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NEW ORTHODOX
Bull Market on Corn(Joyful Noise Recordings)
Add date: 2.11.2025
Release date: 2.7.2025
On Bull Market on Corn, New Orthodox (Nicholas Merz) makes music that responds to the American expanse with plain-spoken thought. The pedal steel player’s songs paint pictures of the fractured ideologies that shape life in this country through the melodic haze of his instrument, the comedy of his lyrics, and the surreal choreography that accompanies his performances. The music is both personal and grand, intimate and vast, taking the tools of country and transforming them into his own spun-out sound.
Bull Market on Corn marks the debut of the project New Orthodox, but represents a continuation of many of the themes that have colored Merz’s songwriting. The album was recorded with Steve Albini, whose musical output, principled ethic, and honest production served as an early inspiration for Merz. With Bull Market, he wanted to keep in extraneous sounds to provide perspective to the recording space; like the click of his foot as he plays, almost a nod to some Shellac tracks. That attention to detail lends to the album’s intimacy, the close range from which it explores Merz’s playing and American life.
Bull Market on Corn also offers a deep exploration of the rich sound and a rewritten history of the pedal steel. Merz first came to the instrument through his father, who played — and had, in the past, wanted a 1978 black Emmons pedal steel, but never bought it (much to his regret). One day, like it was destiny, Merz came across his own pedal steel of the very same make, which carries familial weight with it as well as the years of history living within the instrument. Pedal steel has been primarily used in country music — the tradition of the cradle of America. In his music, Merz takes this history and flips it on its head, transforming his instrument’s gentle twang into a resonant, echoing hum, or a growling, swarming buzz. His vocals, too, reimagine history, taking a forthright style of singing and filling it out with echoing melismas. It’s Merz’s way of playing with American musical idioms, putting a new spin on them to match the stark nature of his songwriting.
Merz developed these songs while on tour, writing fragments and then discovering variations each night as he traveled. The performance is an important counterpart to the music itself. When he plays, he moves in dramatic yet constrained jolts, stilted yet completely choreographed and in-sync. It’s another way of conveying the surreal absurdity of his music, derived from the mechanics of the pedal steel.
Each song on Bull Market feels like a different fragment of the American experience. Tracks like “Glory” reflect on the male perspective of older generations, in fiery and sarcastic overtones; “Blue Marble” personifies the relationship between humans and our planet, the push/pull and often decimation that occurs from one party to the other, in lamenting sighs. Elsewhere, he probes remembrances, like on “One Less Cop,” which draws from his mother’s life experiences and his memories of living in a trailer as a kid, or cuts right to pressing political issues, like “Industrial Complex,” which is a noisily urgent response to America’s prison system. It is vast territory to cover, but Merz’s work is in connecting the dots through the bellowing drone and long tail of history of his pedal steel, using the instrument to tell the story of the present through the lens of the past.