The Children… is a musical project from New York City comprising core trio Michael Wiener, Jim Coleman and Phil Puleo. In the most recent live shows, John Nowlin and Rock Savage have handled bass and drums respectively, and Kirsten McCord has provided somber phrasing on cello. The group has operated almost like an art rock jazz ensemble, with various other collaborators live and in recording sessions, including legendary avant-garde vocalist and performance artist Shelley Hirsch, former Swans guitarist Norman Westberg and clarinetist Johnny Gasper. Vocalist Michael Wiener is an actor, writer, curator and educator whose career in music, theater, film and beyond is richly diverse, and worth a deep exploration. Jim Coleman many may know from his time in influential industrial noise rock group Cop Shoot Cop, as well as the like-minded supergroup Human Impact. Phil Puleo is a composer and visual artist who also had an extended tenure in Cop Shoot Cop, and a long-running, still continuing stint in Swans. Quite the pedigree, which wouldn’t necessarily guarantee genuinely compelling and interesting music. But despite a name that resists discovery through a search engine online, once you’ve found the group’s music, you will be rewarded with some of the most densely orchestrated, ambitious and cinematic art rock being made in recent years.

The group’s forthcoming album, A Sudden Craving (due out on or around March 8, 2024 via Erototox Decodings), is like an industrial jazz, nightmarish exploration of generational trauma, and the ambient flow of those energies underlying the fractured and convulsed psyche of modern American culture. The imaginative arrangements and sonic intensity of the music are reminiscent of early 70s English art folk like Robert Wyatt and Soft Machine or John Martyn, but in a sort of jazz fusion manifestation more akin to the likes of Can and Japanese psychedelic rock of that same decade. It’s just difficult to know where it’s coming from, and yet there is an emotional immediacy that draws you into the music. It has a cinematic aspect in its storytelling that seems to tap into collective mythology, the way the more daring filmmakers of the 1970s mixed not just styles and themes with art concepts, but with music, in a fusion of aesthetics. One hears echoes of Eno’s 70s post-Roxy Music rock albums, and how alien yet accessible they were, or 80s Tom Waits, and his mutant blues and jazz pop storytelling that aims at more than then current popular styles of music. More contemporaneously, it should appeal to fans of the current spate of harrowing but transcendent Swans records, or those of Los Angeles-based post-punk art phenoms Sprain. It is a music that is out of time and timeless. The band calls its music “gothic blues ambient,” which is a succinct summary of what you’re in for when you listen to the album, and, one would hope, if you are fortunate enough to catch a manifestation of the songs live.

thechildrenband.bandcamp.com/album/a-sudden-craving
www.erototox.com
www.instagram.com/thethermae/
www.instagram.com/philpuleo666/
www.humanimpactband.com