Description
17 years strong, Sexmob are a venerable New York City music institution. The band’s four founding members—Steven Bernstein, Briggan Krauss, Tony Scherr and Kenny Wollesen—defy genre, instead replacing it with their own inimitable musical language. It’s fitting then that for their first new album in over seven years, Sexmob would choose to re-imagine the music of Nino Rota. It was Rota’s imaginative compositions that set the tone for the surrealist films of the legendary director Federico Fellini. The Italian filmmaker once said, “My films, like my life, are summed up in circus, spaghetti, sex, and cinema.” Accordingly, Sexmob have dubbed their tribute, Cinema, Circus & Spaghetti. The 13-track collection is a welcome return to form by these giants of the NYC downtown scene as they dive headlong into Rota’s iconic Fellini film melodies. The quartet fearlessly blows apart musical parameters whether steering the arrangements through gutbucket swing or igniting them with New Orleans brass band second-line fervor; dubbing them out into ether or blasting them with punk jazz abandon. These classic themes are the perfect foil for Sexmob’s improvisational psychedelia, old world beauty and hypnotic groove.
