Brian Lisik & Hard Legs make a Nu Wreckard with a dirty old sound

 Akron-based singer-songwriter Brian Lisik was thinking a lot about the ghosts of his musical past while making his latest studio album, appropriately dubbed Nu Wreckardout Oct. 13 on Cherokee Queen Records.

“Frankly, in the past couple years, I’ve become bored with anything but rock-n-roll,” Lisik said. “And I’m talking the rawer and bleaker the better; Flat Duo Jets, Daniel Johnston, Peter Laughner, Link Wray, Billy Lee Riley, Gil Scott Heron, this German jazz guitarist named Tobias Hoffman who is just great. Lately I’ve been trying to do more with less whenever possible.”

This aesthetic has extended to both Lisik’s minimalist backing band of guitarist Robb Myers and drummer Martyn Flunoy – with occasional appearances from long-time bassist/vocalist and songwriting partner, Steve Norgrove – and the seven-song Nu Wreckard. The album is short, it’s snotty, it’s irreverent and it’s smart.

Or, as Lisik himself put it: “I try hard not to write songs for stupid people.”

The album is also notable for its abundance of co-writing by Lisik’s Hard Legs colleagues, with more than half the album credited to the Lisik-Myers-Flunoy partnership. While he has co-written with others, primarily Norgrove, over his previous seven solo outings, Lisik said creating Nu Wreckard was an organically collaborate effort from the start. A true band record, if you will.

“These songs were born from us getting in a room, making some noise and seeing what happens. More so than I’ve done in years,” Lisik said. “Letting other people make suggestions and decisions about my songs can be a very frightening process, but also a very rewarding one.”

Featuring guest appearances from Ian Early (Cherry Poppin’ Daddies) and Akron rock legends, The Bizarros (which Flunoy is also a member of), Nu Wreckard deftly traverses an ocean of genres – from raw ‘50s rock to 90s grunge to campy ‘70s TV cop show sounds.

In spite of its brevity, the album is deceptively deep – a musical milieu of bloody streets populated by corrupt politicians who didn’t really mean it, Old West outlaws who most certainly did, and Gatemouth Brown’s flooded casket. A world where anything can be better than nothing at all – most of the time.

“I hope I haven’t hit my creative peak, but if I had to sum it up I this is probably the best pure rock-n-roll record I’ve ever made,” Lisik said.

Nu Wreckard follows Lisik’s 2022 release, the intentionally unvarnished live album Hotsy Totsy!American Songwriter placed “Monk,” a searingly profane non-single from that album, among its Top 24 songs of the year. Hotsy Totsy! was also named one of the Canton Repository’s “Best of 2022” releases.

No Depression called Lisik’s music “a winning formula of catchy phrasing, jangly guitar riffs and great pop hooks.”  The Seattle Post Intelligencer said his songs make “A rough and tumble garage-y sound…soaked deep in an ocean of chunky guitars.” Music writer Lee Zimmerman said “Lisik writes songs that resonate almost immediately…sharp, smart and full of edgy intensity…bold, assertive and flush with full tilt rock ‘n’ roll.”

For more information, please visit www.brianlisik.com

Publicity: Mike Farley / Michael J. Media Group / 608-848-9707 / mike@michaeljmedia.com

Record Review Round-up

Blue Ridge Outdoors:  Favorite songs in June

Brian Lisik & Hard Legs – “Alex Chilton”

Ohioan Brian Lisik’s latest single is an homage to an homage. He and his bandmates, guitarist Robb Myers and drummer Martyn Flunoy, provide a smoking rendition of “Alex Chilton,” originally recorded by The Replacements, who wrote the song to celebrate Chilton, the larger-than-life Big Star frontman who died in 2010. Lisik and The Replacements certainly share common sonic ground—buzzing guitars and in-your-face rhythms—and it is certain that both bands were influenced by the music of Big Star. Lisik and company’s take on this tune is an apt tribute to both The Replacements and the song’s namesake, their shared inspiration. – DAVE STALLARD

Source: Our Favorite Songs in June (blueridgeoutdoors.com)

“Monk” among American Songwriter’s Top 24 of ’22  

“Monk” – Brian Lisik & Hard Legs
Culled from Lisik’s latest album Hotsy Totsy, “Monk” channels the Stones’ “Live With Me,” while exemplifying a blend of attitude and exuberance. Even so, the abject humor and sarcastic asides give the music its distinct personality. – LEE ZIMMERMAN

Source: American Songwriter’s Top 24 Songs of 2022 – American Songwriter

Canton Repository: Best music of 2022

Best live record: Brian Lisik & Hard Legs – “Hotsy Totsy!”

Eager to watch Brian Lisik live in late October at The Auricle in downtown Canton, I missed out on my chance, unable to be two places at once when Urban Honey was performing at Patina Arts Centre.

