Saturday, October 3rd at Drunken Unicorn
Nobody’s Booking presents…
The Head, Alex Lotito, Your Ex’s Pets
Doors at 8:00pm / $15 / 21+
The Head have been making music together since high school, writing and performing
original songs inspired by the bands they love: trippy Brits like The Stone Roses,
Spiritualized, Ride, The Verve and Echo and the Bunnymen, and moody Americans like
The National, Scott Walker and early R.E.M.
Alex Lotito wants you to feel something. A fixture of Atlanta's indie music scene, the introspective singer/songwriter has been recording and performing his bruising, cerebral brand of folk rock since he was a teenager strumming cowboy chords at Maddy's rib shack. Lotito is an Atlanta musician as few are. Raised blocks from the Variety Playhouse and mentored by bluesman Chicago Joe Jones, Lotito honed his craft on Atlanta's barbecue circuit, and his music melds the wisdom and wit of the blues tradition with the pedal steel pathos of indie's country/folk revival. You can hear both on "Mechanical Heart," the title track of Lotito's 2022 album. Listening to Mechanical Heart is like flipping through an album of stray photos—a tattooed shoulder here, a smoke cloud there—and sensing, as Lotito sings in "Smolders," that "something still ain't right." Whatever that something is, it ain't the music. Lotito’s guitar playing shines. His syncopated vocal melodies gambol across soundscapes dripping with tremolo and heartache. An English teacher at Druid Hills High School, Lotito knows what good poetry sounds like. His lyrics are frequently devastating. "Things we used to think were something / linger still and now mean nothing," Lotito keens on "It's Trivial," a languorous, horn-filled track on his new EP. The new EP, Lotito's most polished yet, has much to say about how the past haunts the present. Lotito asks listeners to reflect on roads not taken, on the small choices that sum up to a life. "You wanted to stay / I wanted to move," he remembers in "LA Time," a song about an ex-lover "three hours behind" and a universe away. In "Haunted," the record's center of gravity, Lotito whittles down heartbreak to its brutal nub: "I thought that it would pass, but it stays / always." It would be wrong to say Lotito makes sad music. He makes music that pricks the heart and reminds it why it keeps beating.
As with Mechanical Heart, most of the EP's tracks were recorded at Lotito’s home studio in Atlanta, which he co-manages with producer and guitarist Joseph Faul. Restrained and ferocious, like a coiled snake, Faul's guitar work is as tastefully virtuosic as you can hope to hear on any record today. The EP is luxuriously textured and humming with life, thanks in large part to the outstanding musicians Lotito recruited to work on the project. Among these is Daniel Wytanis, whose trombone and trumpet performances dust the tracks with gold. Enormous credit also goes to Paul Stevens, who has been recording with Lotito for over a decade and whose drums, organ, and electric piano work makes the record cohere. These musicians and others (Anthony Aparo, Alex Tramble, Zack Milster) are a huge part of what makes Lotito's new EP such a gut-wrenching meditation on loss and regret, on the scraps of memory we cling to and the ones we let slip through our fingers.
Your Ex’s Pets is a band from Athens, GA led by Jackie Hales. An evolving lineup of collaborators brings playful, tender songs to life with harmonies, layered arrangements, and careful dynamics. Peers have called them “fussy,” “idiosyncratic,” “eclectic,” and other words for things you like but can’t quite define. Sometimes groovy, sometimes rocking, sometimes haunting and delicate, the band mixes shades of pop, alt-country, shoegaze, and funk from song to song.