One of the absolute best parts of starting this blog way back in 2011 has been the people I have been able to meet through their incredible music. With a small handful of exceptions, I have met the most stellar people through simply wanting to share their music with other people. I have met people from all over the country. People who make all kinds of music and give all kinds of energy. It’s been such an adventure and has warmed and broadened my life in so many ways. One of my favorite people that I have had the pleasure of doing this work with is Ryan Liatsis. A man unmistakable around the jam scene because of two key things – his insanely talented guitar work, and his mustache.
I have done work with Mr. Liatsis through several of his projects, most notably his original band ShwizZhttps://www.facebook.com/ShwizZ and more recently his work with the vocal magicians in Western Skieshttps://www.facebook.com/westernskiesmusic. Both have been an exceptional example of what a guitar master he is. His signature sound is of the soaring variety, velvety smooth and seemingly effortless. It was of course an absolute privilege to get the opportunity to review his most recent release, one that is all his own, and one that has this signature sound on a fantastic display. If you love a versatile, guitar focused instrumental album, this is for you and you are in for a trip.
Ryan is a man of many talents, and that is evident in his new and very first solo release, Music That Makes No Cents, Vol. 1. This record is his decade long labor of love and is almost entirely self produced, self recorded, self mixed and self mastered. All songs were written by Ryan and all instruments with a few exceptions were played by Ryan. Let me state first that if you are going to invite a few special guests to help out with your solo record, there are few I would choose other than the ones he did. Most are drummers, with the likes of Neal Evans, Kito Bovenschulte, Kevin Soffera, Jordan McQueen, and Paul Cesario. He also gets some help from exceptional bassist and fellow ShwizZ musician Scott Hogan. It’s a well stacked grouping of awesome.
The first track, 11:11, kicks open the whole collection with a very hard rock spiced piece of Ryan’s multi-layered shredding, woven with synth and heavy drum work (care of Paul Cesario). The album then moves over to Dragonfly which immediately gave me super calm vibes while still having an earnestly rocking soul. Easily my favorite song on the album. This is that soaring guitar sound that Ryan does so well. Almost midway, it slows to a piano solo before picking back up with guitar that gives an emotional feel. This song will take you on an adventure, if you let it. Speaking of emotional, All On One is gorgeous, beginning with a dreamy far off sound that pulls you in. Not quite as calming, but it will definitely give you the feels for something with the subtly climbing notes and really pretty break about halfway through that comes back hard right into your heart. This expertly layers sounds to give depth in places throughout the songs in a way that plucks right at your internal strings.
Saturator is another great rocking track, with drums care of Kito Bovenschulte. This song is a mix of exceptional guitar playing dexterity while keeping with head bobbing beats. Coming in strong and hard with melodic layers of sound, it has fantastic use of climbs and stops. It’s absolutely talking to you throughout. I love that Ryan uses the guitar like a vocal in that respect. There is a story being told throughout this record but it’s entirely up to the listener to discern or decode exactly what that is. Every track is deliciously different and capable of captivating even the most captious listener.
My genuinely take on Music That Makes No Cents, Vol. 1 is that it’s brilliantly written and put together beautifully. This record is a batch of stories told through music like a Choose Your Own Adventure Book, and it’s all up to you which road you take and which page you turn to. There is trip worth taking with yourself within, and I highly recommend that you do. I am sure if we picked Ryan’s brain as to what he envisioned while writing these songs over ten years, he would have buckets of information for us – but what fun is that? I didn’t really get into instrumental albums outside of old jazz and the occasional Joe Satriani song until very recently and this album was such a breath of fresh air for me. My advice to you is do what I did when I first got my hands on it. Plug in a really comfortable pair of headphones, get good and cozy in your favorite spot, close your eyes, and let the music take you where it will. Additional substance assistants are entirely up to you.
You can get yourself a download of Music That Makes No Cents, Vol. 1 over at BandCamp here:
We were drenched from head to toe, despite our thin plastic ponchos. We were cold, as the temperature had dropped into the mid 40’s with a wind that ebbed and flowed with its own prerogative. We carried nothing but my “zoo bag” purse strung across my body and a cold bag full of beer and alcoholic iced tea. We shivered as we walked through the mud, dodging puddles that swallowed whole feet and filled shoes. Under normal circumstances, we were in a situation that would have had us declaring “fuck this” and heading back to our sketchy but warm motel room in Monticello and ordering some takeout while planning an early voyage back home to our own lake in New Jersey.
