Honeyglaze; Real Deal wields the power of sensory liberation through intention
An album review. In 2025. The final year of human association in music.
There’s no prerequisite for Honeyglaze.
No need to flood the body with decades of tension in relentless longing. No need to seek resolution from the waning palette of hope. No reason to endure a lifetime of destructive confusion through continuous and infinite rejection. No urgency to expel the violence.
No call to suffer a world of impeding morality designed to dissipate upon approach. No inherent fortitude opposing an otherworldly array of dreamy euphoria in belonging.
Real Deal does the damn thing in a collection of actual, modern day escape and re-entry of discerning madness spiraling in and out of psycho-worldly expectations; sifting realities without mass. Gurus call it disassociation. The album is melodic brilliance swimming through asymmetric emotion as signature and pleading angst as cadence, with definitive dialogue as both tempo and harmony; acute phrasing to override physical alarm while examining its volatile blind spots. The power is in the connection; the vector is in the song.
Real Deal is the most endearing trajectory of post punk music ever. The indie/alt art connects with break neck arrangements, supreme sound scapes, planet-wrangling bass grooves and theatric percussion, opening the cerebral path for a vocal signature of spirited resolution. Space dust instrumentation rushing to cliff’s edge just before the lyrical story transfers yearning into lift, pillowing the soul down to river’s edge for a cool drink in worldly acceptance. Delightful and angular punk in heartwarming relevance, Honeyglaze orbits unregulated chaos into limbic harmony. A youthful discovery of witness through centuries of invisible conditioning.
No need to sample the back catalog within the genre; post punk, by definition is expansion; not a full departure from the angst, but a necessary adaptation to evolve memory in vulnerability. It’s how we pick up the pieces and carry on in a conduit of cathartic release. Real Deal is how we shape ethereal expansion during human integration. A must for anyone in an ongoing relationship with self and belonging through trauma of complicated neurodivergence, existing under condition in archaic social norms.
It’s fun, hilarious at times, post apocalyptic (by way of human institution) while grooving through radiant alamedas of disorders and ‘tisms, revealing spectrums of truth within rhythmic side quests and lighthearted discovery through portals of interrogating introspection. Far beyond and removed from expectation.
With 25 years flowing down the river of linear time, Real Deal summarizes relationship dynamics in the twenty first century, navigating the entire mine field sans community. No asterisk. No footnote. No exemptions. Honeyglaze is the human standard for evolution of individuation through forged exclusion. Real Deal is an art of necessity.
“You watch the sky open,
but I feel it fall”
Stringer
Author’s note: I’ve been absorbing the sounds of Real Deal for a while now; took a break from euphoria to get this out to the world. Each title is phenomenal and accompanies its own urgency. Take a day or three to isolate; from everything and everybody. After a few passes through the music-nova, the blurry bits come into focus. The story and suffering of my life contained and projected by “I Feel It All” as witness to a half-century old tornado alley of destruction and a landfill of dysregulation before the awakening. Now in concert with becoming.
Anouska Sokolow - vocalist/guitar/lyrics
Tim Curtis - bass magic
Yuri Shibuichi - cliffhanging drums
Real Deal produced by Claudius Mittendorfer (Parquet Courts, Sorry, Interpol); recorded in a private studio.
Real Deal released by Fat Possum Records (Buffalo Nichols, Man/Woman/Chainsaw, Dutch Interior, Not the Same Old Blues Crap, and my personal fav, r.i.p. Charles Caldwell).
All info gathered from Fat Possum’s website: Fat Possum
