Tommy Siegel - Another Century Wasted (2020)

Hypnotic, colorful, and darkly funny, Tommy Siegel's solo debut is jacked into the veins of the chaotic hellscape of Trump-era anxiety. The record formed concurrently with Siegel's challenge to draw a comic every day for 500 days, a project that garnered him 300,000+ followers on social media and launched him as an incisive, leading voice in 21st century webcomics, with shout outs from cultural juggernauts like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ringo Starr along the way. Written in tandem during the same time period, "Another Century Wasted" marks his solo debut after a decade with Jukebox the Ghost and acts as an off-kilter dance soundtrack for the collapse of the American dream, with dense and hypnotic polyrhythmic tapestries that serve as the bedrock for clever songcraft that recalls late-70s power-pop like Elvis Costello and XTC.