On the heels of OffBeat Magazine’s premiere of their latest single “Silent Sirens,” the NYC collective Gideon King & City Blog have released a performance video for the song, which OffBeat called “boldly vibrant, yet oddly calming…like walking down the stairs in the rain.” A piano-led ballad carried by a three-person chorus, the video features the team of Bryan Reeder (keys), Caleb Hawley (vocals), Alita Moses (vocals), and Mike Stephenson (vocals). “I wrote this song because it seemed to me that people are often prowlers in each other’s minds,” King explains. “I broke into your mind, kicked down every door,” the vocalists sing. “Salty are the tears pouring from my soul.”
"King’s musical upbringing is a mosaic of styles and influences that stretch over a lifetime: parents who swore by Classical music, a jazz-piano prodigy brother, sisters who turned him onto Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd,” OffBeat explains. “In a Steely Dan-inspired effort, King began the Gideon King & City Blog (GKCB) studio project to make the diverse colors and features of his musical history, his myriad influences and styles, shine to their best. Despite the project’s jazz-based roots, King aims to write guitar songs without a focus on genre, preferring to experiment with complex harmonic rhythms and abstract lyrical patterns instead.”
“Silent Sirens” is the follow up to GKCB’s ‘Love Knot’ EP, a three-song collection that blurred the lines between jazz, rock, folk, and soul. King first launched City Blog in 2015 as a studio project with a rotating cast of players that included the likes of guitar pioneer John Scofield (Charlies Mingus, Miles Davis), sax legend Donny McCaslin (David Bowie, Bobby McFerrin), renowned vocalist Marc Broussard, and SNL bassist James Genus (Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea), among others. The group’s full-length studio debut, ‘City Blog,’ earned glowing reviews, leading Huffington Post to call King a “musical genius…[playing] some of the most complex and satisfying music you may ever hear.” Now, with two other critically-acclaimed releases under their belt — the experimental ‘Upscale Madhouse’, and the cathartic ‘Love Knot’ EP — Gideon King and City Blog are only just beginning.
Gideon King & City Blog is composed of:
Alita Moses (Vocals)
Mike Stephenson (Vocals)
Caleb Hawley (Vocals)
Gideon King (Lead Guitar)
Jeff Hanley (Bass)
Jake Goldbas (Drums, Percussion)
Bryan Reeder (Keys, Synth)
