Booze Radly is a 5-piece emo/punk band from Philadelphia, PA with members: Alex Manescu (Guitar/Vocals), Dylan Molloy (keyboard/vocals), Vince Dejesus (Guitar), Youssef Moussa (Bass), and Peter Sovia (Drums).
The album is being released on cassette via the great US label Lonely Ghost Records. The album is a mixture of pop-punk, surf rock, skramz, and hardcore punk. Not really something I am sharing here too often, but I am glad I come across this in our mailbox. I used to listen to a lot of harder music a few years back and somehow I have been more into slower, softer music past months. So I am glad that I can share anything I enjoy on my blog and I think we all should broaden our standard listening genres.
I am so happy also to discover another band from Philly that is worth checking out. The number of them is starting to grow and grow and that city is becoming an amazing birthplace for so much great music. I am also happy that this album is getting a physical, cassette release. It would be a pity not to have it. I would love to have it in my personal collection as well, but here is again that painful moment when you want to get something from the USA and you cannot.
The songs have so much energy and I could imagine these songs would be awesome heard live. For example Unlearning Sadness is such a great track, but others are highly enjoyable as well.
So if you are into harder music, this is a must listen, if not, give it a chance and you might get into it as well.
I wrote to the band and asked them our standard 3 questions. Dylan answered:
What inspired you to start making music and what keeps you making music?
My grandmother taught me how to play piano at a very young age and was also my singing teacher who helped me with chorus, chorale, and theater auditions as a child. She taught me how to read music, play piano, violin, and got me interested in performing at a young age. She was the activities coordinator at a local hospital, and would have to entertain people in the transitional skilled unit which was a unit that mainly helped elderly people recovering from injuries get ready to move back into their homes. Every Sunday I’d go to the hospital and play piano and sing hymns or Broadway songs for them and help call bingo or set up whatever activities they were having that given week. So seeing how helpful music can be to the spirit of other people at a really young age always stuck with me. And then seeing how punk music could let out frustration in a healthy, community-oriented way and serve as an outlet for people to get their thoughts out in a way that connects them with other people and to share struggle and solidarity with each other was really transformative for me at a young age and I’ve been hooked with the show-going experience ever since.
What was the most challenging thing in your music (artistic) path?
It was hard for us to be able to play together at points because there were times where many of us were all living in different cities. Our keyboardist lived in Pittsburgh while the rest of the band lived in eastern Pennsylvania. At various points some of our members lived in Philadelphia, while others were a little over an hour northwest in the Lehigh valley, so physical distance made it really hard to be able to practice consistently together or to have our fully in-tact lineup at various shows we’ve played over the years, so having to find fill-ins or have band members slide over from guitar to bass for certain shows or what have you has certainly been a challenge we’ve had to deal with at times.
What would you dream to do if anything was possible?
If anything was possible, it’d be great to be able to tour all internationally. We all have full-time jobs and music is more of what we choose to do with the limited free time we have, so our shows tend to be more local and spread out in terms of when they happen. It’d be great to be able to meet even more bands from different places and just get to experience what scenes are like all over. It’d also be really cool to experiment with adding more unconventional instruments to our recordings and performances. We got a bit of piano and saxophone on this release, but think it’d be cool to experiment with stuff like horns, harp or theremin in the future.