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Cannonball’s coverage of the NYC music scene
Nancy Paraskevopoulos’ Comfort Muffin at the End of the Universe (originally published in Boog City 105)
Comfort Muffin, Cincinnati native Nancy Paraskevopoulos’ debut release, is, true to its title, the sweetest, most comforting ode to the horrors and banalities of everyday existence I’ve heard all year.
Despite being released in 2014, complete with an album cover designed by Paul Coors depicting Paraskevopoulos’ name in bright lights, on a giant billboard overlooking a magnificent Ohio sunset, oddly reminiscent of The Simpsons, it took me over a year to discover Comfort Muffin, which is saddening.
If you’ve heard the album, you’ll understand why.
If you haven’t, you will soon.
Many songs on the album are painfully blunt, reporting on anything from heartbreak (“My Mixtape”), to the intertwined rabbit holes of various environmental problems and their causes (“Restaurant at the End of the Universe”), with spirited, humorous delivery.
Armed with a ukulele and a versatile voice, frequently oscillating between haunting, melodic vocalizations and expressive, often m sardonic talk-singing, Nancy Paraskevopoulos plays heartfelt, poetic love songs and poignant breakup songs, jam-packed with sparks and outbursts of spontaneity and imagination, and often interspersed with inspiring sociopolitical commentary.
Paraskevopoulos’ songs stand out in an era endlessly oversaturated with recycled, heartless, unimaginative love songs, and she stays grounded, humble, and real throughout whatever zany, interdimensional adventures she takes us on.
In “My Mixtape,” Paraskevopoulos attributes her accomplishment of this feat to her actually being a giraffe: “I am a giraffe; my head is in the air, but my feet are on, my feet are on, my feet are on the ground.”
It goes without saying that Nancy Paraskevopoulos is a human being, and not a giraffe, or an Iggy Pop cover band. Despite this, there’s a brilliant cover of Pop’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog” toward the end of Comfort Muffin, reinventing the sadomasochistic proto-punk anthem in a far more tender, romantic light, without sacrificing the power or momentum of the original.
Other highlights include a brave, subtly anti-homophobic love ballad called “Let ’em Stare,” and a hidden track where Paraskevpoulos raps about how she learned to spell and pronounce her name, while teaching us how to do the same.
Interestingly, what makes Comfort Muffin so comforting and muffin-esque seems to be its brutal honesty.
Like most art dabbling in the darker, mare melancholic sides of the human condition, the music of recycled, heartless, unimaginative love songs, and she stays grounded, humble, and real throughout whatever zany, interdimensional adventures she takes us on.
Nancy Paraskevopoulos is a modern, personal spin on the ancient feeling of simultaneously being eaten alive by the world we live and watching it destroy itself, but making art, laughing, falling in love, and working eccentric, underpaid jobs, inside of and in spite of it.
Nancy Paraskevopoulos’ ukulele wizardry works wonders, without any Tiny Tim-style schtickiness, or virtuosic shredding in the vein of Jake Shimabukuro, or conforming to any of the many conventional notions of what a ukulele player “should,” “would,” or “could” do; the uke simply complements Paraskevopoulos’ songs in ways a guitar wouldn’t.
The engineering and mixing of Comfort Muffin‘s many ingredients (all natural, and none containing traces of whales or butterflies, for any concerned environmentalists) also complements her songs, and it was handled by Jerri Queen. The mix was then mastered (baked) by John Hoffman.
Sadly, Comfort Muffin is no longer available in the form of a muffin (or at least, an edible one), but it’s still available as a CD and digital download, from the BandCamp page of Paul Coors’s Cincinnati-based CDR label CHOW.
– Jesse Statman
Read more of Cannonball’s coverage of the NYC music scene from this era:
1. Review of The Grasping Straws’ self-titled debut album
2. Profile of Stu Richards, formerly known as Chicken Leg
3. Review of Thomas Patrick Maguire’s In The Bag
4. Review of The First Law’s She Traveled With Me
5. Review of Little Cobweb’s Indelible Marks
6. Review of Zack Daniel’s Memoirs of a Scared Teenager
7. Review of Prewar Yardsale’s Black and Blue
8. Review of Yeti’s Pill
9. Profile of Horra
10. Profile of Lauren O’Brien
11. Review of Nancy Paraskevopoulos’ Comfort Muffin
12. Blurb for The Icebergs’ Eldorado