Dominic Angelella is detained in uncertain surroundings on “Red State”
Singer and multi-instrumentalist Dominic Angelella is one of the busiest dudes around the Philly scene, between his gig playing bass with punk road warriors mewithoutYou, busting smooth dance moves on late night TV in Natalie Prass’ band, sharing songwriting duties in Lithuania with Eric Slick, and rocking the occasional solo release when he has a minute to come up for air.
After many years fronting DRGN King, Angelella made his solo debut last year with the Goodnight Doggies. LP on Lame-O Records; this spring, he follows it up with the Road Movie EP, out May 4th on Lame-O, and a new track just premiered today via Brooklyn Vegan.
“Red State” is a chugging rocker reminiscent of Toronto four-piece Pup, and on the surface it sounds like an indictment of the American political landscape of 2018, Angelella’s voice fraught with tension as he sings about overzealous police and escape from uncomfortable surroundings. Actually, it’s only partly about the stateside scene, as he told Brooklyn Vegan today.
On my first tour with MewithoutYou, we traveled to Russia and played two shows, one in Moscow and one in Murmansk, a military city of about 300,000 above the Arctic Circle. This was at the tail-end of a three week run in Europe, the first time I had ever been out of the country save a few stray trips to Canada.
In Murmansk we played this crowd-funded DIY space that was once an auto-garage. As soon as our set was finished, the show was raided by Russian police and we were taken to a detention center to await further instructions.
We waited for hours, our flight back to America getting closer and closer, with no idea why we were being detained. After being interrogated one by one we were able to figure out that there was an issue with our visas and hastily paid a fee in order to make our way to the airport. we rushed onto the tarmac and barely made it out, 24 hours after landing, with no sleep.
This song was written later in the year after a tour through the American Southeast, in attempts to connect the red states of my country with the strange, wildly beautiful place that I visited earlier in the year.
Give a listen to “Red State” below, and grab a pre-order of Road Movie here, via Bandcamp.