But that wasn’t tonight. Tonight was special. Our dear friends in Peak had invited us to Yasgur’s Farm to see them play Yasgur Road Productions’ “May Meltdown” festival. It was not a normal festival. We have shown up for lots of festivals, but this was different. This was a legendary place. The entire area has an infectious energy that seems to come up from out of the dirt. Every single day people arrive just to feel it. But there was so much more to this evening.
Before COVID came and closed all the clubs and all the venues, before it took over our schools, our hospitals, our families and our entire lives, the last show we saw out and about in the world was Peak. We saw them play at The Bowery Electric on February 29th, 2020 and it was a wonderful, pure, and energetic evening. I look at the photos from that night and I can feel the sweat I was shedding as I danced, and I can feel the joy that I felt in that moment as I let myself be enveloped by the kind of magic that only music can conjure. For the entirety of the COVID shutdown, I thought often of that feeling and that show. The insecurity that was brought on by over a year in relative isolation, despite occasional cheat days with friends we knew were clear of COVID due to recent testing, created a haze on the joy that live music had always given me. It’s such a strange thing to think about. But anyway, our last show before the world went crazy and then shut down was Peak.
It surprises me none that our first show back would also be Peak.
I just had no idea it would be in a place I had been trying to get to my whole life.
To know me is to know that I have kind of a pervasive fascination with the Woodstock festival. My husband has on more than one occasion called it a weird obsession. He’s not totally wrong. For me, it’s like an itch. It’s an itch that no amount of watching the videos or listening to the record has ever been able to scratch for me. My parents were 19 years old in August of 1969 and in my opinion, the perfect age to understand and appreciate everything that it was, whether or not they actually did. They met in college at what was at that time Glassboro College. They both remember that weekend vividly, even though neither one of them attended the festival. They saw the feature film from Woodstock in the movies on a date. It was a highlighting of so many artists that they knew and loved and it was important to them. As a result, every single time that PBS played the film during a telethon throughout my childhood in the entirety of the 80’s, we watched it. We watched it as a family. I knew all the dialogue from beginning to end.
Much of my teenage years were spent listening to modern music that I loved but split evenly with the music my folkie parents raised me to love. Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Jefferson Airplane, Etc etc etc. I used to pick at their brains about these artists and why they loved them. What their lives were like when they first heard them. What they thought about the songs. I feel like I could just go on forever. No matter what I heard in my life, no matter what band or artists I fell in love with (and there were many), no music ever resonated with me or felt like it understood me like that. It makes perfect sense to me why I would enjoy watching Woodstock. But why is it so deep? It didn’t matter tonight. Tonight, I was here, and I was here with some of my favorite people. We had made it through all of this, and here we were.
I showed up with my husband on this rainy, cold night. We got our wrist bands from the amazing women set up in ponchos under a canopy in front of the barn proclaiming the Yasgur name. Despite how wet and cold the world was in that moment, these gals were truly an embodiment of polite joy in their duties as gatekeepers to this amazing place. It felt a genuine privilege to meet them. We moved on from that station and parked our car in the muddy field, and prepared ourselves with ponchos and umbrellas for our hike down into the woods. We made our way down through the puddles into the forest and found tents of habitation, tents of retail purpose, and it felt like festival season was just alive despite the conditions. I don’t know what food vendor it was that had the booth closest to the entrance to the woods, but their tents smelled divine. We moved on down towards the performance tent, tucked under the trees among the bravest campers I think I ever saw. The conditions were terrible for camping with temperatures well below what they should be for Memorial Day weekend in the Catskills and rain that continued to fall in buckets. But there were campsites! Tents set up with popup canopies and spots for hangouts within those woods. I couldn’t say enough that night how much I admired those folks. The energy within those trees was incredible.
