Bite the Wax Godhead Releases Entire Remastered Catalogue on Bandcamp for Glioblastoma Research Organization Fundraiser
New York City band Bite the Wax Godhead released its complete remastered catalogue on Bandcamp today at
https://bitethewaxgodhead.bandcamp.com/, with all proceeds going to the Glioblastoma Research Organization. Because the release lands on a Bandcamp Friday, when Bandcamp waives its revenue share, 100% of sales revenue will go directly to the charity. Today is BTWG's first-ever streaming release.
Bite the Wax Godhead was an indie pop/rock/rap band based in Manhattan, with Brooklyn as a second home base. The band's core was a couple: Cynthia Harden, a neurologist/keyboardist/singer-songwriter, and her boyfriend-turned-husband Alec Cumming, a TV producer/bassist/guitarist/singer-songwriter. Together with guitarist Larry Horowitz, who played a significant role through the first half of the band's 1989–1998 run, they became regulars at CBGB and other Manhattan clubs and a fixture of the "Brooklyn Beat" scene, appearing on several Brooklyn Beat compilations long before the borough became an indie-rock mecca.
BTWG was defiantly unique and relentlessly tuneful, with a quirky mixture of pop, dance, rock and rap styles inspired by acts as disparate as They Might Be Giants, Salt-N-Pepa, Electronic, Neneh Cherry, Talking Heads, Young MC, Happy Mondays, De La Soul and The Beach Boys. The band wanted to break down the walls between the dance music and indie rock of the era; Cynthia's sardonic, Delicious Vinyl-inspired feminist raps sat alongside Alec's more psychedelic pop concoctions. Musicians Exchange wrote that "BTWG is summer in a bottle; breezy, stylish, sexy, hooky, but above all, FUNKY pop, as indebted to Earth, Wind, and Fire as Burt Bacharach." Alternative Press said the band "tiptoes through a tulip garden of genres, gently moshing New Wave, rap, tango and breezy '60s pop into a musical mulch from which mighty songs may grow."
BTWG's only full-length CD, Radio Stuyvesant, was released in 1994. Today's Bandcamp release covers the full span of the band's recorded work, including four previously unreleased tracks from a 1998 session.
The timing also coincides with the May 5 premiere of Before It Was Cool: The Brooklyn Beat at Lauterbach's, a new documentary chronicling the scene which features clips of the band and interviews with Cumming and other musicians from that era. One of the unreleased Godhead songs, "A Million Dollars," appears on Brooklyn Beat — Evolution Now, the scene's eighth compilation album and its first in 34 years, which goes live on streaming platforms the same day.
Alec and Cynthia's daughter Julia Cumming is the bassist and lead vocalist for the indie-rock band Sunflower Bean and recently released her critically acclaimed debut solo album Julia on Partisan Records.
Alec, Cynthia and Julia all strongly support the Glioblastoma Research Organization, which advances global awareness of this aggressive and fast-growing brain cancer and raises funds toward a cure.
For more information, and for a panoply of sweetly ingenious songs, visit [
bitethewaxgodhead.bandcamp.com].
