Bram Cools Releases ‘Safe Happy Christian Music for the Conservative Middleclass’

posted in: Music News | 0

Next Saturday, the first day of July, the Bram Cools album ‘Safe Happy Christian Music for the conservative middleclass‘ will be released through my bandcamp page. It will a ‘choose your own price’ release, and if enough people ask me for it I might make some kind of physical CD-R release too.

More about the album
Don’t be fooled by the title, ‘Safe Happy Christian Music for the Conservative Middleclass‘ is not only a rough collection of weird lo-fi folk songs that often go in unexpected musical directions, it is also a a bit of a spiritual concept album that is designed to make people uncomfortable at times. (It even makes me uncomfortable 7 years later, and that’s not because of the musical errors and out-of-tune moments.)

While the music is inspired by the words of Christ and the New Testament, so you can be certain there’s nothing safe or middleclass about actual Christianity. If you take these things seriously seriously you’ll end up closer to nonviolent anticapitalist green anarchism than to a cage of safety, Mammon and the quiet desperation of adulting under peer pressure of those with shiny toys and life-sucking jobs…

As said before it’s not really a new album, but an older project that only got finished now. ‘Sell everything you have and give it to the poor’ was meant as its first single together with ‘Stephen, they’re gonna stone you to death’ 7 years ago, but the album never came… It grew out of a set of songs songs that I started writing at the moment that my band the contemporary Christian Muzak collective (CCMC) was falling apart, almost 10 years ago. Mandolin and melodica are very prominently present on the album, but apart from that I do switch instruments all of the time, and the role of electronica if present is generally rather small.

Most of these songs were almost completely recorded but never finished when life happened and prevented them to be completely finished, and so they took a long sabbatical on my harddisk instead of being released ‘soon’ as I promised 7 years ago. Musically there still is the pre-cyberluddism approach of playing a lot of instruments myself rather than programming them as I did on later albums, which gives a more folk and at moments even rock feeling, and there is a lot of experimentation going on which sometimes gives a noise-feel. While most of these songs have just been hiding on the computer, a few of them have been played live, and the sing-along classic ‘sell everything you have and give it to the poor’ fastly became a concert favourite.