Danny Carney’s new compilation Bagels comes bearing a helluva promise. “It’s here to knock the wind out of you and hold your hair/hat while you puke,” Carney says on the Instagram page for his musical project, Danny Carney Chainsaw Symphony. “It will likely be the catalyst to you falling in love several times this summer.”
That, uhh, varied range of emotions stems from the comp’s 20 years in the making, spanning 21 tunes composed across the country, from Carney’s hometown of Lowell to the West Coast. After sifting through over 150 songs in his archive of previously unreleased material and demos, Carney dropped Bagels last week (December 30), his first release since his 2020 LP Blizzard of 82.
Hey, if you documented two decades worth of punk rawk living, you’d have a rager for every feeling under the sun, too. One track — “Magliner Mo” — even features a 50-second voicemail that makes excellent use of the vocabulary words “nonplussed” and “flummoxing” while also name-dropping Hunter S. Thompson.
“It was executed using all kinds of sketchy equipment in a million different bedrooms, garages, rehearsal spaces, closets, and flop houses,” Carney adds. “Recorded and performed by yours truly with a laser sharp focus on doing everything the wrong way with no remorse… Once it was mastered I realized it’s essentially a fucked up mixtape from heaven, so the perfect medium for such a release would be cassette!”
Stream the scrappy, hyper-specific summary of Carney’s career below, or grab a tape on Bandcamp.