Press and Reviews

“Mishka, you really can’t sing.  At all.” --Robert Christgau, Village Voice     Thank goodness Mishka Shubaly's coarse, druggy poetry outweighs his love for dimestore comedy. Between bad jokes, the troubador and one-time Denver resident serenaded the audience at the Hi-Dive on Oct. 20 while jacking singer-songwriter cliches and revealing his ridiculous penchant for booze and devastating songs. "Home" is a brilliant heartbreaker of an alley waltz. And it's proof of this New York songwriter's fierce sense of self and love of poetry, which has evolved gracefully since his days contemplating the "Washington Ballet."                             --The Denver Post I first met Mr. Shubaly at a club in Brooklyn. Hearing “the guy you are looking for is Mishka” at various clubs and situations since my time here has been a strangely common occurrence. Booking person, house manager, etc., he’s held down various jobs in the venues of New York. A man of imposing stature, and definitely stalwart in his resolve not to be messed with, one might assume he’s just a quiet person with a serious demeanor. Even more so, that he’s a stern professional. In essence, “don’t fuck with me, I have bigger things to take care of.” But that merely plays into the idea that we often do simply judge a book by its cover. Under the professionally-minded veneer is a musician with a degree of nonchalant honesty I’ve rarely ever witnessed. And it all begins with his past. Rather than delving into his past fully, I’ll send you to his website to read his bio and simply say this: it’s practically a template for an average American history, the sad reality of our times. That being said, it’s no wonder that his music is as darkly honest and vibrantly emotive. There’s a real tongue in cheek cynicism coating each song’s message that rests comfortably on a bed of lyrical prose, both bucolic and thankfully pretension-free. His topics, never betraying the sullen mood of the air, share with us some of those everyday feelings and thoughts that we all know too well. Mishka is lucky enough to be able to (or simply not give a shit enough that he instinctively does) write to the lowest common denominator in everyone. Where we feel our lowest and saddest, deprived, depraved, depressed: that’s where Mishka is found, uncomfortably but successfully writing away. There is something to be said for music as poetry that is highly crafted and verbose in character. But there is something so much more raw and captivating about a person allowing the listener to feel, not just hear, his actual thoughts as they happen. That’s genuine, non-sheepish, cutthroat and non-apologetic, fucking honesty and it’s just plain refreshing. All this heavy, meaty, dark substance is offset by a dark (yes dark, you had to see that coming) sense of humor as well, that triggers spurts of spontaneous laughter. The kind of laughter that is followed closely by a “dear god, I probably shouldn’t be laughing at that.” Lines like “God you’re so beautiful, it’s like you’re fucking deformed” delivered in Mishka’s fashion, only ever make me think “…I am just not funny. This man is funny and he’s earned it.” With all of the weight of his subject matter, Mishka reassures us to laugh for christ’s sake. In fact, he goes to great lengths to add as much humor as possible in all respects while still maintaining seriousness in his music. The music behind the man is country swaggered and early rock n’ roll infused. Raunchy clean guitar tones, solid steady drums beats, easy laid back tempos, female back up accompaniment, and the occasional keyboard line bring us to a down-home bar anywhere in the South. Bluesy, sort of folkish: yes, but so much more than both. But before you get too comfortable with the feel of the music, you find yourself wanting to finish the last of that drink and then pat Mishka on the back. Thanking him for a night of reflection, thanking him for a window into his world. But most of all, thanking him for perfect drinking music. Mishka Shubaly has a real penchant for spilling his guts. Heartfelt reflection mixed with dark wit. Most singer-songwriters have nothing on Mishka Shubaly.                             --Transform Online Bob Christgau says Mishka can't sing, and the boy assuredly cannot.  This grand tradition, recently choked by emo whiners, has been revived by this gruff chronicler of fuckups and fuckovers.  He smothers the bullshit out of fractured folk. -- Village Voice Mothers, lock up your daughters!  Daughters, lock up your mothers! Mishka Shubaly is a foul-mouthed, liquor-swilling, gravel-voiced anti-singer/songwriter whose sense of humor is as dark as his black, black heart.  