The Lowliest One is a genre-blending, freak-folk, indie-psych project by Peter Siegmann that blurs the line between singer-songwriter and band, featuring rotating line-ups of musicians depending on members’ availability and life’s ebbs and flows. The current arrangement includes Mike Maroney on synth and Zoots Houston on pedal steel guitar, with Siegmann at the helm on vocals and guitar. Last year TLO put out a single “Cash Only” that mixes dark poetic cynicism evocative of Nick Cave and Tom Waits with eerie psych resonances that bring The Black Angels to mind. They just released a music video for the song on October 26th that is very DIY both in regard to the fittingly lo-fi production quality but also how it captures the gritty, nomadic lifestyle of DIY musicians hopping from bar to dirty dive bar night after night. Scroll down to check it out or watch it on YouTube.
The music video opens with Siegmann lying asleep on his front porch and as the beat drops he’s jolted awake. He approaches his ’77 Ford F-250 and is immediately on the move–capturing the chaotic get-up-and-go day in the life of a touring musician. Kingston locals will recognize some locations throughout the video, such as the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, where we see Siegmann driving and nodding along to the music, giving a sort of cool, haunting Sopranos intro vibe, which we love. While the shots of Siegmann driving and singing serve as the throughline throughout the video, the interspersed montage of clips of the band bopping from venue to venue and goofing around makes you feel like you’re with the band in constant migration and gives you a visceral sense of what the gigging life is really like. We see Maroney catching some much needed sleep on a bench in a bar, getting the Zs in where and when he can. We see Houston carrying bags of gear and loading in to a venue, and later we see him prone on the ground outside as a good friend lies next to him to pose by his passed out body.
The lyrics complement the music well in that they work together to create this ominous, unsettling atmosphere. It feels like the narrator’s surroundings are alive and breathing and grotesque, and the wires of our sensory perceptions are being crossed in synesthesia like something out of Naked Lunch. These lines stood out to me: “You can smell the piss from the stalls / As it crawls through the walls / And their ramblings strip away / From every patron that comes to pay.” While the lyrics depict a despondent perspective of a dystopian wasteland, the fact that Siegmann and the band continue to do the thing they love despite the Sisyphean nature of the world they find themselves in is encouraging and inspiring, I think. Siegmann sings, “We lay buried here in years, and fears / And crumbling careers / With our futures in the cracks/ From the backbones of our past.” There’s an edge to Siegmann’s vocals as he expresses his bitter indignation that feels raw and reveals a deeper passion railing against a world gone awry.
Much like the musician touring between venues, in the paths of our own lives we find ourselves constantly in pilgrimage from sanctuary to sanctuary, braving the darkness in between and seeking the light peaking through the cracks. And so we find ourselves in dimly lit bars with all the projections cast against the walls, sifting through the haze and straining our eyes to see with clarity. A sign above the bar reads, “We Do Not Accept Bad Checks”–cash only, got it?
Watch the music video on YouTube:
The Lowliest One’s social and streaming links:
Buy the single on Bandcamp
-Review written by James Kwapisz
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