Dubbing something as “rock and roll” has often felt more patronizing than laudatory to me. Maybe it’s because by the time I was born the world was clogged with the detritus of rock culture: rock as Time Life boxset infomercial, rock as Hard cafe, rock as Crosley turntable on sale now at urban outfitters, and perhaps most egregious of all, rock as institution. Too many perversions to count, all of them far too intent on telling you what rock is—read: was—rather than sitting back quietly and listening for what it could be.
My first encounter with Joey Agresta’s warped pop confections was back in college when he dropped the video for “Fresh Baguettes” under the name Son of Salami, leading me to his garbled masterpiece A Study in Eraser Headless Tape Recording. Back then, Agresta recorded music using tape recorders from which he’d removed the erase head, building tracks layer by layer without the benefit of hearing how each was syncing up. The tensions between his deceptively simple, hummable melodies, hilariously vulgar lyrics and deadpan delivery, and jarring tape distortions sounded to my then not-quite-fully corrupted ears like a natural devolution of rock (née pop) for our ever-burgeoning hellscape (née world)—songs struggling to reach us through their own decay, eager to drag us into their world of hiss and wobble. It was some extremely formative listening for me, and though each of his subsequent releases have been stellar, they haven’t hit me quite as viscerally as that first platter. Or at least that was the case until a few weeks back.
Agresta’s latest full-length, Let Me to Rock, is the sound of an inimitable artist firing on all cylinders and stands as his most definitive artistic statement to date. It manages to distill much of the feral brilliance that runs through his back catalog into something that’s accessible but far from compromised. Musically it doesn’t deviate too far from an off-kilter center, yet he manages to milk a wide variety of flavors out of this minimal palette. At turns quietly triumphant (“Teach the Dumb”), manically pensive (“The Perfect Words”), and heartbreakingly earnest (“My Love”), it showcases the maturing lyricist heard on his last full-length, 2017’s Let’s Not Talk About Music, while reintroducing the chaotic playfulness of his early releases. While the analog flourishes of old may be gone, in their place are some absolutely madcap samples that bring Agresta’s understated musical wit to the fore. “If U Wanna” is the party-starting hit for those of us whose invites must have gotten lost in the mail, a jaunty number carried by an undercurrent of burbles, screeches, and buzzing bugs. The title track is replete with the bleats and crows of a barnyard/zoo chorus (pet sounds, if you will?), offering some surprisingly fitting background vocals, even if they seem to be discouraging his rock and roll aspirations. And of course, who else but Agresta could pull off album-highlight “My Consumption,” a forlorn waltz that hinges on fart sounds—after all, Agresta knows a thing or two about the fallout of human consumption, having spent years living above and working at Burlington’s Junktiques Collective. That the track has both sent me into hysterics and provided solace as I watch garbage blow up and down my block is a testament to his versatile songcraft.
Given its peak-Agresta vibes, it makes sense that the album emerged—or maybe spewed forth would be more appropriate—following a period of Relative (big R) inactivity. Following the release of his last full-length, he broke down his home studio, converting the space into a set for his first film—a science fiction feature-length called Light Forms that is being shot and edited on his iPhone, starring his wife and produced by Ted Lee of the indefatigable Feeding Tube Records—a project which has occupied much of his creative energy in the intervening years. He still found time to record songs on his phone with Garageband, “mainly selling them for rounds at bars or weed or small amounts of money,” he relayed to me via email, with some also finding their way to his Instagram. Even so, for someone whose prolificacy is the stuff of legend in certain circles, the change of pace must have been stark.
Enter Benny Yurco, Burlington resident, member of Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, and an admirer of Agresta’s Instagram oeuvre. In October 2019, he invited Agresta to hang out and record at his home studio, where one song quickly snowballed into the album. “My favorite thing about music as an art form is that I don’t need anyone else to make it, so I’m usually trepidatious about recording with others,” Agresta noted, but in Yurco he found an ideal collaborator and something of “a long lost brother” (both were born in the same area of north Jersey, in the same hospital, same year). And so, between October and December and in keeping with his MO, Agresta wrote tracks the same nights they were recorded, laying down each layer by layer with Yurco performing and engineering alongside him. Before they were able to get to vocals however, Yurco’s schedule began filling up, so Agresta dusted off a just barely functioning 8-track he’d used in his younger days (“I literally had to rig a piece of clay to the main volume knob to get it to work by weighing it down”) and got to work on his own. This was March 2020, and at the same time that the world around him seemed to be crumbling, he was struggling with a debilitating bout of depression. “It was a really painful and worrisome time, but a lot of what I was going through made its way into the album and it’s a better album because of it.”
Indeed, even more than his idiosyncratic aesthetics, what’s really always drawn me to Agresta’s music is the melancholy just below the surface. When he declared “this world is full of shit” or “life is too heavy, everyday” it didn’t ring as flippant to me, but rather as the hard-fought declaration of someone who knows the struggle of keeping your head above water. Make no mistake, Let Me to Rock is a celebratory album, one that prizes “the Rock + Roll spirit, and creative freedom” above all else, but with every celebration comes the knowledge that it can’t last forever. “Rock + Roll is in danger of becoming stagnant or worse yet, dead,” Agresta observed. “It’s losing the things that made it great, the energy, the reinvention. My hope is that this is a fresh continuation of the heritage.” And here again I’m reminded that rock and roll, regardless of all the cloying artifice that’s been built up around it, need not be the soulless joke I often perceive it as. Even if it is, as long as there are artists as tirelessly inventive as Agresta willing to Weekend at Bernie’s its husk, I’ll be willing to twist and shout.