Hayley Thompson-King — Psychotic Melancholia

Inspired by her youthful days in Clowns
for Christ, Hayley Thompson-King presents her “Sodom and Gomorrah
concept album,” Psychotic Melancholia.
As metal as that sounds, these are in fact the basic ingredients for
a rich and complex “psychedelic country” album. 
 
Thompson-King
has carried the seeds for
Psychotic Melancholia,
her debut full-length album, for quite some time. She describes
herself as a child who often questioned the role of women in Old
Testament Bible studies. (Her tenure in Clowns for Christ, a youth
troupe that acted out parables, did not last long.) “My parents
weren’t even super religious,” she recalls. “I was very curious
about religions as a child. I’m not a very religious person now. But
I was really inspired by these questions I had as a kid about all of
the women I had learned about who were considered really wicked and
evil, but upon revisiting their stories they just seemed really smart
and were asking really solid questions. So I was inspired by these
women. I thought they really strong and exciting and that I could put
myself in their shoes.” Her intellectual curiosity is evident in
earthy songs that are equally influenced by Romantic art, opera, and
her upbringing in Sebastian, Florida, where she grew up riding and
showing American Quarter Horses. Thompson-King sees the album as an
amalgamation of all of these: her classical training and Southern
roots: “I grew up riding horses. My dad’s a team worker. I grew up
in a truck with vintage country music. It definitely influenced me
and I love being from the South.” But if there’s one unifying theme
on
Psychotic Melancholia,
it’s the dismantling of false idols. 

 

Thompson-King explains that her songs
often begin outside of herself, but ultimately reflect upon her inner
experience. “I like to write about real things that happen in my
life. I think I’m always writing about my relationships, like with my
folks, the other people whom I love. It’s easy for me to write about
myself if I’m looking at a third party, so that I can look at myself
as another character.” This tendency can be seen in the opening
track “Large Hall, Slow Decay,” which is a rootsy diss track
directed at a former bandmate whom she had looked up to prior to
working her. (“Long Hall, Slow Decay” is a reference to the
reverb effect the singer constantly demanded during rehearsals and
live performances.) Thompson-King, however, needs no effects to
amplify her vocal abilities. Trained at the New England Conservatory
of Music, Thompson-King joins the ranks of operatically trained rock
singers like Pat Benatar and Ann Wilson. Her training is brought to
bear in the power of “Lot’s Wife,” a backwoods road-house
scorcher that re-imagines the Biblical character as a woman who
couldn’t understand her husband’s directive and turns back, once
more, to watch the city she loves burn. (What else would they listen
to in Sodom?) In “Soul Kisser,” a meditation on the midwifery and
violence of the creative process evoking Goya’s Saturn Devouring
His Young
, Thompson-King’s
vibrato and emotion create a temporary calm in the tempestuous
guitars of the album. The band closes the album with an alternate
arrangement of Schumann’s “Wehmut” (or, in English, the album’s
namesake: “Melancholia.”)
The
album is in fact a labor of love six months in the making.
Thompson-King and longtime friend, collaborator, guitarist, and
producer Pete Weiss holed up in his Athens, VT studio between October
and March of 2016. According to Thompson-King, Weiss helped develop
her “baby” songs into fully fleshed adults. The pair obsessively
tweaked songs, tested out instruments to use, and various mic set-ups
to create the perfect soundscape. While the pair ultimately used
digital recording techniques (unfortunately, Weiss explains, it
proved too difficult to edit the tracks as they had been recorded
live) the band wanted to create a live-sounding album like Dave
Cobb’s. “We weren’t trying to do something that was perfect. We
were trying to do something very human and very real and wild. We
wanted it to be emotional and exciting.” Keeping in that spirit,
the band limited the number and types of takes they did on each track
an an effort to preserve the album’s organic feeling.
Thompson-King’s artistry has been
widely recognized by the Boston community. She currently receives a
grant from the city of Somerville, Massachusetts, and The Somerville
Arts Council to live as an Artist in Residence. Along with Weiss, she
is joined by Chris Maclachlan of legendary Boston new-wave band Human
Sexual Response on bass and Jonathan Ulman, declared 2016’s “Session
Player of the Year” by the Boston Music Awards, on drums.
Thompson-King still sings opera and teaches voice lessons, but she
feels a strong sense of place as a singer-songwriter.
Reflecting on her
departure from her classical training, Thompson-King notes that “As
a singer, I knew that I had this big voice and I wanted to use it in
a really serious way but I wanted to write my own material.”
However, she sees a connection between her music and opera: “it’s
super emotional; [it] tells these stories that are common and human
but in a really big way, which is what I’m doing now.”
Note: Thompson-King’s PR Company, Baby Robot Media, asked me to write the press release for this album. Since this is more or less what I’ve written anyway, I’m featuring the album with my draft here. They’ve tweaked it a bit since but if the words seem familiar and you’ve read more than one review of this excellent album, that’s why!
Hayley Thompson-KingOfficial, Facebook, Purchase from Hayley Thompson-King

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