtown Theater EP finds Tom X. Chao transforming four stage-rooted songs into full-bodied, freshly recorded rock productions. A veteran of off-off-Broadway and the Canadian fringe circuit, Chao revisits material once delivered over homemade MIDI backings and reimagines it with vibrant arrangements and brass flourishes.
Melding twangy guitars and mellow keys within an introspective vocal allure, “Cannot Be Denied” opens the album with spirited artfulness. “Every lonely person has to turn to the mirror and look deep inside,” Chao sings, then expanding into touches of further guitar distortion and glimpses of baroque-pop charm as the “chorus of crying” string-laden segment hits. The original track, coming via 2003’s Cats Can See the Devil, enamored with its memorable songwriting — and this version, with bolstered instrumentation like brass, breathes new life into it.
The ensuing “Lower Your Standards” — coming via 2001’s 2-person comedy Can’t Get Started — reminds fondly of Magnetic Fields in its deeper vocal tone and evolution from quaint indie-pop into a brass-forward soaring. Elsewhere, “Culture Jamming! (Love Theme from The Negative Energy Field)” struts a charismatic vigor in its bright organs and peppy brass infusions, culminating in fervent layers and a concluding round of applause — apt, since the original track played as “the built-in ‘encore’ for Tom’s first and most avant-garde experimental performance piece in NYC.”
EP finale “Woman, I’m an Asshole” then engrosses with a dreamy, heart-on-sleeve melancholy — coming from 2009’s Callous Cad and, like “Cannot Be Denied,” consuming in its visceral self-admissions and self-pity. All these tracks resonate with theatrical, vulnerable enthrallment within consistently melodic songcraft.
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We discovered this release via MusoSoup.
