The Western Mass/Vermont psych-pop corner of the U.S. has long been one of the freakiest, most fertile pockets in all of lo-fi land, including Sunburned, Chris Weisman, Ruth Garbus, and now Jeff Coyne, whose debut Piano Etiquette is out June 3rd on cassette and digital download.
Coyne recorded the whole thing between 2020 and 2022 in his apartment on East St. in Easthampton, MA, and you can hear the place: the road outside is a major throughway, and just about every track with a mic has the low hum of traffic bleeding into it.
“That’s been a source of low-grade annoyance over the years,” Jeff says, “but I’ve now come to embrace it.” That little surrender of letting the room and the street become part of the record is the kind of move that puts Piano Etiquette in conversation with the patron saints of weirdo bedroom psych-pop. Think The Madcap Laughs (1970), Gary Wilson’s You Think You Really Know Me (1977), albums that set the bar for how strange one could construct a record alone in a small space, and somehow make it sound like a whole world.
Coyne’s compass on this one points toward a very specific cast of bedroom lo-fi heroes: Zach Phillips’ tangled chord changes and OCD song-craft, Ariel Pink’s pawn-shop synth haze, distant whiffs of Red Krayola’s lopsided pop logic. Piano Etiquette keeps that lineage glowing with fuzzed-out tape hiss, stacked vocal harmonies, and oddly structured pop commodities that don’t quite resolve where you think they will. It’s the work of someone who has clearly logged many hours with a cassette four-track and knows exactly how to make its limitations sing.
The first single, “Out of Control,” is a good entry point, and Coyne has paired it with a short experimental biography/music video that’s worth your three minutes. Check it out below:
Piano Etiquette is the kind of debut that arrives with a fully formed sensibility. It’s baroque enough to feel ornate, lo-fi enough to feel handmade, psych-pop enough to fly your freak flag to. You can practically smell the BOMP! Records blotter paper. Fans of Syd Barrett, Cindy Lee, Gary Wilson, and Fievel Is Glauque should dig this one.
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