Cannonball’s coverage of the NYC music scene


Blurb for The Icebergs’ Eldorado

No one ever really gets another, but I swear, you feel like mine

A whirlwind of personality, emotion, energy, and wit await in the twelve songs of Eldorado, poised to attack any and all listeners brave enough to fully surrender themselves to it.

No; it’s not a hurricane. It’s the debut album from New York City based post-punk power trio The Icebergs, led by one-of-a-kind poet and professional classification defier Jane LeCroy. Are you ready for this?

Mixed by Caleb Mulkerin (of Cerberus Shoal fame), Eldorado is a rare brew of sonic and linguistic virtuosity that takes many listens to fully appreciate and understand. It’s radical yet subtle, steeped in a history that’s simultaneously personal and global. It’s a dream and a nightmare. It’s ancient, and completely avant-garde. The playful, extraterrestrial sound collages and effects on the album recall LeCroy’s work with the experimental ensemble Spook Engine on their prescient debut The Sound of an Approaching Era, released two decades prior to Eldorado.

And keeping with the precedent set by LeCroy and Abbs in their earliest days of collaboration in the mid ’90s, every song on The Icebergs’ debut was originally a poem by LeCroy. Her wistful, often metaphysical musings take the listener on a psychedelic journey, contemplating the very nature of the fabric that holds our infinitely interconnected illusory realities together; “no one ever really gets another, but I swear you feel like mine.”

LeCroy has spent decades conjuring artful, righteous rebellion against the status quo, through her involvement in New York’s Lower East Side squatter scene of the early ’90s, her award-winning poetry and prose (including the Pushcart nominated Signature Play, work in the permanent collections of the Yale Library, Library of Congress, Poets House, the Smithsonian, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and a collection of porn novellas for women, penned under a pseudonym due to disapproval from her family), her work as an educator, and her performances with a myriad of bands and collaborators, ranging from the touring feminist poetry group Sister Spit, to the ’90s emocore band Vitapup, and countless others. A poet with a lifelong love of music, she marries these two mediums in a seemingly infinite number of unique, daring, visceral ways.

LeCroy met multi-instrumentalist Tom Abbs at Eugene Lang College in 1995, spawning two decades of collaboration, transforming her words into dynamic musical performances. The duo performed small gigs and residencies in cafes and artspaces around the city, and released several albums and videos, but there’d always been a sense that some special ingredient was missing from the project. In 2014, LeCroy and Abbs joined forces with drummer and producer David Rogers-Berry, a founding member of goth-country outfit O’Death, and solidified as the trio now known as The Icebergs.

Since then, they’ve been whipping up a fiercely original blend of sounds, with Abbs’s signature electrified cello style, honed on dozens of jazz recordings and thousands of performances, fingerpicked horizontally with a guitar strap around his back, dancing to Rogers-Berry’s expert drumming, heartbeating, and backup vocals, all simmering with LeCroy’s feral, emotive destructions and reconstructions of language and the human voice.

Not a soul on this planet knows what wild adventures are in store for The Icebergs in 2017 and the many years to come, but if Eldorado tells us anything, this group has quite the surplus of otherworldly sonic tricks up its sleeves, patiently waiting to be played upon the world.

– 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

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