I was sulking in 60 hours of rain.
Ruled by moods of vexing design.
I have all this love to give,
And nothing but pure mutation!
Que Linda, the first full-length from the delightfully deranged mind of Mary Chicken Soup and Rice (alias of Los Angeles filmmaker and sonic tinker Matthew Dunehoo), spills forth like a fever dream in four dimensions. This isn’t music as much as mischief: rhythms that slink, hiss, and hum; highs so heady they float like smoke from a burning jukebox. Imagine, if you will, Brian Eno and Siouxsie Sioux hosting a midnight séance, with The Dandy Warhols, Primal Scream, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Raveonettes, and The Brian Jonestown Massacre all speaking in tongues around the table.
This record’s road was long and littered with detours; crisscrossing the cracked highways of America’s underbelly; before it landed here, dizzy and defiant. Que Linda waltzes, wobbles, and howls under the desert moon. A strange brew of sweat and starlight, born from the dust, driven by desire, and bent on setting your brain alight.
“Alec Ferrell and I met when one of my old bands played with his old band at the Replay Lounge in Lawrence, KS,” says Dunehoo. “When I moved to NYC, Alec got me into my West Village rehearsal space, which was sadly destroyed during Hurricane Sandy, along with all our gear. But Alec and I have stayed tight and I’m honored to be releasing Que Linda on the label he’s curated over two decades now. This album is the first solo record I’ve ever released, and MCSR represents giving the whole idea of a self-sufficient live act, a genuine shot. Someday, maybe a band but for now, I’m touring solo this spring and summer to backing tracks, with a bunch of LED candles and fake white roses.”
Que Linda opens with LV2BLVD, a whispered, urgent chant “Love to be loved” spoken over and over with searing guitar and choral synths.
Eat Yu captures a chaotic craving for connection, blurring desire, disillusionment, and desperation. Love feels chemical, aestheticized, and slightly violent, wrapped in drugged dreams and static-laced longing. There’s tension between intimacy and alienation, beauty and brutality. Each refrain spirals deeper into obsession, revealing a restless, unresolved need to break down barriers, dissolve distance, and devour closeness at any cost.
“Dear friends/cinematographers Shawn and Aurora Sopher had the delightful idea to try and emulate the inner workings of my music brain by filming at a wondrously colorful place, the Balloon Museum in Los Angeles, a traveling exhibit based in Europe and ensconced in DTLA until the spring. They were like: “You can rent the museum for 10K on the weekend, or come in and shoot for free on Tuesday.”
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In As Life Was To Life, Mary Chicken Soup and Rice tosses philosophy in the blender, adds funk, and lets the existential sediment settle beneath the beat. It spins like a record and a riddle: life looping, love lingering, everything entangled like tangled headphone cords. Feelings morph, moods shift; you’re grinning one second, gutted the next. The track leaves its stain: proof that joy and ache ride the same groove.
The Well of Loneliness descends deeper, where pride postures and doubt devours. Isolation echoes, circling like vultures. No explanation eases, no words soothe. What remains is the endless ache, gnawing and naming nothing.
Unknown Origins roams restless, rootless, where despair wears no face. Self-blame, shame, fatigue—each circling like broken satellites. No cure, no clarity, only the quiet surrender to a sorrow without source. The unease lingers, heavy as breath, impossible to escape yet familiar as one’s own pulse.
Growing grips at the brittle edges of identity, where the self teeters, split, stretched, smudged – beneath the bright glare of constant expectation. Authenticity wrestles with artifice; each breath feels bartered, each step uncertain. Change creeps in, unstoppable, and survival demands a daily decision: bend or break, falter or forge ahead.
I Like You stumbles through the wreckage of self-destruction and stumbles again upon something startling: steadfast affection. The speaker, sharp with self-sabotage, softens under the steady hand of kindness, caught in the clumsy, chaotic dance between despair and desire. Love is no neat package. It mutates, misbehaves, shocks, but survives.
My Heart Is Broken beats to the rhythm of repetition: day after day splintering the same way, hope rising only to crumble. The weight is leaden, the thread thin. Heartbreak bleeds visible, yet inside, clarity clouds. Fragility hums beneath every breath, each moment balanced precariously between collapse and endurance.
Song For My Children That I Won’t Have hums like a lullaby to absence, every line heavy with the hush of what never was. The speaker cradles ghosts – an imagined child, a life unlived, singing softly to a future that slipped past. There’s no rancor, only the quiet ache of empty arms, a love poured tenderly into thin air. Mortality looms, legacy lingers, but acceptance seeps in. Always on the Drugs drifts through childhood’s sterile corridors, white-coated doctors dispensing miracles and malaise alike. Beneath the prescriptions, the speaker flickers between rebellion and resignation, longing for a life unscripted, unmedicated, unbought.
At last, the record closes with Don’t Stop Trying, a swirling storm of shoegaze and sweet resolve. Guitars swell like tides, psychedelic and persistent, evoking the cosmic sprawl of M83, the kaleidoscopic lilt of MGMT, and the fiery theatrics of Arthur Brown’s wild world. Beneath it all, a whisper of Maurice Sendak and Carole King’s classic Chicken Soup With Rice: nursery rhyme meets fever dream. And that final guitar solo? A slow-burn blaze, worth every winding moment that came before it.
Que Linda is out now. Order Here
Mary Chicken Soup and Rice will be touring the West Coast from April 3-17, then the Midwest/Southwest May 3-18, then the East Coast end of August and the beginning of September.
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