On Holidays: Monster Rally

"One of the more admirable qualities of music is its ability to take you somewhere. Sometimes it is somewhere you've already been. Other times, it takes you to a Midcentury pool party where everyone is blazed, doing the Watusi on the patio and enjoying an endless summer. Monster Rally resides on this plane of permanent vacation.

"Monster Rally is the project of Edward Farrell Feighan III, or simply, just Ted. Over the past year, he has been creating a lush isle of estival tunes out of tropical loops and stylized beats. Each song is masterfully layered, producing thick melodic jungles ripe with the breezy nuances.

"You'd never guess the man wasn't from the line of the Equator, though for Feighan, Ohio could be just as humid. 'I grew up in a house without air conditioning and during the summer in Cleveland it can get insanely hot and humid. The type of weather where you take a shower in the morning and your never fully dry for the rest of the day,' Feighan recounts. 'It sounds horrible, but I've always felt comfortable in environments like that.'

"Cleveland may not be a beach, but that isn't to say that it isn't rife with record stores waiting to be ransacked. As with most music with substantial sampling, Monster Rally started from an epic record collection. 'A few years ago I started buying a ton of old tropical records from thrift stores, almost entirely because I loved the imagery so much,' says Feighan. 'I listened to almost all of them, but the one that really made me think differently about music was Martin Denny's Quiet Village.'

"'I never really went anywhere that tropical growing up so I think that rather than vacations that I've taken inspiring my music, its the ones that I haven't taken that influence me,' he notes. 'I think the vacations I would really like to take would be impossible. For example, I'd like to take a vacation to 1950's Cuba or 1960's California.'"

Amen, Feighan. Never been anywhere tropical, don't plan on it any time soon — this will suffice for eternity.

Story via Impose Magazine, postcard via Vintage Chromes.

"Play a song for me, please."

While everyone else is enjoying certain harbingers of summer—you know, like, wearing dresses, grillin' out, the sun—here at 8300 feet up it's snowing every other day and reluctantly brown. But that hasn't stopped me from living vicariously though cinema and music (always a quick-fix).

By total mistake I found myself enjoying too much a little Portuguese gem called Black Orpheus from '59. An adaptation of the greek legend of Orpheus & Eurydice played out in a shanty town in Rio de Janeiro (a pretty sexy place to have a shack, if you ask me). The plot anticipates a parade + carnival full of glitter, gaudy costumes and crazy dancing. To make a long story short, the composers are the real stars, and it's jam-packed with bossa nova classics. The director of photography didn't do too bad either.

Pictures via ilovehotdogs.net

Some sexy ads from Mike McQuad. Not gonna lie, this definitely makes me want to drink Beam. Whiskey drinking should never be a passé ordeal and everything about these reiterate that.

Heading back to KC soon for a pleasant trip. Really looking forward to it.