"Angels get too much power," James Ferraro whispers on "Thrash & Escalate." For the video of the track, a single from his album Skid Row, released yesterday, a band of white-silhouetted angels don cowboy hats, play guitars, and drink beer as a chimney spews smoke over a hazy sunset. Rather than witnessing any divine acts, we are instead given a bird's eye (or angel's eye?) view of traffic in LA's poorest neighborhood, from which Ferraro's new album takes its name.Ferraro released an artistic statement that teases a nightmarish vision out of a quest for truth:Million dollar smiles, lattes & police brutality. Excess and fiscal ambiguity.
Media violence & Lamborghini dreams, all under one surveillance video texture. The desert landscape, like tupperware housing digital smog.
K9's and glistening acid rain,
wash away the sentient blood that stains the palm tree city.
An Escalade® burns on the freeway.
The drone of helicopters hum above head, in a desert backdrop commuters in traffic requite a speed of 20 mph pass the gleaming semiotic debris.
the sushi elite & the poor all anonymous in an unforgiving freeway fatality,
an undiscerning system. Man on the highway, through a walkie talkie speaker, barefoot on the slick asphalt.
As the sunsets, the sky burns a fusion of metal and silhouetted palms.
and a hyper real civilization is rendered by it's idealism, at war with the gravity of reality..
Rendered by it's traffic culture, it's culture of police brutality and gang violence, media saturation and racism, it's glamorization and solipsism, rendered by the tabloid of it self. Skid Row started as a collection of poems, it came first as words, then grew into becoming the lyrics of Skid Row.. I was writing about the state of the world around me, living on what feels like the brink of societal collapse while also seeing high excess everywhere.. all the sounds of the streets crept in, the blood and tears on the street, the echoing sirens in the early morning fog, soaked into the poetry and it became evident that LA is a hyper America. a place where violence (media and real life), excess and poverty, police exceptionalism & brutality, racism interact daily.. racism is a war on reason, so in my state of animosity I wrote Skid Row, I'm a disciple of the streets my spoken word and music on Skid Row mirror these conflicts that spill out over the western landscape like a painting of America frozen in a state of hyper real war.Skid Row is Ferraro's first album with Break World Records, whose roster now includes Teen Girl Fantasy and Goth Money. Ferraro previous album, 2013's NYC, HELL 3:00 AM, was released on Hippos In Tanks, which folded after the death of it's founder Barron Machat.
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Media violence & Lamborghini dreams, all under one surveillance video texture. The desert landscape, like tupperware housing digital smog.
K9's and glistening acid rain,
wash away the sentient blood that stains the palm tree city.
An Escalade® burns on the freeway.
The drone of helicopters hum above head, in a desert backdrop commuters in traffic requite a speed of 20 mph pass the gleaming semiotic debris.
the sushi elite & the poor all anonymous in an unforgiving freeway fatality,
an undiscerning system. Man on the highway, through a walkie talkie speaker, barefoot on the slick asphalt.
As the sunsets, the sky burns a fusion of metal and silhouetted palms.
and a hyper real civilization is rendered by it's idealism, at war with the gravity of reality..
Rendered by it's traffic culture, it's culture of police brutality and gang violence, media saturation and racism, it's glamorization and solipsism, rendered by the tabloid of it self. Skid Row started as a collection of poems, it came first as words, then grew into becoming the lyrics of Skid Row.. I was writing about the state of the world around me, living on what feels like the brink of societal collapse while also seeing high excess everywhere.. all the sounds of the streets crept in, the blood and tears on the street, the echoing sirens in the early morning fog, soaked into the poetry and it became evident that LA is a hyper America. a place where violence (media and real life), excess and poverty, police exceptionalism & brutality, racism interact daily.. racism is a war on reason, so in my state of animosity I wrote Skid Row, I'm a disciple of the streets my spoken word and music on Skid Row mirror these conflicts that spill out over the western landscape like a painting of America frozen in a state of hyper real war.Skid Row is Ferraro's first album with Break World Records, whose roster now includes Teen Girl Fantasy and Goth Money. Ferraro previous album, 2013's NYC, HELL 3:00 AM, was released on Hippos In Tanks, which folded after the death of it's founder Barron Machat.