Taste Test, Edition #25: Pete Mancini, Tommy Ocean, LYSO & Mari Dangerfield

Welcome to Taste Test, a review wrangling of SubmitHub-only gemstones.

“Dear Admirer” by Mari Dangerfield

Heartbreak can make you feel, that’s for sure. You might want to puke at the sight of new, cheek-blushing lip-lockers; or throw a punch at the local bar to let out your rage. Who knows. Folk-pop’s Mari Dangerfield unties a craftily bedazzled storybook about such a brash collection of emotions with her new song “Dear Admirer,” which will elicit every shade of raw passion, from a stream of crystal tears to a heart’s thriving palpitation to collapsed melancholy. The electronics spin in a tornado of fairy dust around Dangerfield’s celestial-bodied voice. She’s as light as a feather but uncages an evocative and hyper-charged performance. “I know that every time you see a couple holding hands, it makes you sigh,” she consoles in the song’s final moments. She then vaporizes into the mist, and you’re left clutching your heart, once in pieces but now whole again, far wiser than you thought possible.

“My Hometown” by Pete Mancini

Small towns creak underneath the two-ton weight of the world, eroding just as a pair of once-shiny sneakers on concrete. Folk singer-songwriter Pete Mancini laments the dire condition of his hometown of Bellerose, New York, a cog in the machine stuck between polarizing ideologies and a soured human shape. “I’d rather be dead in the ground than drop roots in my hometown,” his words cut deep. He addresses the sorrow and angst with fearlessness, and in the current sociopolitical climate, it’s a necessary proclamation aimed at archaic traditions of middle America.

“The Beggar” by Tommy Ocean

Life provides a plethora of pathways, swimming in and out of various possibilities and gateways to even more adventure, and you have lots of choices to make along each destination. Out of Germany, folksy musician Tommy Ocean considers every option spreading out as a deck of cards at his feet, from being a beggar to a residency as a doctor and everything in between. “If I were a singer, the one that never hits a tone / You would be my only fan,” he sings, almost as a bittersweet, tear-jerking confessional. It’s dipped in harmonica and an acoustic guitar’s soft purr, and Ocean certainly ebbs and flows along with it.  “I’d sing of feelings that before I’d never known,” he ventures forward, his voice so ruggedly plainspoken that it sparkles in the sunlight. He’s the everyman, one destined to be just like us, but his earthy, unsophisticated storytelling envelopes you and pulls you into a grand soundscape that touches the unfiltered edges of mankind.

“A Road to Follow” by LYSO

Robert Frost famously grappled with the road less traveled. Its evergreen message of forested, overgrown crossroads seeps into the bedrock of folk-rocker LYSO’s acoustic-rendered new single. “A Road to Follow,” which cracks at dizzying heights that propel him ever-so onward down the snaky curves of backroads and mountain drives, fixates on the uncertainty bearing down upon him. His asphalt-doused voice tears at his throat, as he gazes heavenward for the answers to strike as a bolt of lightning. “Alone I stand,” he muses. The sky is overcast, though, so he must look inward for the truth he so desperately seeks. His voice climbs into the eaves and seemingly shatters the production into jagged chunks. “An endless journey,” he screeches, his body careening into the melody like a drag racer throwing caution into the sweltering wind. LYSO bravely gives a divine performance, perhaps a career-making one.

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