Heavy rain pounded the litter-strewn pavement, the starless night lit by street lights seemingly flickering “help” in Morse code. Nocturnal dread: We all feel it from time to time, right? I sought shelter from the storm in a neighborhood gin joint where an ancient jukebox skipped hither and yon through 45s that likely hadn’t been changed since the 1970s. “Love will keep us, keep us, keep us”—BANG! As if a female Fonzie, the waitress thumped the side of the bulky machine, causing the stylus to jump from the vinyl into silence.
The rain reverberated on the bar’s thin tin roof like off-kilter percussion, while boozy conversations echoed just beneath the din. The Giants and Rangers and Jets and Sharks were on everyone’s mind, it seemed. Thunder boomed like a bass drum, then did it again, upping the tension and drama.
A dark-haired dame named Maisie wobbled toward me, her gams on full display. “Hey babe,” she purred, sliding onto the stool beside me—and promptly sliding off. She somehow landed on her feet, however, almost making the accidental swoop look graceful. “Oopsie-daisy,” she giggled. She smoothed the wrinkles from her floofy skirt, met my gaze, and winked. “Buy me a drink?”
“Whoa! What’s you doing there, pal?!” Her ginger-haired brother, equally unsure on his feet, growled at me from the end of the bar. His name was Mo, the barkeep informed me—short for Maurice, aka the self-anointed “pompatus of love”—or is that blood? He stumbled my way, drink in hand, but within a few strides lost his train of thought. He plopped on a barstool and shook his head. “Some night, huh?” he said to no one in particular.
I’m having some fun, obviously—but for a reason. The Streets Like Beds Still Warm, the first entry in a planned LP trilogy from the Brooklyn-based Wilder Maker, unreels like a film noir or pulp novel set to song. Jazzy undertones accent the scenes, from haunting sax riffs to slack rhythms, while the gruff narrator chronicles what amounts to dark night of the soul. It’s a a challenging listen that’s well worth one’s time, with hard-boiled imagery punctuated by the grotesque; imagine a Sam Spade story from Flannery O’Connor’s pen.
The press release quotes Gabriel Birnbaum, the band’s principal songwriter, as explaining, “Film noir detectives always start out looking immaculate, but by the end of the film they have a torn collar, a black eye, their slacks are stained, and they’ve started slapping people around in desperation. Are they the good guy anymore? I find this fascinating and I love the visual cues reflecting the internal landscape.”
The songs began life as open-ended jams between Birnbaum and his bandmates Nick Jost, Sean Mullins, and Adam Brisbin; they then condensed the improvisations, fired up the figurative kiln and re-shaped some of them. Joining on various tracks are Katie Von Schleicher (synths, guitar), Joseph Shabason (saxophone), Cole Kamen-Green (trumpet), and Will Shore (vibraphone).
The result is more ambient than traditional jazz; it’s moody and woozy, yet never trips or falls—or, to return to my silly opening, slips off a barstool. The narrator contemplates the questions that plague many of us late at night, when we simultaneously have all and none of the answers. He drinks and dreams, frets about his ill father, and contemplates God, fate, and the meaning of life. Mortality is a knife we too often fail to recognize until late.
The October 2025 issue of Poetry magazine includes “Poem for My Father” by Kevin Prufer, that somehow seems apropos here. In it, he recounts not just his father’s final moments but the immediate aftermath, when the mundane becomes an affirmation of sorts: “In the white alcove,/the night nurse laughed/into her black cell phone./Someone pushed a tray of pills/down the hallway,/around the corner/and into the past.”
The Old Grey Cat 