In September, 2003, he gave up his cold warehouse apartment in Brooklyn for a Toyota mini-van and has toured virtually non-stop since.  His live show (one voice, one guitar, one hangover, one swamp full of reverb) will make you laugh, cry, hate him, hate yourself, and drink too much.                              -- Criminal Records Mishka Shubaly is staggering home. The singer-songwriter wrote his first tunes while living in a Colorado basement, where his blissfully black sense of humor helped him handle a hard-knock life and the stigma of clothes that smelled like pickles. (He kept his duds in pickle jars from his job at a Sonic Drive-In.) He eventually left Denver (and his Vlasic aura) for the Big Apple, where he earned a small cult following and produced two highly entertaining recordings -- Thanks for Letting Me Crash and To Hell With You -- of hung-over, Beck-style rock. He also spent time playing Gotham clubs (solo and with grunge-pop act COME ON), headlining bills opened by the Strokes and doing an internship with rock writer Robert Christgau. The famed music critic deemed Shubaly's voice one of the worst he's ever heard -- a badge of honor Shubaly is quick to flash. Like Scotch, his vocals are an acquired taste worth the time. In a droll, semi-baritone that's equal parts Nick Cave, Johnny Cash and Iggy Pop, Shubaly takes the listener through ragged tales a Pavement fan can adore. And his brainy, smart-ass songs of disappointment and "heartbreak and liver failure" chronicle the loser life in fresh, often hilarious fashion. Shubaly's Denver dates -- the Bluebird Theater on Thursday, October 16, the Larimer Lounge on Sunday, October 19, and the Lion's Lair on Thursday, October 23 -- are especially crucial for him. This August, he sold his possessions and gave up his NYC apartment to spend a year on the road running down his unique musical dream. Make it out to a show, treat yourself to a rare night and make his return a good one. Offers of warm showers, canned goods and couches to crash on might be welcome, too. Hold the pickles.            --Westword Like Johnny Cash in a slow motion drunken brawl with Tom Waits. Priceless! -- Kingblind.com     Some friends and I were putting on a show at the Shannon Lounge in Hoboken recently and someone put on this disc for background music.  I swear, three different people came up to me and asked me who it was, and Mishka wound up selling more CDs that night than any of the bands who actually played.  That’s a pretty neat feat but it’s understandable;  this amiable, lo-fi disc finds Mishka Shubaly – whom you might know as the hulking, often barechested bassist of the NYC grunge-pop combo COME ON– doing a mean Tom Waits, singing bar room anthems in a dusky, deep voice with simple acoustic guitar backing.   Damn if all six of these songs aren’t instantly hummable and worlds more clever than any singer-songwriter stuff you’re going to hear on Lite FM these days.  Hey Mishka, you can crash at my place anytime. And thanks for letting me hear these songs.         --Jim Testa, JerseyBeat Watching Mishka Shubaly in some nondescript dive, singing sad, smartass bluesy songs, you'd never imagine that he was recently the coolest dude in New York City. As the rock booker for Brooklyn club Luxx (revolution central for Larry Tee's Electroclash babies), Shubaly was adored, a promoter who believed that rock should be dangerous and a club should be a place to make out and get totally fucked up. At six-foot-five and 210 pounds of, to use his words, "twisted steel and sex appeal," he could back up his bluster and break people in half. Before his Luxx days, Shubaly's former band, Come On, was a big deal. The Strokes opened for them; Come On rejected an opportunity to record with future Is This It producer Gordon Raphael. So it might seem insane that Shubaly decided to sell all his shit last year, buy a van and tour the country with wry tunes of disaster and heartbreak that are more No Depression than Yes New York. Goodbye life in the fast lane... hello country-folk laments. But Shubaly's always maintained strength in the face of being a ridiculously overmatched underdog. He's created gorgeous songs that make grown men cry, that remind you of teenage heartache and then disarm you with lines like, "God, you're so beautiful, you must be fucking deformed." When their home was repossessed, a 16-year-old Shubaly and his mom just sat outside and split a 12-pack of beer. He's written a song about it. Shubaly's best song, "When I Was Young" is a tribute to a friend who overdosed and died. Shubaly understands better than most that hardship and tragedy can you make you stronger, but they don't mean a goddamn thing if you forget them. "You'll always feel as real as you are to me now/ You'll never be someone I knew when I was young," Shubaly sings on "When I Was Young," and then the denial turns into acceptance. "You'll never feel as real as you are to me now/ You'll always be someone I knew when I was young."                         --Portland Mercury     This has been a long time coming.  I can remember when the tentative title for this follow-up to the well-received ‘Thanks…’ was ‘Dollar Beer.’  Shubaly’s not the kind of arch obscurantist who leaves the title track off of his album, so, presumably, there existed a draft version of this LP that included the relatively lighthearted song ‘Dollar Beer.’  Hmmm, it’s probably incorrect to describe any of Shubaly’s writing as lighthearted, but he’s got a propensity for writing extended jokes and songs that function as platforms for his cleverness, and anybody who’s seen him perform will instantly know what I man when I say that some of his compositions (‘Dollar Beer,’ the duet ‘We Came Together,’ etc.) allow the singer to mask his disappointment behind humor and wordplay.  Well, none of those songs are on this album.  ‘To Hell With You’ presents Shubaly as a tough-guy too heartbroken to crack wise, a drunken lover looking to escape himself, excoriating friends and enemies, always intelligent, dangerous as a poorly chained Doberman.  This record isn’t as immediate or as cheekily ingratiating as ‘Thanks…’, but it is a whole hell of a lot better, more moving, communicating of a more palpable desperation, more frightening, more willing to jettison sarcasm and glibness in favor of naked expressions of pain and loss.  Shubaly’s notorious singing voice makes Nick Cave sound like Mariah Carey by comparison, but this is a taste well worth acquiring, and, commendably, he knows this: the vocals are front and center here, sometimes echoed, sometimes doubled, never subsumed by the shambolic backing tracks.  The hung-over, rueful ‘For You’ and ‘My Love is a Gulag’ find power in pathos; the latter a dark sleepwalk through barely-sublimated rage and frustration.  ‘I’ve got a secret life that begins when I black out,’ Shubaly sings, and spares us the details—though later, on ‘Drooping the Boom,’ the veil of privacy is further pushed back, as the narrator is found ‘waking up dead’ in a room that the listener can almost smell.  ‘Hellbound’ (‘if we were hellbound, we’d be home by now’—did I suggest heartbreak had squeezed all the smartass out of this guy?), by contrast, is a portrait of the artist out of control, murderous, ranting, attempting to suffocate his intended with a gigantic blanket of scathing verbiage.  Jimmy Spoiler’s ‘Tagged and Towed’ is rewritten from a cocksure (if slightly unhinged) come on into a pleading duet with Allison Langerak, whose voice provides welcome relief from the claustrophobic intensity of Shubaly’s interior monologue.  Best of all is ‘Kansas City Misery’ a break-up song where nobody get away clean; a Great Plains desecration complete with guitar squall from Beauty Supply frontman Josh Taggart and even a harmony vocal break (!).  Shubaly could easily have made ‘Thanks for Letting Me Crash II’ and kept everyone happy but himself; instead, he followed his voices and pushed further into the darkness.  He might find fewer followers this time out, but those who take this trip with him will be rewarded for their dedication.                             --Tris McCall, Jersey Beat Mishka Shubaly is this week's unknown that you don't want to miss.  Dirty, down-and-out, hungover country rock songwriter Shubaly writes some of the best lyrical lines you've never heard, and delivers them in a gruff, only semi-musical voice while punishing a guitar for some imagined sin.  He was bass player for New York City's almost hot COME ON, while laying his own stubbly tunes on a 4-track in his spare time.  Shubaly is currently homeless, having vowed to stay on the road for a year without a break, and should be just weathered enough by now to sing it like he means it.  Great stuff.                     --Tampa Weekly Planet If it isn’t enough that this town’s best rock band, the Broke Revue, and the much-improved (and heavily Stones influenced) Grand Mal are on hand tonight, this is really a birthday party for Mishka Shubaly.  That’s him in the opening slot, with his deeply gruff voice and songs about ‘Killing the Ghost of the Girl’ and such.  