Jonesy Land Updates, Plus Details On A Briefly Released New Album!!

Today's post looks at a different band who released a new studio original song on May 31st, along with more on their recent song postings on streaming services, and we'll cap things with another band who put out something for digital consumption last month... just not for long. Here's what you should know on this rainy Wednesday!

One year to the day that they released their debut album "Zoom - Out", online page-less local punk/alternative solo project Jonesy Land released their new single "The Lucky Ones" onto major streaming services on Friday! Their second studio release of the year (following their "Be My Baby" cover last month), this is Jonesy Land's fourth standalone original song that isn't (yet?) on an album. According to project leader Dustin Jones' personal Instagram page, this song features his Bookclub bandmate Erin Antonello on horns and Lake Effect frontman Frank Deresti (a long-time collaborator in Jonesy Land material) on bass. The song in the usual places to hear for free, but Dustin's label Tidal Records' YouTube channel now has a lyric video for "The Lucky Ones", which was obviously recorded at his own Mission Control Studios. While this song is a departure from the folksy "Zoom - Out", it also doesn't flow with Dustin's best known punk material.

"The Lucky Ones" is more genre-ambiguous, and is darker in scope with imagery to match, including video of him in a dark location ranting about the ills of current society and how we are (sarcastically) the lucky ones who get to live through it. Some of the lyrics are slightly off in the transcription (it's "hemming & hawin'", not "hymn & hawin'"), but it's certainly one of the most direct and issue driven songs that I've ever heard from Dustin and/or Jonesy Land, if (thankfully) not political. Solid bass line and percussion here too! While we're on the subject, Dustin quietly released one more Jonesy Land song on major streaming services in December, namely a cover of The Beach Boys' Christmas song "Little Saint Nick"! Dustin has talked up Brian Wilson as a major production influence, so the shoe fits in that regard, but I might have been more timely to cover it here if Jonesy Land had social media accounts to promote their material with!

As it turns out, this isn't brand new, as Dustin actually recorded this cover back in 2018 under the one-off project name "The Snow Boys" alongside Frank, then-Rising Tide drummer Chris Johns, and prolific local indie musician Jay Case. This may explain why the song was quietly dumped onto Jonesy Land digital storefronts five years later, but if you like the original Beach Boys classic, you'll take to this! How often will you find local bands using a glockenspiel anyway? Click here to give it a listen if you don't want to wait for the Christmas (in July?) season. In one more Jonesy Land note, their cover of the aforementioned Ronettes song "Be My Baby" was spotlighted in this SooToday article on May 15th by arts writer and local musician Chris Belsito. It features interview remarks by Dustin about the song, his appreciation of Phil Spector and (by extension) Brian Wilson as producers, and why he chose this song to recreate.

Of note, his new Bookclub bandmate Josh Norling (saxophone) and backing vocalists Storm Rausch (the reigning Soo's Got Talent champion), Madi Schomogyi (Lime), Isabelle Deady-Bell, and Jett Jones (Dustin's daughter) were the "miscellaneous people" not credited by name in the official YouTube upload at the time. Also, lead singer Gabrielle Dumas (Hollow Heads) is apparently recording a solo album with Dustin right now. Good article that covers one song to the nth degree, so read it here, see above for much more from Jonesy Land, and check out "The Lucky Ones" below!

We'll close today with another new music release from a local band last month... well, briefly. I mentioned this earlier this week in our latest "Where Are The New Albums?" post, but it has yet to make a normal news post, so I wanted to acknowledge it here. If you have a Bandcamp account and follow groups on there, you may have noticed that local alternative/blues rock quartet Sykotyk Rampage released their 70th album (and first album of 2024) on May 15th, entitled "Waerlogas Sagas Konfysion Of Fyck". In hindsight, I should have checked it out sooner than I attempted to, as by month's end, the album was taken down for unannounced reasons. I also can't find extant reference to the album being on other services, and while the band rarely acknowledges their albums in advance on social media, Occam's Razor would suggest that the album was delisted already due to further edits or due to jumping the gun to release it too soon.

This is the album cover (at least, as of May 15th), which is viewable in the notification e-mail that Bandcamp sent out. A "waerloga" is Old English for a liar or traitor, and "warlock" is derived for it, while the letter Y is used for some U sounds in Finnish, so keep those in mind as thematic hints. I don't know if/when we'll hear "The Waerlogas Sagas", but seeing as it was briefly online/for sale, the songs do theoretically exist. We'll let you know when/if Sykotyk Rampage's 70th album (this or otherwise) goes on sale, and stay tuned for weekend concert previews on the site next! Thanks everyone!