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Posts Tagged ‘Alternative rock’

My Latest Album, ‘Betrayed,’ Has Hit The Streams

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on July 23, 2025| Leave a Comment »

I am very proud to announce that Salon de la Guerre’s latest album has hit the virtual shelves. It’s called Betrayed, and it’s now available on Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon, Spotify, Bandcamp and Pandora, among other services.

Betrayed is a collection of dark pop songs on political and personal anxiety, obsession, jealousy, guilt and redemption. Yet it’s all pretty poppy and peppy, lest you get the wrong idea from all those scary nouns.

This time out I turned to some singing help from my friend Christina E., who contributes the wonderful lead vocal on my song “Latin Quarter Restaurant,” and whose harmony vocals and vocal counterpoints can be found throughout the rest of the album as well. When I wrote some of these parts, I realized that my voice just wouldn’t do, and I turned to Christina, who offered not just great interpretation but allowed me to visit more spaces in the sonic landscape and give the songs a different color and personality. Also, working with her was a joy. When you work alone so much, it’s a breath of fresh air to have someone else come in and show such enthusiasm for what you’re doing and lend so much positive energy.

I’m fairly proud of my production on these cuts … or at least as proud as I can be with a layperson’s understanding of sound engineering. Of all my strengths, I rank my arranging talents pretty high and my audio tech acumen pretty low.

I composed the music almost entirely on Logic Pro X this time around, though I also tucked in a solo here and there that I performed on an iPhone keyboard. (I haven’t picked up an actual guitar yet this year … but watch out for it. Sometimes I get itchy to play.)

As always, Betrayed is only available online in a digital format (which will be the case every time out until I’ve signed a record deal). The album was written, produced and performed by yours truly at my home studio from May to July 2025. Again, the background vocals on a smattering of songs and the lead vocal on “Latin Quarter Restaurant” are by Christina E. The color photo illustration on the cover is by CSA-Printstock.

Here’s one of the new tracks. Enjoy!

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Salon de la Guerre’s New Alt-Rock Album

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 22, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Aren’t you lucky, you darlings! Salon de la Guerre’s 35th album is here, and it’s a lot of fun!

The album is called Citizen Wet Smack and it features some hard-rocking tunes such as “Scooter Impossible,” “Fred Jr.,” and “Once Evil, Now Retired.” The songs cover familiar Salon de la Guerre ground, with vignettes of characters you might find in short fiction: small-time criminals, white collar scammers, spoiled rich kids and unethical philosophers.

As of this week, the album is available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Pandora, YouTube and Bandcamp, among other streaming services. You can also use my stuff to make TikTok videos, if you’re so inclined. (My old song “Funny Drunk” is evidently popular for that sort of thing.)

About the title: “Wet smack” is an old-timey phrase for “wet blanket” or misfit. I use it a lot in my novels when I can.

The instrumentation on the new album is weird (Salon de la Guerre fans should expect no less by now). I include a lot of original Fender strat guitar performances alongside prefab guitar sounds generated on my iPhone GarageBand. I confess, this app has a hard rock guitar timbre that I quite like, and which I can manipulate in Logic Pro X. I understand that some purists probably shudder at that thought. But as I’ve said before, I’m not a musical purist about anything. I don’t care where songs come from as long as I’ve got an instrument or machine that gives me easy access to my own melodic ideas. Sometimes for this reason I get some snickers about my production quality from friends and critics. On the bright side, I’ve squeezed out a few hundred songs by doing things my way (I’ve got three more albums dropping soon, and my total song count is now just under 500 titles).

I noticed after I submitted my music to a paid review site a few months ago that a good reviewer can spot my influences pretty easily. The critic who wrote about my last album, Even Toy Dogs Get the Blues, thought he could hear some Peter Gabriel in my voice. I accept that view, though I don’t mind stating my influences outright, especially for my latest work. It’s pretty much all Sonic Youth, Joy Division and the Pixies. So there you go!

I’m also responsible for the cover art this time around, since my preferred collaborator has been busy. The plaster bust photos were purchased from a photo wire and taken by someone named Parsadanov.

I will likely do this kind of album again in the future, but the three albums I’ve got coming up are all very different: one’s folk, one’s electronic, one’s classical.

But for now, please enjoy a sample of the new album below, and buy it if you’d like!

