Artist: JimBaumerMe (pronounced JimBomberEmEE)
Location: Biddeford, ME
Album: Living in Some Strange Days
Maine-based indie rocker Jim Baumer recently released a new batch of songs on his latest release, Living in Some Strange Days.
Front cover, “Living in Some Strange Days” [Jonathan Braden design]
Baumer’s music hearkens back to a period of time when indie rock ruled college radio in the mid-1990s. Many of the tracks on Living in Some Strange Days originated during the past 2+ years of the pandemic, when he says he was “locked in my basement wondering if I’d ever play live again.”
Music has been Baumer’s path forward following the aftermath when his son, well-known environmental activist and poet, Mark Baumer, was killed in 2017. Picking up his old Yamaha guitar he’d had around the house for 20 years, Baumer took it out of the case and started to play. He states “I’ve been playing it ever since.”
LISSD is a mix of solo acoustic material, rooted in 70s music and artists like Arlo Guthrie, Neil Young, Big Star, and T. Rex. The one-man-band electric songs like “Spaceship Flying Saucer Bluze” and “Soros Jam” are influenced by angular indie bands of the 1990s and similar to Pavement, Silkworm, and even some of the Amphetamine Reptile noise bands of that period.
A child of the 1970s, Baumer grew up with music that never shied away from the topics of the day. “TNT (Acoustic Mix)” speaks to freedom and protest and tilts against so-called leftists and their locking down of dissent in Canada and elsewhere.
Photo by Shawn Munro Edgecomb [design, Jonathan Braden]
The final track, “Kick the Darkness” is the first single from the release. It takes the refrain from Bruce Cockburn’s “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” and offers a glimmer of hope for anyone who thinks that we might be living through strange days.
Baumer has one prior release, an EP on Bandcamp called All You Stupid Sheep, which came out in early 2021.
All songs written by Jim Baumer
All instruments (drums, guitars, found sounds, loops) and vocals performed by Jim Baumer
Website: http://jimbaumerexperience.com/music/