B-Side Guys

Andrew Becker frames “The Sightseer” around a question nobody asked: “What if Paul Bowles had Instagram?” It’s the kind of absurdist premise that makes sense when you know Becker is a filmmaker and former Dischord Records drummer who allegedly spent time hijacked by Larry Drake’s son while attempting to reach Inner Mongolia. The song sprinkles what he calls “skronk soot over a punky funk thrust,” which is accurate if unhelpful—imagine someone trying to make art-punk danceable while quoting Marshall McLuhan about privacy invasion as “one of our biggest knowledge industries.”

The lyrics treat tourism as surveillance: “You hide in cuneiform you’re so shrewd / Hey sightseer / Try on your uniform.” Becker collapses ancient writing systems and modern observation into the same performative act, where the sightseer isn’t passively watching but actively wearing a role. “Spectacle amnesia makes every moment a water mark” captures the Instagram condition perfectly—everything experienced becomes evidence of having experienced it, authenticity replaced by timestamped proof. The repeated invitation to “hang it up and marry me” reads less romantic and more desperate, like asking someone to stop performing long enough to become real.

Becker’s background with Medications and Brooklyn’s Screens shows in the production—guitars that refuse to sit still, rhythms that feel deliberately off-balance, vocals delivered with the confidence of someone who spent days watching 70mm prints of “Dr. Giggles” while eating ham salad. Eel Sparkles (out March 6 on What Delicate Recordings) apparently fills “that long glaring void nestled between Phil Niblock’s ‘Nothing to Look at Just a Record’ and J Rock’s ‘Streetwize,’” which is either brilliant contextualization or complete nonsense. “The Sightseer” doesn’t clarify which, and that ambiguity feels intentional—just another moment turned into a watermark, another uniform tried on and discarded.