Mishka Shubaly
How to Make a Bad Situation Worse?
In Music We Trust
Who the frick is Mishka Shubaly? He’s the type of person who would break into your house just to grab a beer and watch some TV. You can join him if you want. If you do, make sure you listen to How to Make a Bad Situation Worse?
Shubaly’s fractured, disturbingly hilarious folk is in full effect throughout, but the best way to describe it would be the same way that he describes a former girlfriend in “Don’t Cut YR Hair.” The acoustic musings are like Tom Waits, but the words are more like… well, someone with one warped sense of humor:
The potato peelings in the sink/ Did not turn into vodka as I had hoped/…/ You left a bunch of dirty Kleenex underneath the mattress/ like an unwanted batch of kittens/…/ I heard you changed your name again darling/ But don’t you change your hair/ It was the only thing I liked about you/ In the end.
Yeah, I can’t even begin to think of a way to describe it. It’s like he took traditional folk, added the passion of Bono (minus the pompousness), the humor of Tenacious D, and the combined vocals of Tom Waits and Elliott Smith, shook it together in a brown paper bag and smashed the hell out of it with a hammer. It’s what would happen if either movie director Michel Gondry or writer Philip K. Dick were to make an album. It’s something that after the first dose takes a while to settle, but once it does, you crave another helping.
Mishka Shubaly is the musical version of Gondry or Dick. His music would probably be classified as folk or Americana or even a rebellious version of country. But none of those labels would do him justice. Shubaly deserves his own genre: Drunk folk. Oh yeah, it’s frickin’ good. It’s just like a shot of whiskey. It burns, but it feels so good.
In Music We Trust: http://www.inmusicwetrust.com