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Even Toy Dogs Get the Blues

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , , on August 4, 2023| Leave a Comment »

I am extremely proud to announce that Salon de la Guerre’s 33rd album, Even Toy Dogs Get the Blues, has been released today. It can now be found on all the major digital music platforms for streaming or download, including iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, Amazon and Bandcamp. (You can also make TikTok videos with Salon de la Guerre music, if you’re so inclined.)

As longtime readers know, Salon de la Guerre is my nom de rock, and I’m responsible for all the writing and playing (though I thank Apple for the useful sample here and there). Most of this album was made on my iPhone and home computer, save for one track with a guitar flip-out.

The album includes a lot of sketches of compulsive characters—spies, smugglers, strip club patrons, scam artists, obsessive dog lovers and Buddhists.

I recorded the album at my home in New York from May to July.

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Salon de la Guerre’s Catalogue

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , on March 30, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Salon de la Guerre now has 32 albums available on iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, Bandcamp and other sites where can buy and stream music. My latest is Stereoisomer. You can check out the catalogue here and here.

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My Rockin’-est Album Will Hit Shelves In A Few Days

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , on March 26, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Salon de la Guerre’s 32nd album is going to come out in the next week. It’s my hardest, fastest, most rockin’ album yet, full of up-tempo alt rock guitar numbers.

To whet your appetite, I’m uploading another cut from SoundCloud. The album will soon appear on iTunes, Amazon, Pandora and YouTube, as well as other music distribution sites, including one big one I won’t mention that’s been in the news for hosting rich asshole anti-vaxxers.

As always, I recorded the album at my home studio in New York City on Logic Pro. I wrote the album, sang on 10 tracks and played guitar on eight of them.

The Banality of Eva

No one ever starts out as a bottom feeder
You’re a pristine block of wood and you carve your own features
Next thing that you know you’re in the tabloid reaches
Got flashlights for eyes just like the dumpster creatures

Made in the trash but
Seeking the light
Morning caller
You’re still made of night
Doing devil’s work
To learn what’s right

Who would ever guess at the banality of Eva
Only those who knew when she was young and peevish
You only had to see she was a little bit tasteless
You only had to know she was a lot impatient

Breaking the mold, wanting to fit in
Never quite knowing what suit she’s in
Wanting to be a celebrity
Wanting to crush all her enemies

Stylish stylish stylishly late
For your for your destiny with fate
Come to be come everything you hate
Your average-ness, what you hope is great

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My Next Alt-Rock Album, ‘Stereoisomer,’ To Hit The Market Soon

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , on March 20, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Stereoisomer

Salon de la Guerre is releasing its 32nd album in a few weeks. It’s titled Stereoisomer, and I’m sharing the title track and a few others on Soundcloud today.

Most of the album is unabashedly loud, raunchy, guitar-driven hard rock. After releasing my previous album in November, I set about trying to get a brighter guitar sound than I’d previously achieved with my home recording equipment, and I finally found the magic formula. After that, I knocked out most of the basic tracks in a couple of weekends in December. But then I had to figure out how my voice was going to get around all these bigger electric thrashing sounds (a problem I’ve heard discussed by rockers as diverse as Sting and Iggy Pop). There’s a practical reason heavy metal singers use loud, overblown voices, and I’ve gradually figured out what it is: Big Guitar doesn’t leave much room in the sound picture, and the best singers have to float above it. Then there are people like me who have to fake it.

I also had to figure out which lyrics best suited this particular instrumental attack I’d come up with. That took me a few months. As it happens, there are plenty of things in the world to be angry about (I’m looking at you, Russia) and turning your despair into angry expression is an emancipating act that sometimes only art affords you.

“Stereoisomer”

I shed the costume and now I’m chased by snow drops
Had to shed my parachute gear
Had to let go of the octopus gravity
A Dutch girl crying wish you were here 

Blown out face of a Jugendstil building
Looks like we landed in the zone
I’m a nationless man finding the pins in keyholes
A traitor with a rubber for a soul

Wore a pig costume
Hair done page
Now I enter the metafiction stage
Don’t know love from rage
The human cell is acting its age

Behold the age of aromatic polymers
Benzene rings and nylon legs
Sometimes it’s scary the way things crystallize
Show you the girl, the life you left behind

Did you hear the propellant stop burning
That’s when the V-2 started to fall
See it etch the tomato sky of morning
Hope we live to be amazed by it all

Wore a pig costume
You’re on my cape
Never left the re-entry stage
But the eukaryotic cell plays
Plastic man in a plastic age 

And when I broke, broke through the wall
I found a chemical lab and scored it all
Please send word to Truman
I’m sorry that I’m AWOL

Copyright 2022 Eric Randolph Rasmussen

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They Tore Up the Road To Town

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , on April 21, 2021| Leave a Comment »

From the forthcoming album “Digital Moon,” a new song by Salon de la Guerre.

