Blone Noble - Weapon Of Love [Official Video]

Blone Noble is the nom de plume of Los Angeles songwriter, Pat Salway. Channeling the synth-heavy sounds of late 70s Berlin, Salway channels piano-pounding glam rock fused with new wave – a genre he calls “doomsday disco” – penning fitting anthems for the desperate and paranoid times in which we live.

“Weapon Of Love,” out now via Curation Records, vocally touches upon Giorgio Moroder’s version of “Nights In White Satin.”  There’s a swagger in his hips, a sneer on his lips, and an acerbic bite to his satirical lyrics, bringing to mind Sparks, Frank Tovey, Roxy Music, Heaven 17, and of course Station To Station-era David Bowie. The Cold War is alive and well in this Iron Curtain-era sound – this is a love song for a pandemic-stricken dystopia. Stop worrying and love the bomb, whatever form it takes – for death always brings rebirth. 1970s Berlin could just as easily be 2020s America these days – and there’s always a wall to tear down, be it love or be it war.

With the onslaught of 80s VHS-style videos floating around out there, this Fred Joseph (for Expo Aktuell Films) gem really does look like it’s a 40-year-old Top of the Pops broadcast. The film style, with its strange close-ups, three-camera system, and simple edits is unnervingly accurate to the time.  The retrofuturism of decades past rehashes itself with the same old crises in different wrapping paper. —Post-Punk.com

Blone Noble - Pretty Picture [Official Video]

Blone Noble’s latest track, “Pretty Picture,” marks a departure from the swaggering disco beats of his former single, “Weapon of Love.” The refined employment of weighty strings, unpredictable time patterns, key modulations, and Salway’s enticing sprechstimme vocal style invokes comparisons with The Stranglers, The Damned, Tuxedomoon, and Divine Comedy. Is it enough to survive the digital apocalypse?

“By the time this song comes out human consciousness might already be completely absorbed by artificial intelligence,” he quips. “I can’t wait to live out my fantasies in virtual reality!”

The visual interpretation for “Pretty Picture” uncannily mirrors the aesthetic of the 80s, with a curious vision of virtual reality. It’s a work of performance art reminiscent of the film experiments of Fad Gadget, guided by the directorial vision of Andrew Pitrone and the razor-sharp editing of Veneer Publications. The retro-futurism of yesteryear presents itself as a living, breathing metaphor of recurring dilemmas, albeit adorned in new trappings. This cyclical presentation of past and present encapsulates the ever-changing yet eerily similar socio-cultural landscape we continually navigate.

Live footage from this video was taken from the debut of Blone Noble at La Poubelle in Hollywood, CA with Billy Tibbals Band, as well as Marlena Schwenck, Brendan Peleo-Lazar, and Ian Scott Waters. —Post-Punk.com

Blone Noble - Leaders Of The World [Official Video]

In a triumphant return, avant-garde virtuoso Blone Noble (aka Pat Salway) unveils his third single under Curation Records, Leaders of The World. This blistering anthem lampoons the ruling cadre’s agenda to blur the lines between the advancement and the potential diminishment of our core humanity, prompting us to query the true cost of our connected age.

“Leaders Of The World” weaves a fervent tableau with its rumbling piano and glittering synthesizers, evoking the nocturnal allure found in “Nite Flights” by The Walker Brothers, the drama of piano-fueled late-70s Berlin glam rock, and the sharp vivacity of New Wave. Leaders Of The World‘s stomping beat may very well become the anthem of our unsettled age, capturing the restless and wary ethos of contemporary society.

Channeling the biting cadence reminiscent of Lou Reed, Blone offers his fierce lyrical commentary on this global war instigated by the ruling elite to distill humanity into malleable fragments of information. For Blone, the onus is on the citizenry to thwart this looming dystopia.

Rekindling a dynamic partnership with Fred Joseph, who previously lensed his inaugural single Weapon Of Love, Blone Noble revisits their shared cinematic vision. Filmed with the vintage charm of ‘70s RCA broadcast television cameras in the quaint backdrop of Sun Valley, CA, the video is a nostalgic nod to the pre-music video era art films, a time when unbridled creativity was the order of the day.

In a time when digital filters aim to replicate vintage aesthetics, witnessing genuine analog technology in action is both rare and mesmerizing. Dusting off these classic tools and harnessing them anew imparts the music with a resplendent, temporal authenticity—it’s as if one is transported, embraced by the warm haze of distant recollections. The real deal, indeed, offers a vividness that mere simulations can seldom match!

“All of the effects were done in camera with Fred twisting the knobs on archaic video gear and something that looked like a fuzz pedal,” Noble explains. “The Big Brother splitting-head was a happy accident, perfectly aligned with the message of the song. The entire thing was an experiment meant for maximum sensory overload, like the one we’re living through now.” —Post-Punk.com

L.A. RECORD Review: Yesterday’s Freshies

There are times when being introduced to something new can rearrange your view of aesthetics, art and the like. There’s not enough room here to explore the idea of music being a more emotional or visceral experience—or whether the pop-ists or rockists are ultimately right about anything—but this Veneer record might be central to that debate. Yesterday’s Freshies is full of respect for its influences but never slides into being lazy or derivative—it’s a perfect blend of subtle connection and in your face charisma, and a prime example of the punk aesthetic commandeering the pop genre. Think perhaps the New York Dolls sharing a whiskey sour with Pulp, or even Dream Syndicate if they were sipping a deep port in the back alley. Freshies seems to examine the confusion that comes with being an artist in our current circumstances and advances a certain acceptance at being a perpetual outsider. It’s an albums worth of attempts at reconciliation, but the final verdict remains ambiguous at best. Every song seems to be a soul-searching exercise, each leading into the next set of story-of-my-life rock ‘n’ roll self-examination. These kind of literary exercises are what separate the average records from the potentially timeless, and Freshies aims to explores these kind of high-art narrative strains. Songs like “Dreamwalker” display a palpable tension between the inner landscape and the external rhythms of life, and excitement of living—and failure that sometimes comes with it—are everywhere on this album. See: “Growing Up,” with its wrestling between conception and perception, the surrender of one’s self into an accepted pose and the search nonetheless for a true identity and experience.

—Nathan Martel

L.A. RECORD Video Premiere: Idiot Savant

Pat Salway is the guy—or the cosmic receiver for the workings of a certain specific rock ‘n’ roll spirit, as he tells it—behind the band Veneer, whose “Idiot Savant” is raggedly charming Bowie-Lou street rock that sounds like it broke off the leading edge of 1976. (Especially a record like this.) Veneer’s Yesterday’s Freshies (which includes contributions by Rachel Rufrano, Justin Janer and the Buttertones‘ London Guzman) came out on Burger last fall—read our review—and you can snag a copy for yourself here, and keep an eye-slash-ear on Salway and Veneer.

—Chris Zeigler