And that might be him in the corner later on, possibly losing his religion, his lunch, or even his life savings… because there’ll be free beer till 9pm!  We keep thinking that’s a misprint, too, but that’s what they tell us.                    --Time Out New York, Editor’s Pick All around swell guy Mishka Shubaly does double-duty celebrating for his birthday/record release party—his new CD ‘To Hell With You’ evokes the blues-y folk side of Dinosaur Jr.                    --Village Voice, Editor’s Pick Thanks for Letting Me Crash and To Hell With You, Brooklyn-based Mishka Shubaly's two albums reveal his biting sense of humor-- like all good 'depressing' music, there's a wink and a nod behind the bourbon and the smoke.  Oh, and he's got one of those 'acquired' voices (Tom Waits, Smoke's Benjamin) that's really pretty great. --Flagpole, Athens, GA. Brooklyn, by contrast, embraces fatalistic, intelligent downer-rock, and nobody has ever been more articulate while face down in the gutter than Mishka Shubaly. Shubaly doesn't get compared to Elliott Smith either, but that has everything to do with his manly, incensed growl of a singing voice, outraged and pained like a hunter too drunk to realize he's stepped in his own bear trap. So Long represents the third installment of Shubaly's front line dispatches from the narrator's own brutal battles with relationships, the bottle, and the ghosts of rock and roll. Some of the gallows humor of Thanks For Letting Me Crash -- so disturbingly effaced by hard-eyed, unsmiling cleverness on To Hell With You -- is back, but this is still a sad, broken-hearted, depressive recording, given over at times to fits of black desperation. Yet there's evidence he's coming out of his fit, or maybe the fever is just breaking a bit, or maybe he's grown accustomed to his hallucinations. "I wanna die, but I'd settle for sleep", he sings on "Kick Of Your Halo"; by Shubaly's standards, that's almost a party. Likewise, "Killing The Ghost Of The Girl", last heard as a dirge on Thanks For Letting Me Crash is reimagined here as furious, spirited sludge-rock. "I'm turning my back on the world" he sings, once again, but now he sounds like a homicidal shouter rather than suicidal whisperer. Again, it's an improvement in mood (of sorts), albeit one that's kinda scary. On "Drooping The Boom" from To Hell With You, Shubaly over a guitar sound that actually evoked smelly socks, described his urban bedroom as a kind of horrific permanent condition; now he can growl about how "he's never going back in that hole/filled with bodies". The room still dissolves into blackness, but somehow it feels more stable, suffused with soft light after a storm. J Braun's more expansive production also helps alleviate the stinking claustrophobia of the standard Shubaly approach; Allison Langerak adds some sweetening with tasteful Wurlitzer electric piano and appropriately mournful backing vocals. Shubaly is still capable of viewing his own vomit as an appropriate gift for the object of his affections, but he's now able to step out of himself far enough to make observations about her. In character, of course: "God, you're so beautiful, it's like you're fucking deformed". He might be waking up and moving on, but he ain't transforming. Shubaly once told me that the working title of So Long was Goodbye To All That. As a listener who's always been keen on Mishka's more playful side, displayed (though never preserved) on songs such as "Dollar Beer" and "We Came Together", I was pleased to hear it; I'm hoping the writer moves on from a milieu that in some ways is beneath his formidable intellectual capacities. I believe his three EPs constitute a powerful and coherent document, but he's been there and done that, and been there some more and done that some more, and by now he's pretty much got young-rocker horrendousness covered. A guy gifted enough to write a line as poetic as "a man's only true friend is a good taxi driver/passing you kleenex through the plastic divider" ought to turn his talents to a subject other than his own failures. I'd like to orient Shubaly's wit and pith toward, say, American politics, and see what happens. But Shubaly is a true traditionalist rocker in the Neil Young-Johnny Cash school, so he's probably laughing at me now.                             --TrisMcCall.net     The sailing vessel Breath, on which Mr. Shubaly was a crew member, ran aground during the early morning hours of July 4th, 2001.  Mr. Shubaly went to great pains to effect a rescue for the remaining crew members and in the process, lost all of his personal effects.  Please do anything you can to assist him.                             --United States Coast Guard