I’ve been meaning to bring up Bryan Scary at some point, as I do periodically discuss my taste in music on this page – which I jokingly refer to as crappy. This isn’t entirely unfounded; Bryan Scary is probably one of my favorite indie musical artists working today, yet his work seems to have found very minimal reach and everyone I try to introduce it to waves it off as "overdone" and "cringe."
And you know what? Yeah. It honestly is! It’s modern ELO/Queen for quirky theater kids in the mid-2000s. It’s goofy, overproduced, absurd, sometimes too self-serious shlock! And what’s wrong with that?
Is it wrong, as a musical artist, to just want to just have fun with it? Or do musicians stigmatize “having fun” as only being okay when your definition of “having fun” is subscribing to modern styles or trying to break new ground and develop new genres? Y’all need to stop taking music so seriously and just let it be silly!
It’s worth putting his music in context, as well. His first release, the album The Shredding Tears, was in 2006, when all the cool indie musicians were dropping their stuff on MySpace! The CD I own of that album specifically provides a MySpace link on the back. Same for his subsequent 2008 release Flight of the Knife, which is – as far as I can tell – the closest he’s come to mainstream success, being chosen for the iTunes Editor’s Pick and reaching #6 in the Rock category of the iTunes Store, both honors which, as one can imagine, were bigger deals in 2008. If you look for any correlating material surrounding Bryan Scary during this time, there’s no other way to describe it besides cringe. Watching old concert performances, the man is theatrical to a fault – it’s not even clear if the audiences of 2008 are entirely on board with his absurd commitment to the bit. But you know what? He looks like he’s having the time of his goddamn life, and I love that. He is completely invested and completely genuine. There’s no sense of pastiche or of satire, he’s just Having Fun!
All of this not even addressing the fact that the music is good. Like, genuinely. Maybe not every track is a banger, but he’s always trying something wacky in every song. Just because it sounds like ELO or Queen doesn’t mean he can’t be creative and try new things – both of those bands were famously experimental while still retaining a signature sound. Scary is no different. The first track I ever heard of his was Venus Ambassador, I think Spotify recommended it to me or something? It starts off very experimental and weird, all discordant and bizarre, before casually transforming into a song that got stuck in my head for about a year.
It tells the story of an alien ambassador from Venus coming to Earth to have a meeting with the United Nations, before being intercepted and tried in a kangaroo court for being a “menace” and being their self. It’s an absurd, goofy song with preposterous lyrics that ride the line between I’m 14 and this is deep and actually, genuinely cool? Like the Judge, showing that he doesn’t even really understand who they’re falsely prosecuting, calls them “this ambassador from Venice,” which is goofy but genuinely reflective of how uncaring and bleak our justice system can be to those it’s already passed judgement on before they’ve stepped foot in the courtroom.
To quote the lyrics directly:
JUDGE: “Venus Ambassador, you have been sentenced to death…
FOR BEING YOURSELF!!!!”
Yes, it’s goofy, it’s over-the-top, subtlety is not known to this man, but goddamn it I can’t help but love the sincerity, he throws his whole heart and soul into these songs and you can just feel it come through.
My absolute favorite movie of 2022 was, without a doubt, Everything Everywhere All At Once, certainly not a controversial choice. There was something about it that compelled me from the moment I first saw the trailer, to me dragging various friends and family to see it in theaters three times, something I’ve never done with any other movie. There was something about its goofy sincerity that drew me in like nothing else. Even though several of my direct family members couldn’t connect with it, and passed it off as “mid.”
I’ve never seen my feelings on the movie put into words quite as perfectly as this video essay by delightful trans puppy musician Patricia Taxxon, which, by the way, does not spoil the movie in any way, if you haven’t yet seen it. The crux of Taxxon’s video is that EEAAO, and other media in its vein, uses silliness, goofiness, and disarming cheese to tear down your emotional barriers and let the sincerity of the underlying art sneak through. Or, put another way, cringe is dead, long live cringe. “Cringe” in its modern conception has probably done more damage to culture than anything in the past decade, a method by which we gatekept what was and wasn’t legitimate by vaguely defined standards. One of those bizarre standards was media that is too open, too blunt, too up-front about its intentions and style is “cringe,” because you can only be good by being low-key about that stuff, or some bullshit.
Bryan Scary writing a song about a sad train lamenting its lack of use ever since it derailed and killed a bunch of people, with significant backing audio of him making “chugga-chugga choo” sounds into a microphone, and then titling that song The Little Engine Who Couldn’t (Think Straight) definitely, 100% falls under the mid-2010s definition of “cringe.”
