Pop / Post punk

13 MP3 Songs
POP: Quirky, ROCK: Noise



Details:
Ray Weiss is doesn't make music because he wants to. He makes music because he has to, an artist who creates because he just can't stop. Originally struggling his way through puberty and High School by obsessively recording his inner confusion under the moniker "Hundred Dollar Elephant," his ambition was first fulfilled when he formed "The Medics." Through this band, along with three other members also in High School (some as young as 15), he negotiated several label offers, but continually resisted the temptation to dilute, rerecord, or restructure the music he had poured so much into. Even Island Records expressed interest in their debut EP, before finally deciding that Ray's pop escapism wasn't cynical enough for their roster. Those were the good times. Ray hadn't even graduated school yet. How could they have known that cynicism was waiting just around the corner? Just as The Medics were beginning to gain speed, playing CMJ, drawing crowds over 100 people, printing vinyls and designing merch, things began to turn sour. A domino effect, in that special way that events crash into themselves throughout Ray's life. First his long-time girlfriend began to date a 15-year old (lovingly called, "The Replica"), who looked identical to Ray. Breaking up with her spiraled him into a series of drug binges. He holed himself up, alone, in a house in upstate New York, and The Medics began to fight constantly. They finally had Ray committed to a psych ward, and it was during his stay there that he decided to dissolve the band completely. A chapter had begun. Waking up in the morning and drinking cereal bowls of whiskey, wandering the suburban sidewalks all night with nothing but a cheap Casio keyboard. This was how Ray spent those months. Pressure must've building somewhere beneath that depressed facade, because suddenly, in a fit of inspiration, Ray turned back to his old tactics and funneled all that pain into 11 new tracks within the space of a single week, with the help of every musical robot at his disposal. Now, with an entirely new project under his control, Ray has formed the group "Le Rug," which has been focused on involving itself in the dirty grassroots music scene in New York, performing with aggressive regularity and inciting ruckus at every show. Their new album (based to those 11 new tracks) is slated to be finished within the next couple of weeks, and paired with a series of paintings Ray dragged out of himself while locked up in this cycle of loneliness and self-abuse. Less than a month and a half old, Le Rug has been getting a lot attention already, and is about to perform with The Appleseed Cast at the Knitting Factory in lower Manhattan next month. Their audience won't know what hit them. Ray performs like he's undergoing an exorcism, and given the number of nasty things that has filtered through his brain over the last year, he probably is. -joe ahearn (www.sleepwhendeadnyc.com)