Nick Flessa “A Different Kind Of Energy” Vinyl (PRE-ORDER)

With A Different Kind of Energy, Los Angeles-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Nick Flessa communicates volumes without uttering a word, with an album of fully instrumental pieces conveying psychic landscapes of many latitudes. Dust is kicked up by roadhouse rangers where an antagonistic lead singer is perpetually just about to come on stage and start chastising the audience, but never makes it.

Tormented outbursts nod to moments of tranquility with a thinly veiled disgust, and both keep trucking alongside one another. A layered and critical social commentary states its case with a gruffly muttered "no comment."

Flessa already said it all on his 2024 album The Politics of Personal Destruction. Through the vantage point of several hellbent narrators, he crafted a scathing and hilarious dissection of all things horrid, firing shots at the superficiality clouding L.A.'s music and arts communities, betrayal and back-biting within small circles, status anxiety, and the ongoing spiritual erosion of the times. Sounding like the specific din of an unfriendly desert dive bar, Flessa and his band snaked through a post-Berman tumble of smoggy saxophone leads, sparkly pedal steel, and barbed lyrics about psychic pollution, sodium pentathol, character assasination... the usual. The songs were dense and brutal, and when the dust cleared, the air felt markedly different. Even if Flessa's narrative portraits of ugliness and redemption didn't exactly reach any tidy conclusions, the indentations they left were deep, and created a lot of new open space.

In that newfound space, things softened somewhat. Flessa found new inspirations in the vastness of certain forms of California visual and conceptual art, in land art and other mediums that emphasized light and landscape. Acquiring a small cabin in the high desert town of Wonder Valley gave him time to sit in profound spaciousness; endless seas of desert with mountains in the distance where mirages of car lights occasionally emerged from miles away. It was in Wonder Valley that he started writing new instrumental pieces informed by that space, fitting them into the scene-crafting language that had already carried over to his songwriting from a background in film making.

A Different Kind of Energy is the end result of what began in the hanging stillness of the high desert, and was eventually fleshed out back in L.A. with many of the same players who had contributed to The Politics of Personal Destruction. After some time working some of the new song ideas into live sets while they were still in sketch-like states, Flessa and crew recorded the entire album quickly over just a few days.

Again, informed more by visual art than any explicit musical reference points, the album's spacious production tunes into the sound of the players interacting with one another in the same room much like some of the art that inspired the sounds focuses on the interplay between light and shadows.

Though the material here is entirely instrumental, this is not placid ambient wallpaper. Instead, these songs could be seen as a wordless continuation of the frayed edges and troubled character sketches of the album that preceded them, with the acerbic stranglehold of Flessa's songwriting coming through in the presence of the music rather than through overt lyricism. The performances are loud and sinewy, and hints of acidic wit still seep through in piss-taking titles like "Death of a Natural Wine Salesman" or "Rise of John Wayne Bobbitt."

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Nick Flessa is an artist and musician originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, currently based in Los Angeles and Wonder Valley, CA. A multi-instrumentalist with a background in film and literature, A Different Kind of Energy is his third solo full-length. Some other musical endeavors include fronting the goth/post-punk outfit Dayton Swim Club and playing bass in the alchemical lo-fi project Squeegees. He is the longstanding saxophonist for the Austin Leonard Jones band, and has recorded or performed on sax for a variety of projects. For his previous solo record, The Politics of Personal Destruction,  Flessa held a residency at Healing Force of the Universe in 2024. He also makes films, composes for film, and has had two solo art exhibitions in Los Angeles. Spanning across multiple media, Flessa’s work is noteworthy for its literary and poetic quality, conceptual yet autobiographical bent, and caustic abject humor. 

The band for A Different Kind of Energy consists of Nick Flessa (guitar), Gina Segall (bass), Ross Chait (drums), J.D. Carrera (Pedal Steel), and Nicki Chen (Viola). All are long-term collaborators, some dating back a decade or more. Neil Wogensen recorded and engineered the record - another longtime collaborator and occasional band member, he produced Flessa’s first two records as well.