By Tom Carlson

Big Fuzzy began as the duo of guitarist/composer Max Kennedy and vocalist Anneke Reich. In 2019, after years of duo performance and self-released recordings, Kennedy and Reich brought on Dan Raney (bass) and Austin Birdy (drums) to begin work on their self-titled full-band debut record to be released by independent label, Dollhouse Lightning. We’ll get to hear that debut later this January over at Bandcamp, available for preorder on CD and cassette.

Until then, the Boston based band has prepared a really beautiful music video for the first single, “Innocence Pt. 2,”  animated by Eva Okrent and Recorded by Boston Music Awards-nominated engineer Miranda Serra at Zippah Studios. “Innocence Pt. 2” is privately streaming here.

Thoughts, 

Anneke Reich’s voice, soulful and waning, sings lyrics that present a patient and revealing tale alongside Max Kennedy who writes from the perspective of their other life as a math teacher in the Boston Public School system. Lyrics explore the emotional unsteadiness that sits atop of the seemingly repetitive lifestyle of school days. 

This story is shown just as well through arrangement and composition — the steady grooves over unexpected and idiosyncratic chord changes (heavily influenced by jazz) legitimize stability through repetition only to be broken by intermissions that either stray from tonal harmony or climax on both lyrical and musical sustain by means of beautiful holds in two-part harmony. 

The music video, directed and animated by Eva Okrent, opens with watercolor and ink stills with singular moving parts. I’m immediately reminded of watching the minute hand of the clock in a high school classroom in the way that everything beyond the focus of the littlest moving part seems to blur into stills. Okrent directs scenes of still classrooms where only the pages of a book flutter by slower and slower. 

The thing that struck me about the relationship between song and video isn’t easily described... Take a look at Vermeer’s “The Concert” and Mondrian’s “Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow.” When you remove all but the formal qualities, all the detail, from the Vermeer you’re left with the Mondrian. The colors remain in the same place and by the same size. 

I feel this same thing happening when “Innocence Pt.2” lyrically asks us to focus and then begins to describe little things like the yellowing of the windows. Poetically enough, Kennedy, a math teacher, manages to replace our surroundings with only the geometrical, only the formal qualities, nothing but the backdrop for which the emotional uneasiness sits. What is so brilliant is that Okrent’s art and direction manage to abstract to formal qualities at this exact lyrical moment. I was stunned by the synchronicity and am really excited for the release of the full album.

Tom is a culture writer for La Tonique.