The Jester Knows What You Thought You Knew

What beauty. What an experience.

Corey Landis has reinvented himself as Salieri & The Turnspit Dogs and, with The Katzenklavier, delivers a debut album under that name that feels like a journey of discovery — a glimpse into a musical mind where sounds and words are combined in ways only a rare few can manage. Think Mark Oliver Everett or Wayne Coyne. Think experiment and melody in a long-distance relationship that, against all odds, actually works.

But there’s much more happening here than sonic adventure. This is a concept, a message, a public commentary on the world we’re living in. The bio describes it as “a popular music concert in the royal court of The Land Of The Aberimon, incorporating a recounting of disturbing events of the time” — and both the band name and album title reach back to an era when jesters and troubadours were the ones who explained the world to court and country folk alike, through the lens of contemporary themes. One glance at the song titles — Miss QAnon, (East) Palestine, Gertrude The Gaslighter — and the intent is unmistakable: this is music that holds a mirror up to the present, in the tradition of the jester who didn’t just entertain but made the court question what it thought it knew.

Intriguing from start to finish. Overwhelming in its beauty and urgency.