“This record is all kink and no shame,” says Adam Weiner of ART DEALERS, the tough, sexy and tender new album coming from Low Cut Connie. “With Low Cut Connie, I try to create a safe space for you to just absolutely get your freak on.”
For years now, Low Cut Connie has built its grassroots coalition of oddballs, underdogs, and fun-loving weirdos with songs that celebrate life on the fringes of polite society. The band’s infamously wild, passionate live shows provide a total release – of stress, of inhibition, of shame – working up a primordial rock n roll sweat for fans to get blissfully soaked in. The new album, and its full-length companion film, sizzle with that same cathartic sweat, reminding us that it’s time to get dirty again, and to feel alive. ART DEALERS sits at the intersection of sleazy and soulful – a collection of risky, romantic, life-affirming anthems, all dedicated to you.
“I think rock n roll exists to be a red-blooded, countercultural medium,” says Weiner, who has performed under the Low Cut Connie moniker for over a decade, “You’re supposed to get your hair messed-up.” That imperative comes through in the adults-only tone of songs like the opening “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know,” a sinuous, lurid rocker that sounds like walking through depraved Times Square in 1978 – neon-lit and nasty with a snapping beat. The speedy, fuzzed-up garage-rocker “Whips and Chains” calls out Trump and the current wave of neo-fascism, without ever losing its boogie rhythm section.
But there’s also tenderness behind the curtain here, as on the yearning first single “Are You Gonna Run?” and “Call Out My Name”, which evoke the sweet sad love that punky boys like the New York Dolls and the Ramones used to have for tough girls like the Ronettes and the Shangri-La’s.
The sounds throughout the record comprise a grimy modern urban landscape, a soulful but broken place that Weiner and his band (including rock n roll guitar hero, Will Donnelly, in his 9th year in Low Cut Connie) have been gravitating towards throughout the band’s history. Weiner grew up amid the lawns and strip malls of suburban New Jersey, and his own teen dreams were lit up by the beacon of the big city, where he could shed his skin like so many artists before. “If you think about it, so many great artists who we associate with the city were actually bridge and tunnel people,” Adam said. “Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Springsteen. Debbie Harry, Robert Mapplethorpe. People who came from the burbs had this vision of what they could achieve in the city, what attracted them to this art life, who they could turn into and what impressions they could make – if they could just get there.” ART DEALERS is in many ways a tribute to that feeling at the pumping heart of the city – that enlightened buzz that can come in a packed hothouse of creativity and free expression. Songs like the Grace Jones styled “Take Me to the Place” and the penetrating title song point to all the people who cross those bridges, who choose the art life, who find their liberation on the edges of propriety.