But “Hotsy Totsy!” is easily the next best thing, a 12-track show recorded at The Rialto Theatre in Kenmore. Capturing the unvarnished intimacy of a club show, Lisik thankfully refrained from overproducing the album, maintaining the ragged edges and spontaneity of a jam at a neighborhood bar while evoking what Paul Westerberg would have sounded like in his early days.

More: Singer, songwriter Brian Lisik has a strong new album

Easily ranking among my all-time favorite live records, “Hotsy Totsy’s” setlist was wisely curated with both recognizable favorites like “Junior High School” and a random but endearing cover of “Under the Boardwalk,” complete with a few forgotten words. – ED BALINT

Source: Best music of 2022: Eddie Vedder, Taylor Swift, JD Eicher, Nikki Lane (cantonrep.com)

Brian Lisik & Hard Legs cover Replacements classic, “Alex Chilton”

AKRON, OH (April 25, 2023) – Coming on the heels of their 2022 Don-Dixon produced live album, Hotsy Totsy!, Akron, Ohio-based Brian Lisik & Hard Legs’ (Lisik, guitarist Robb Myers and drummer Martyn Flunoy) latest single – due May 19 from Cherokee Queen Records – is a blistering version of The Replacements classic, “Alex Chilton,” every bit as raw and off-the-cuff as both the song’s subject and its composers.

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Hotsy Totsy! New Live Album Available Now!

Akron, OH (August 31, 2022)–In the bygone and halcyon era of mass vinyl, cassette and compact disc consumption, there existed a certain tried-and- true career trajectory for rock-n-roll acts. The seminal, or some may argue terminal, live album was in many ways a final frontier. Unless, of course, one counted greatest hits collections. Which, of course, no one ever did. 

Akron, Ohio-based Brian Lisik grew up in that era, so the inevitable live album, following his eight previous studio releases and another currently in the works, is not a shocker in and of itself. The ferocity, irreverence and fresh relevance of the captured performance, however, belies the fact that this is not a brand new band chomping at the bit and hungrily clawing for its rightful place at the proverbial alter of rock. 

Brian Lisik & Hard Legs: Hotsy-Totsy!  (out October 21 on Cherokee Queen Records), co-produced by Don Dixon (REM, Smithereens, Counting Crows, Matthew Sweet) and recorded during a  particularly fiery set at Akron’s Rialto Theatre on the eve Lisik’s most recent birthday, assumes its place in his established musical canon while hinting, not so subtly, that there is still plenty of gas in the tank. 

Kicking off with a punishing barrage of guitar feedback and machine-gun drums, Lisik and his current minimalist backing band of guitarist Robb Myers and Bizarros-alum Martyn Flunoy on drums take no pains to make Hotsy Totsy! a radio singles retrospective, opting instead for a sonically brutal alt-rock attack more reminiscent of the late ‘90s scene Lisik cut his teeth in with Akron-Cleveland-based underground darlings, The Giants of Science. To wit, this may be the full album that band never got around to recording. 

Pummeling the audience with an opening salvo of “The Poor Kids,” “Hey Zelienople!” and “Monk” – a vitriolic new composition with a chorus made for fist-pumping sing-a-longs (so long as no one’s grandparents are in the room) – Lisik and company finally come up for air with an unfeigned reading of the humorously heartbreaking “Bye Bi Love” before turning the guitars back up for high-octane takes on the 2015 ode to boredom, “Normalcy,” and “(Erebus Goes) Overboard,” “Happy All The Time” and “Junior High School” from 2020’s Gudbye Stoopid Whirled before closing the blistering set with a 5-minute magnum opus rendering of Lisik’s 2021 single, “Sights.” 

Equal parts flippant and devotional, Hotsy Totsy! also finds Lisik tossing out a dizzying array of random pop-music interludes throughout – from The Troggs and The Drifters, to Mac Davis and Brenton Wood – appearing and disappearing as wacky musical menageries with head-scratching abandon. 

If Lisik’s most recent album release, the largely low-key Gudbye Stoopid Whirled that Elmore Magazine called a “tasty bare-bones hash of timeless folk-pop and rockabilly, shaggy garage-rock edge and power-pop sparkle,” was his sweeping indictment of the vapidity of pop music’s current landscape, Hotsy Totsy! in many ways inserts the exclamation point.

Americana Highways called it an “incendiary concert set…occupying a sweet spot between garage rock and power pop and making a much bigger sound than you’d expect from three people.”

Far from a literal career retrospective, the album still manages to touch on Lisik’s most noteworthy musical tomes, both original and inspired, in ways that almost accidentally make Hotsy Totsy! his most honest and unguarded to date. The vibe provided by a roomful of true believers sharing that experience makes it even more poignant, as Lisik & Hard Legs ignite a 40-minute sonic forest fire, leaving nothing but the raw, charred, profanely pulchritudinous essence of his sound. 

Publicity: Mike Farley/Michael J. Media Group/608-848-9707/ mike@michaeljmedia.com