The City And I

The City and I is the weed-buttered food baby of Colins ‘Bear’ Regisford (Kids, Mannequin Pussy). His first album, Downer, is influenced less by any particular genre and more by universal anxieties: late night munchies, early morning loneliness, the inability to deal with the pressures of choosing what to make for lunch. Each song is taken from a real place or moment of time in his ADD-filled head. Introspective lyrics (”I don’t think it’s bad to want to be alone,” “I know you wanted to”) weave in and out of songs like mantras, while snippets of conversations and city noises float over hazy guitars, creating dreamscapes that take you to all those moments that you try to forget, the ones we can’t quite remember but know happened. There’s a sense of inevitability in Downer and in between the tape hiss lies all the familiar ups and downs of someone just trying to find their way in life.

Though The City & I started in 2004 as a personal acoustic project, Bear solicited help from his friends in the Philadelphia scene to flesh out his sonic reverie in Downer, including members of The Spirit of The Beehive, Ghost Gum, and Gunk. The result is an album that treats you as a confidant, inviting you to share in one man’s most intimate reflections. When it comes down to it, Downer is the album for those who never wanna leave the basement and The City & I is just a full-grown man-baby trying to figure out where his Baba (beer) went.

Limited to 350 colored cassettes, Downer will be released on November 27th as part of the second annual Infinity Cat Cassette Series, curated by Casey Weissbuch.