They ripped up the road that takes you downtown
Some joker cut the phone line out
I don’t know my spit cup from my drink cup
And we just dump the trash all down the mountain

Kids that were raised good turn bad from boredom
Got to shoot at the squatters cross the way
My watermelon grew the size of thimbles
And I’m feeling like a failure every day.

Pavement’s coming
Any day now
Water well is
Drying out
Pavement’s coming
Any day now
We’ll just have to figure it out

You were out there pissing on pool tables
Someone’s going to ruin all the felt
You were vandalizing motorcycles
And whoever smells is the ones that dealt

There’s nothing I can do but steal ammonia
And sell it to someone with chemistry
You can’t remain alone out in the boonies
Your sanity gets lost out in the trees

Pavement’s coming
Any day now
Water well is
Drying out
Pavement’s coming
We’ll see soon
Water well will dig us out

Written, performed and produced by Eric Randolph Rasmussen. Copyright 2021.

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‘From Sour To Cinnamon’ Now Available

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , , on October 16, 2019| Leave a Comment »

From Sour To CinnamonMy 21st album, From Sour to Cinnamon, is now available on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, CD Baby, and other places where music is (still) sold. As I’ve written previously, it’s an album of pop songs with some dark undertones.

The album art was provided by my 8-year-old son Xander.

While the last Salon de la Guerre album displayed my recent obsession with country music, this album is all pop, and most of it was generated with keyboards in Garage Band (though I play guitar on the  the song “A Kid’s Inside,” an ode to youth and play and silliness and joy).

Again, all songs written, performed and produced by yours truly.

Enjoy one of the latest tracks here:

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The Sirens

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , on October 9, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Tangled in the sun, the bird he flew
Came back, didn’t say what he knew
Came back with a song he knew only as a scream
Came back in a life he knew only as a dream

Wax in my ears, the siren quakes the sea
I don’t know what the sirens sing to me
Basaltic rock you wake dead or as a king
When you hear the sirens sing
Stuffed my ears with the wax from the bees
I don’t know what the Sirens sing

I ate a bird, something that flew
I wondered if it he knew he was through
I fly when I dream and that means I fly
People think they can’t, I don’t know why
Tangled in the sun the bird he flew
Came back didn’t say what he knew

Wax in my ears the siren quakes the sea
I don’t know what the sirens sang to me
Basaltic rock you wake dead or as a king
When you hear the sirens sing
Stuffed out ears with the wax from the bees
I don’t know what the Sirens sang to me

(Lyrics to the song “The Sirens,” now available on the Salon de la Guerre album From Sour To Cinnamon, copyright 2019.)

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‘Amphibious Grandkids’

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 6, 2019| Leave a Comment »

The latest Salon de la Guerre album drops this week. It’s called From Sour To Cinnamon, and it’s a slate of big candy-like pop songs with a dark center. Check out this track from the album, set to release Monday.

All the wrongs on this album were made by yours truly, including music, lyrics and production.

“Amphibious Grandkids”
By Eric Randolph Rasmussen
Copyright 2019

Take them to the aquarium
Take them to the Grand Canyon
Set your grandkids loose to swim
While you sit at look at ’em.

The froggy skin and the set of gills
You never knew we’d have them
But these fish were spawned from your loins
You’d never know to look at them

Your grandchild no longer walks the earth
Or plays his video game

A patronymic and a set of fins
And the memory of land
Your legacy in sedimentary rock
Your fossil of vestigial hands
Cause you bequeathed your sons a water world
While you drove your car around

Your grandchild no longer walks the earth
Or plays his video game
Now he plays with a set of flippers
But still has your name

A patronymic and a set of fins
And the memory of land
Your legacy in sedimentary rock
Your fossil of vestigial hands

Cause you bequeathed your sons a water world
While you drove your car around
Once you thought you’d take Manhattan
Now it’s all Long Island Sound

I don’t believe that he glitch-killed me
It was crazy enough to kill you
Amphibious grandkids swim away
Too hungry to be mad at you

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