Standout Track: “Stockholders” is a crispy, noisy introduction to guitarist-vocalist John Masters’ new solo project. Masters, the former frontman of inactive band Metropolitan and drummer of The Cheniers, focuses his energy on a Sonic Youth-style guitar riff that loops and loops to a backdrop of sustained tones. “We’ve got access/ She’s got nothing/ We’ve got stress,” he sings, wrapping up with a messy, excited solo.
Musical Motivation: Improvising at home and working with long-gestating ideas, Masters recorded “Stockholders” with an iPad. The lyrics were a bit “scatted out,” Masters says—beginning with a wordless melody—but he ultimately based his lyrics on his experience with his parents’ aging and deaths. “Now/We’ve got nothing/Now.”
Aural Grief: Masters doesn’t intend the track to be a downer. “I just wanted to be more reflective and I think in turn, being reflective, it was more somber of a tone,” Masters says. Having to act as an executor of his parents’ estate and deal with their loss, he hopes to convey how “no one really teaches you how to [deal with] that, it’s really pretty complicated.”
Harness Flux plays with The Caribbean and More Humans Nov. 2 at U Street Music Hall.