I first discovered Peak in 2016 when i asked the Facebook masses for some new material to dig into. A friend and colleague, Cat Sisco, referred me to this new release from a band called Peak – a song called Barometric Pressure. I had been driving for Lyft at the time and was constantly adding to a playlist that I played while out spending hours driving. I added this song to my list and after many hours on the road became addicted to it. A couple years later, I was writing occasionally for the Jamwich magazine and I received an email from my editor. She knew I was working in midtown for a publisher and could easily check out a band having an album release show. She asked if I could go and review Peak. Of course I took the assignment and off I went. That was how I met Jeremy Hilliard and Johnny Young.
Jeremy Hilliard, the guitar and voice behind Peak, used to be in a band called Turbine. When I told my husband that evening that I was headed over to cover his show, he was excited his old colleague was off on another adventure. That night I showed up to their venue in the village and met up with Jeremy in the bar. We walked to the pizza spot across the street where Johnny and his wife, audio tech, and superhero Michelle Young were. The four of us sat down and rapped about influences, music venues, and the vibe of it all and in that moment, I knew I had met lifelong friends and amazing musicians. Their energy was infectious and sincere. These were folks who genuinely loved what they were doing. I was bummed that night that I didn’t hear ‘Barometric Pressure’, but I heard so many other songs that were exciting. I left a genuine Peak fan.
Later, Kito Bovenschulte of Particle and Josh Carter of Haley Jane and the Primates were added to the mix and the entire sound started to morph into an entirely new, amazing trip. They were the dance-funk vibe that the songs that Jeremy and Johnny had drafted were missing. Now the band was complete. And along the way, we were following. Fast forward to this past weekend…
Peak was in rare form on this particularly wet night. Not only were they back in front of an audience for the first time in well over a year, they were in truly ceremoniously Woodstock 1969 wet conditions in front of people who were feeding off their contagious energy like a festival game of Hungry Hungry Hippos. Every single member of the band played with the fire of one thousand suns behind their instruments. They played a few tunes, including “Choppy Water” from their upcoming new album by the same name. Then, all of a sudden, there was “Barometric Pressure”! Yay! I might have hurt myself dancing in that moment.
Speaking of dancing, we were all in a tent in the woods with the stage. When we arrived, there were a handful of people under the tent leftover from the previous band’s set. As Peak began to move, these people started to come in from the rain. It was like beings moving towards a light in that moment and all of a sudden, our dancing numbers had doubled. Then they tripled. I am not sure what the numbers were when the set ended, but I know that with the conclusion of every song, there was more applause, whistles, and deliciously positive energy. At one point, the guys busted into the unmistakable intro to Zeppelin’s “The Song Remains The Same”. Lots of bands tease an intro like that, and that’s pretty much what I expected it to be, but it didn’t stop. They played the whole song and they KILLED it. I remember turning to Josh’s wife in the crowd just to remark that he was absolutely knocking the bass parts right out the water. I have been listening to this song my whole life and I never heard someone cover it so flawlessly, but here were these guys destroying the song in the best possible way.
Our favorite song, “Path Paved With Roses”, was the second to last tune the guys did and it was so wonderfully amped up and dancy, I am sure egged on by the energy of the crowd that just darted around that makeshift, muddy dance floor. It was amazing and dream-like the way people circled around amongst one another. The encore was their song “When The Night Comes Calling You”, which after this weekend might very well take the top spot for me. I was dancing like I can’t remember ever doing. It was energy that flowed through bodies on the floor like electricity that had left its channels and was running wild. It didn’t feel possible to be in this magical place, feeling this incredible, despite everything that had happened to us all – everything that had happened to us as a species and a nation. We felt incredibly lucky. Peak brought us back to the wonderful world of live music. They were the bookends for us, to the pandemic, and normality.
And it was here, in Bethel, where positive energy emerges from the dirt.
I don’t know what will come of the world in the wake of COVID. I can say though that bands like Peak are there to help us navigate whatever it is. They are here to bring us slowly out of despair and isolation and back into the magic that is the energy of live music. To have been in such a magical place with a band that understands how to not only capture that vibe but encapsulate and hand it to their audience felt like a delicious privilege that I don’t really yet know how to file in my heart the right way. All I know is that I feel so lucky to have been there, dancing my ass off, and feeling it all in that moment in that wonderful place. That night my body more or less gave out from it all, and I didn’t even care. I was somewhere magical with some of the most wonderful people.
I look forward to dancing with you all as soon as possible. See you out there, friends…
