Raybees – Seed Funding from the Federal Government
It’s Raybees, baybee. Live from the dungeon? Live from the sunroom? Who even knows how songs like these originate? There are only a few things that we do know: 1.) Buffalo-based songwriter Jacob Smolinski is at it again – Raybees is another vehicle for his uber-prolific musical output. 2.) This six-song EP doesn’t even breach six (6) minutes in length. 3.) These songs are weird as hell.
Ok fair enough – here’s a little background. Consider Seed Funding from the Federal Government a palate cleanser, if you will. Smolinski made a conscientious effort this time around to put out some music that felt a little less meticulously crafted than, say, Reaper, Take My Life For Free!. Being a songwriter is hard when you’re also a full time IT guy or insurance adjuster or human resources assistant, so off the clock, Smolinski turned to creating these noisy nugs as a way to blow off steam. The result is what it sounds like in your head at 2:45 after some subpar pizza took all the remaining wind out of your sails but you still have to fix the Xerox machine.
“Kicker” squelches through your speakers with all the energy of ’90s-era Nickelodeon. Smolinski sings about “getting his kicks” over a canned Casio-keyboard beat while instruments buzz and bend beneath his distorted vocals. He continues this energy with the clattering “Bangin’ on My Line.” Smolinski, again, keeps things suspiciously short and sweet – moaning in his quasi-baritone over clattering can percussion. Whereas “Kicker” seems to be more about getting a fresh pair of shoes and fucking off, “Bangin'” feels a bit more like a conscientious nod to our omnipresent big brother and how it’s shoved down our throats via the omniscient light up cubes in our pockets that grant access to the collective of all human knowledge from recorded history at all times for any reason.
For such a chaotic-sounding EP, Seed Funding is remarkably cohesive. “A House Upon the Shore” is the album’s shortest song, but feels primal in nature. Guitars noodle atonally below Smolinski’s chanting of just wanting to have a nice, beachfront house. It juxtaposes nicely against the sentiment found in “Knife Fight” where he states that he “can’t get no satisfaction from this.” Whether “this” is referring to “life” or his music is unclear, but, the message is received via sonic freakout. “Wait Up,” too, fits this narrative, where he claims “I can’t do this no more, NO MO, NO MO!” after complaining about “all these people, all these problems.” It’s a weirdly perfect encapsulation of what it means to work in corporate America, and while you’ll never hear Raybees replace the Hotel California muzak playing through the elevator speakers, it certainly distills our constantly-fraying mindsets into something (un)startlingly familiar.
By the time you make it through the campfire acid trip dance of “Victory March,” you’ll be wondering to yourself how you made it through a full EP before a significant number of songs would have even ended yet. Seed Funding from the Federal Government is out now (August 24th, 2026) – check it out via bandcamp (below).
Categorised in: Album of the Week
This post was written by Nick Sessanna