Toot Sweet

During my coverage of the CMJ Music Marathon 2014, I had the pleasure of being introduced to this Toot Sweet's (extremely fun) groove-tunes in a live setting; the band caught me completely off-guard. Their music oscillates seamlessly between the lighthearted and carefree, pained romanticism and everything in between, all with the nostalgic tone of an age lost to most modern culture, but with a euphoric freshness that instills new relevance and desire for such original songwriting. I had a chance to reach out to the band's front lady Mary Spencer Knapp, to ask a few questions about her band, her influences, and her accordion. It seems rare that a modern day band beckons the sound and feel of such a distant and specific place and time, that it makes you question age or origin. Or at least when done as well as NYC's Toot Sweet, who play a mean funk-infused cabaret style of pop, quite the drastic change from the 90's revival everybody's been talking about. - NYC Deli Magazine

In Toot Sweet’s new video for “Stations,” a multi-faceted romantic conflict between land and sea, past and present, away and home, takes place in accordion funk outfit. The track is a slow moving, dramatic opus of stop-and-go. Double bass backing and oozing accordion chords bolster frontlady Mary Spencer Knapp’s vocals as they build up and burst and build up again throughout. The video, directed by Knapp and Rod Morata, opens with Knapp awakening in her bed to find ghostly pirate figures, whom she follows out the door on a seafaring voyage, which dances between the past and present, the living and the dead. As she steps through her sliding glass door to the outside, the color video transforms into an old-timey, granular black and white vaudevillian film visual, and we’re taken on a trip through time. Choral backings come in and out before a clean guitar replaces every other instrument beneath Knapp’s singing, creating a tremendous hollowness in the background, and highlighting her vocal power. Dramatic swells as grandiose as the ocean itself occur in the chorus, as Knapp hopelessly, heartily laments, “Do you know the way home from here? It’s getting dark and I’m afraid of fear.” A girl, an accordion, the ocean, and the past are intertwined to make a powerful visual accompaniment to a uniquely theatrical track. You can see Toot Sweet live at The Bowery Electric on August 21. - JP Basileo - NYC Deli Magazine