Told Slant (Felix Walworth)

Told Slant is the songwriting project of Felix Walworth, Brooklyn based lyricist, producer, and founding member of The Epoch arts collective. Felix is gender non-comforming or non-binary if you prefer, using pronouns they and them, so that's what we'll be using as well. Walworth started the project in 2011 as a means of marking a stylistic shift in their songwriting, specifically a shift toward understated, ambling arrangements and simple, illustrative lyrics.

A multi-instrumentalist who focuses on drums, Walworth grew up in a musical environment with father Danny Walworth, who drummed alongside guitarist Thurston Moore in the pre-Sonic Youth group the Coachmen. Those of you who don't know Sonic Youth, here's Teenage Riot from their classic album Daydream Nation:

The younger drummer started Told Slant as an undergraduate at Bard College. Walworth's intimate and delicately off-kilter first LP, Still Water, was self-released in 2012. From this album, here's an interesting song called In San Francisco:

Each phrase of the album is less sung, more choked out as best they can manage it, while they create songs as a means of catharsis for all the things they are going through. This raw emotion in the performance gives each track on Still Water a confessional quality, helped along by a very close-mic recording. Lack is one such song.

Ohio Snow Falls is one of the punchier songs:

“I am so fucked up” he concludes on Sleep In. There’s a feeling in the lyrics which is almost like a stream of consciousness: the dark thoughts creeping to the surface and crawling all over your mind like cockroaches, scuttling back into the shadows, but never really going away.

Listening to them, I'm really reminded of Velvet Underground. They were the insipration for so many acts after them... As Brian Eno had said: “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band”. We'll get to deal with Velvet Underground more extensively soon.

Though Told Slant functions more like a “solo project” in its recorded state, its live incarnation is arranged and performed by Walworth and Epoch co-collaborators Emily Sprague of Florist, Oliver Kalb of Bellows, and Gabrielle Smith of Eskimeaux. Since the release of Still Water, they have toured extensively, slowly developing a very devoted fan base. No records were released in the meantime, until a few months ago, when their 2nd album Going By was released.

Walworth’s voice revels in its own messy excess, repurposing vocal transgressions into fundamental elements of their singing style. On Low Hymnal, conscious claiming of the queer body’s deviance (“still my body will be an illegible one,”) allows their voice to so powerfully transmit the extensive trauma that queer bodies magnetize.

Listen to Low Hymnal

In Green Nail Polish they say:

I don't want to make my bed for anyone

I don't want to spread my legs for anyone

I like to make my breakfast alone

walk myself to the store

and then back to the porch

you liked my green nail polish

and I liked your short black mullet

it wasn't love but I don't know what to call it

Tsunami begins with a gravelly mumble of “I want to be a good sky on bad day” before choking a register higher into “and today was a bad day.” The weary lyrics bare an “old soul” demeanor.

The lyrics get even bleaker in Sweater:

Talking used to pass the time

And smoking used to pass the time

But talking became a waste of time

And smoking became a waste of time

And my life became a pantomime

Of my life when I liked to be alive

That slippage from comfort to desolation and companionship to solitude is the space Told Slant’s music inhabits. It's not a comfortable place to be, but it feels real.