Album Reviews

In case you didn’t know just yet, The Rentiers is the new project by Joel Tannenbaum (Plow United, Ex Friends) that allows him to record whatever he wants with whoever he feels like. Sometimes things end up sounding more folky, while at other times it’s straight up punk-rock. Or… well, it could go wherever he wants it to go basically.

On his latest single, “Black Metal Yoga”, Tannenbaum headed for the studio with Chumped’s Annika Pyle, Floating Action’s Seth Kauffman and Mikey Erg, who is in every other band not mentioned yet and walked out with two new songs. The title track is exactly what you think it’s about… doing yoga to black metal (which probably leads to positions like ‘the inverted cross’ and ‘the burnt down church’). But it’s also about an insurrection on a Martian mining colony. And about doing things that might not make sense to anyone else, but which you do cause they make you happy. Does that sound weird enough? Good.

The other song on here is – surprisingly - a rocksteady jam called “Drunks & Stoners”. It’s far from my favorite style of music, but it’s good enough in its own right. And while you might not have seen it coming after “Black Metal Yoga”, it is clear evidence that Tannenbaum really is doing whatever he feels like. More power to him!