Sea Level Drive

by Andy Seven

Andy Seven Ltd's second spoken word album is a panoramic display of modern urban despair, from atomic bomb scares in In Bed With The Bomb to drug addiction in Sea Level Drive to punk rock excess in The Hardcore Kid.

In addition to Seven's poetry there are two readings of Maxwell Bodenheim poems, Death and The Ballad of Jack Rose. Available for purchase on CD Baby either in CD format or individual mp3 tracks for sale. Tracks can also be heard on Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, Apple Music and other streaming services.

Genres: Poetry

12 pages, Audiobook

Published October 31, 2022

About the author

Andy Seven has written for music magazines and is a veteran of the original Hollywood punk scene where he played with many legendary bands. Seven's writing employs roman noir/pulp fiction elements with a strong Fifties Beat influence to create a new genre of hard-boiled writing, punk noir. His novels Hot Wire My Heart and Every Bitch For Himself are prime examples of his crime fiction.

Mr. Seven lives in Hollywood and is the author of the bi-weekly blog Out Demons Out, which is now in its sixteenth year. His poetry can be read in the anthologies Will To Flutter and Horror Sleaze Trash Quarterly.
He can also be heard reading his poetry on the current Dawn of Darkness Experiment compilation at ReverbNation and The Internet Archive.

Reviews

[Harry Whitewolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Experimental etymological sparkles collide with dirty banshee-like basslines and pretty mandolin plucking to create a beat noir jazz cacophony of supersonic phonics, candy bars, catchy tunes, electric Lynch-like noise and hustler ghosts.

‘kin marvellous.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although this is listed as an mp3 CD I prefer to think of it as an audiobook. It's pure poetry all the way, I'm definitely not trying to be Harry Styles, thank you. Most of the audio soundscapes are either neofolk mandolin (On Her Bed of Roses, Velvet Candybar) or jazz-infused electronica (Disc Over America, Teethgrinder).

Sea Level Drive is named after the road at the end of Malibu, the story of a young drug-addicted couple planning their Final Solution ("Let's flip a coin is it heaven or hell, Wrap our troubles in furs like Tuesday Weld, Trembling like Dietrich in old Shanghai, Ocean foam white lines on Sea Level Drive"). It's all so very Hollywood Babylon, darling.

There's also some Kenneth Anger/Jean Genet street blast in Ghosts of Hustlers, necrophilia in Velvet Candybar, and the you can't Make America Great Again in Disc Over America. According to Oscar Wilde, Bukowski looked at the gutter but I prefer to look at the stars.

Teethgrinder is about the farce of social networking and how it's made people angrier at each other, fighting and arguing non-stop to see who can get the final word in. It ends with the chant, SMH - SMDH - STFU.

I really enjoyed making this record, and the days of sonnet lovers opening up a slim volume of Mallarme might be behind us. Listen to me howl and believe.