STANDING ON THE CORNER - Standing On The Corner II

Almost ten years on from their 2016 debut Standing On The Corner, the New York collective led by Gio Escobar delivers a work that is the uncontrolled, uncontrollable hybridization of warped jazz, psychedelic soul, experimental hip-hop, rock, plunderphonics, spoken word and plain noise, assembled not according to any logic of genre but purely according to a logic of collision. This second chapter, then, doesn't build a coherent world, but gathers the fragments of a world in flames and turns them into music.

The opening track, “Will It Ever Be The Same?”, is almost an endurance test. Agonizing organs, off-axis guitars, slow drums and voices that seem to come from another, dreamlike dimension build a thoroughly apocalyptic liturgy, somewhere between Mac DeMarco and the more experimental tradition of Fifty Foot Hose and United States Of America. Then gunshots, sirens and interference arrive, and you realize it's not the music destabilizing you but what's around you.
From this point on, the record keeps mutating, constantly shifting sounds, colors and moods, forever balanced between dream and nightmare. While “The Word” turns jazzy arpeggios and grainy beats into a kind of LA beat music dream evaporating during a hot summer night, “Man May Not Last” takes hip-hop and crashes it into a flow of samples, noise, vocal mutations and unsettling chants. “Evil Man 9”, on the other hand, sinks into psychedelic soul, while “Gimme My Gun” drags it all into a deranged gospel organ and garage guitars with a touch straight out of the Residents' playbook.
Every track seems to recall something without ever truly belonging to the memory it evokes. This is Standing On The Corner's headphone magic: they don't quote music history, they haunt it.

Also very strong is “Mr. Postman, Wait!” (one of the singles released ahead of the album), a track that turns romantic pop into a sentimental hallucination, while “Roll Over Beethoven” (yes, another quotation, but above all a bizarre Devo-style cover) becomes a fragment of pop culture hacked to pieces with an axe and reassembled like a meme beamed in from a parallel universe.
Then “Doesn't Mean A Thing” pushes everything to the breaking point: violence, political absurdity and the loss of any moral measure are turned into a super-abrasive sonic matter, complete with that Mike Patton-style vocal grit. But beneath this chaotic surface lies a human surprise, “Secrets”, a passage that lets through a tenderness almost impossible to foresee. “How Deep Is The Sea?” (featuring Danny Brown) opens a strangely festive parenthesis within the apocalypse. And “Go 2 Sleep Pu$$y”, with its suspended strings and funereal tone, closes the journey like a prayer uttered once the party is already over.

Sixty-four minutes is a lot when every second is trying to destabilize you, and this feverish tension won't win everyone over, but clearly this isn't an album built on contemporary timescales — it's an entity unto itself.
Standing On The Corner have built compositions that seem to come from a future already past. A collage of memory, spirituality, violence, desire and pop culture, recorded as if every fragment could explode at any moment and drive a splinter into your brain.
Calling it hypnagogic pop or sound collage (or even psychedelic soul) only points to the entrance. The point is that, once inside, there's no longer a specific room to settle into, and that feeling is, in every sense, astonishing.

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01/10/2026