Bryan Scary is one of the few artists around willing and able to pull off a rock opera. His music plays homage to conceptual rock from the ’70s, the styles delving in a mixture of psych-rock that is neither too pretentious nor overbearing to lack hooks. Scary is a pop songwriter with a knack for grandiose ideas, and an adoration for nostalgia and influences like The Beatles, Queen, ELO, and Zappa that go hand-in-hand. It helps that he’s a singular visionary, one capable of writing all songs and playing all instruments, which he has done before. His two LPs, The Shredding Tears and Flight of the Knife, offer some of the most infectious and colorful material in pop today.
Scary is also one of the most criminally overlooked songwriters around. Despite praise from every publication that lent an ear, like this one here and here, Scary remains a relatively ambiguous figure with little-known personal history. What is known, however, is that his tireless work ethic provides something to perpetually look forward to. His newest project, Daffy’s Elixir, is “an epic double album featuring cons, quacks, cow-gal robots, spurned lovers, villains and bandits, all set in the Old West. Euro-centric art-pop meets Spaghetti-Westernisms and old-timey yarn spinning.” Scary’s third LP, Daffy’s Elixir, will be released on Paper Garden Records in April 2012. As if paying the bills isn’t hard enough for an artist, his tour van and trailer was stolen during touring for Flight of the Knifee, so to fund the album he launched a successful Kickstarter campaign, raising over $16,000 in fan donations. The double album was recorded throughout 2010 in a variety of studios with a variety of engineers and instrumentalists. It will be great to finally hear it.
Here’s a track from the new album:
Pre-order a limited edition of Daffy’s Elixir here.
These tracks should give you a good feel of Scary’s material:
