Ron Gallo: A Saturn Nights Showcase

When you are at a Ron Gallo show leaning against the bar whining to your roommate about last night you will probably get called out and like it, you might get accidentally whacked by a guitar headstock or your phone punted, you might find yourself succumbing to the internal animalistic feelings you’ve been suppressing all week and you might even leave a slightly better person. It is a confrontational show with good intention, like a final punch before everything goes to shit. If you say hello afterwards, you might be shocked to be greeted by a genuinely friendly and grateful person that 5 minutes ago looked like a terrifying spastic red-faced maniac. Formerly the frontman of Philadelphia based rock and roll band, Toy Soldiers, Gallo has gone through the return of Saturn and the wringer of life over the last couple of years and has come out the other side a person that dances where the infuriated fighter-of-the-good-fight and the observational jokester hang out. Like some big-haired spiritual punk raised in the 90s, Gallo is well-informed of the 20th century roots of American music and obsessed with the NOW in a time where people are drugged by distraction, bullshit and mediocrity. On Gallo’s second solo record, HEAVY META (out early 2017), he candidly tackles the heavier topics and dark experiences he lived through during these transformative years. From his personal ideology on refraining from drug and alcohol use, self-empowerment, domestication, dead love, not knowing someone or yourself, having a stalker, the “struggle” of being an “artist” in 2016, to the disastrous cycle created by terrible parenting, mental illness and post-apocalyptic tales of a world where “all the freaks have gone to bed,” this record reflects its subject matter drenched in aggression, fuzz, and walls of Gallo’s unconventionally primal approach to the guitar. It is a lyrically driven album laid upon a bed of electricity attempting to wake you up with each listen. Gallo does not enjoy sitting still so has spent a good portion of the last few years and will spend the foreseeable future on the road backed by Joe Bisirri on bass and Dylan Sevey on drums: Coming to a hole in the wall, night club, backyard, theater, basement, Hardee’s, Sleepy’s Mattress Store, or arena near you. Gallo has appeared at Bonnaroo, SXSW, CMJ, Audiotree, Daytrotter and has received praise from renowned publications such as The FADER, Under the Radar, BrooklynVegan, PASTE among others. “HEAVY META” will be released at some point in early 2017, but the “RG3 EP” is currently available on American Diamond Recordings, a record label run by Gallo out of his room in the Bordeaux neighborhood of Nashville, TN as of new years day 2016. The mission statement of American Diamond (as well as Gallo himself) is, “ROCK AND ROLL ISN’T DEAD… YOU ARE.”