Ron Gallo
★★★★
Foreground Music
KILL ROCK STARS. CD/DL/LP
“What an existential crisis would sound like were it also fun,” says Gallo.
Song titles that have you at hello (I Love Someone Buried Deep Inside Of You; Big Truck Energy); out-there guitar tones that razor your speaker cones – there’s lots to love about Foreground Music’s kooky, disruptive energy. Big on garagey art-rock and fractured funk, the New Jersey-born Gallo brings fizzing zeal and a bounteous grab-bag of ideas, his songs’ hooks as striking as his idiosyncratic lyrics. In his 2018 mockumentary Really Nice Guys, Gallo sent himself up as he played a series of unsuccessful release shows, but here he sounds like a real contender, tapping something of Kurt Vile’s industrious slackerdom and railing against greedy Airbnb developers, male entitlement, and retail therapy. “How are there so many T-shirts in the world?”, he sings on the wonderful Foreground Music. As its title suggests, it warrants your full attention.