But you know what? If you just let the song in, it kinda goes hard? Scary’s singing skills are hard to miss, of course, but the song is obviously and clearly about more than its literal narrative – it’s about anyone who feels that once they’ve let people down in a big enough blunder, they’ll never be taken seriously again or given another chance to prove their worth to the world. It’s something I think a lot of people might relate to, and it connects to the sorta-concept of The Shredding Tears, which the Bandcamp page states:
The songs call forth a menagerie of lonely depraved individuals, often dead or dying
As the album’s name might imply, the subjects of the songs are quite bleak, despite the poppy sound many of the songs possess. Ranging from loss of sanity, to suicide cults, to the loss of a loved one, Scary seems to be prodding at the tragic, melancholic beauty of these things with the glitz and glamour pop sheen he applies.
His other works similarly have concepts, though it seems every subsequent album was more directed than The Shredding Tears’ suggestion of connected themes. His 2008 followup, Flight of the Knife, is an unabashedly steampunk-inspired, aeronautically obsessed work, with defined characters and, if you want to really work at it, some kind of storyline, I think? It closes with a reprise of the opening track, giving it some sense of conclusion and finality to some sort of story, though I’m not adept enough at deciphering some of his poetic lyrics to piece it fully together myself. Though I’m pretty sure the song The Curious Disappearance of the Sky-Ship Thunderman is a song about a dude who TFs into a sky-ship, for whatever that’s worth. If you’re one of those anthro plane people, you might dig this album, idk?
This album was quickly followed up by a small EP in 2009, Mad Valentines, which is not to be dismissed! There is not a bad tune on the 6 tracks presented here – The Garden Eleanor got stuck in my head about as long as Venus Ambassador did.
Then in 2012 he came back swinging with a double-LP length album, Daffy’s Elixir, a Western themed rock opera about… well, a lot of things! He uses the tropes of the Wild West to comment on many of the similarities between then and now – when I tried to describe the album to my dad once, he asked what about it made it specifically a Wild West rock opera, and every answer I tried to give only proved how its subject matter is really just as applicable today as it is to then. Hell, it’s a pretty damn political, explicitly leftist album. There’s a song about how shitty landlords are and a song about environmental pollution by uncaring corporations. It’s a pretty lengthy behemoth of an album, 15 tracks clocking in at 70 minutes of music, but again, I’d be hard-pressed to find a bad one in the bunch. Ziegfield Station and Diamonds! are among my personal favorites.
Then things begin to get… odd. Long hiatuses. Scary came back, kinda, in 2015 with a series of 5 EP’s called Evil Arrows. They’re very different from anything he’d released before – far more raw, simply produced, almost lo-fi? Like, garage rock. It reminds me of the first White Stripes album from 1999, recorded in a literal attic. If you’re still not a fan of his overproduced shlocky goodness, this might be more up your alley – it’s far more traditional prog rock.
And then… Well, his most different album, to date. Eschewing the ELO/Queen sound almost completely and going into some very strange, folky proggy directions, not entirely unprecedented but definitely a unique evolution of his sound, 2019’s Birds was an acquired taste for me but I’ve come to see it as probably his most impressive work yet. Delving completely into the theme of birds, a subject you’ll find he’s been infatuated with since his first release in 2006 (listen for them, you’ll find tons of old references to birds and flying – hell, Flight of the Knife was basically already about birds, in a way) – if Bryan Scary had a fursona (and he seems like the kind of guy who would be cool with that), it would totally be an avian of some kind. There are some songs on here that continue to floor me – the unrelenting, deep, punchy beat of Seagulls hits with full force every time I listen to it. The “Mother Nature/Father Wonder” section of Bird or Beast? is impossible for me not to sing along to. The ear-splitting blasts of loudness in Quick Wendy, Wake the Sparrow! were so good they inspired me to make a meme that was outdated the moment I uploaded it. At one point I think I posted it to Twitter and tagged Scary, and I’m fairly sure he responded to it – but that account’s long since been banned (good riddance!).
And if you were worried Scary was trying too hard to be taken seriously in Birds and was straying too far from his goofy soul, rest assured, he still finds time for the jokes. A rather impressive one here. The last track on Birds is titled simply The Word. It’s one of the only tracks with a title devoid of reference to anything birdlike. And you’ll never believe the first lyric:
Bird is The Word
Yes. Bryan Scary built up an entire album themed around birds, only to deliver a Family Guy reference as the punchline at the end.

I don’t have a conclusion. Music is good. “Cringe,” silly nonsense is fun sometimes. Bryan Scary’s singing voice is insane. The songs are good. Listen to them. I'd recommend starting with the very beginning of The Shredding Tears and going from there! It's all straight from the heart to the ears 