Acoustic ‘Phalanges’: KGFREEZE puts his finger on Florida Man

Lost in the content craze of streaming services – that “golden age of TV” stuff – has been an appreciation for the art form that is the concept album. Where American society has embraced chaptered storytelling like never before in the world of video, it has virtually abandoned the narrative in music. 

Largely we are trafficking in single songs, like dipping into a single episode of a 10-part series and calling it good. But works like KGFREEZE’s new “Phalanges” demand that we pay closer attention to the album format.

Those who have followed Kyle Gervais’ career – from the pop-punk fun of Glory Trap to the introspective rock of Cosades and Grand Hotel to the number of sprawling works he has released as the solo project KGFREEZE – know that he has a frenetic talent for creating insistent pieces that gnaw at you. He can appreciate and craft melody, but it comes with a caustic edge, a darkness fueled by irony and cynicism. 

With “Phalanges,” he strips everything away for the first time, using just an acoustic guitar, his vocals, and a little bit of reverb to explore a character Gervais has decided to embody, a down-on-his luck Floridian singer-songwriter working the stages of dead-end bars up the coast from his current hometown of Key West. 

Gervais has sort of tried out this persona in a couple of places before. The adopted southern accent and drawl sounds a lot like the derpy voice that opens “Bark for Me, Tom” off 2017’s “Scapegoat,” and on “Egomaniac,” from 2018, we have a song called “Key West,” and a title track where the protagonist tells us he’s “written some of the best songs you never heard,” which smacks of the naked bravado this character oozes. 

Yet this Phalanges character is a loser, by any societal definition. Even the songs we hear aren’t the kinds of artfully done, fingerpicking-filled singer-songwriter pieces a solo acoustic record might normally feature, but rather the bones of rock and pop and funk songs. If only this guy could get a band to play them. 

On “The Best of Lori Madison,” a great call-out to the excellent HBO drama “The Deuce,” we get the shallow sentiment that a character in a TV show has the same name as his ex, and that made him nostalgic, but he remembers: “You always wished I’d talk about anything else, other than music / And myself / And stop writing songs about writing songs and how good I am at writing songs / Because it’s better to show, not tell.”

And that’s what Gervais does best here: lay his character open to be flayed, especially with two monologues he delivers before an imagined audience. In the first, he tells a three-minute rambling story about a time he was supposed to take his kid to his baseball game, on the kid’s birthday, but instead took him to a burger joint so he could drink beers with his friends. 

His wife ended up calling the cops: “It goes without saying that Darren’s eighth birthday was not the best.”

Does he mean well? Does he love his kids? Is he an epic screw-up? Is he apparently a pretty damn good songwriter? The answer to all of these questions is somehow “yes,” and this complexity of character is further developed by a second monologue, about bringing his kids to see a Taylor Swift show in Miami, followed by a truly moving cover of “Lover,” the title track off her latest album. 

There is so much contrast to embrace. His obvious, if emotionally stunted, love for his daughter shines through even as he complains about the tickets costing 15 years worth of Amazon Prime and laments that he spent nearly a hundred bucks on drinks at the show. And he interprets Swift’s love song with emotional grace and power, just after getting the name of her album wrong. 

It’s a wonderful exploration of the messy human experience and what it means to be a performing musician, putting yourself out there even if you don’t quite know your “self.” 

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at [email protected].