Los Angeles native Landis emerges from CDR-land with Feast of Scraps, a stunningly powerful chronicle of frustration, failure, and trying to hold onto something when everything around appears to be crumbling. Laced with the bitterest, sweetest melodies, Landis’ tall tales of middle-American minutia and his characters’ unforgettable assertions of romance and despair are the aural equivalent of those weird-tasting candies grandpa used to pull out of his coat pocket. Sure they tasted good, but a little… off.

“Born on the day Elvis Presley died, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter Corey Landis joins the ranks of great troubadours like Warren Zevon and Tom Waits with his debut solo full-length… The real instrument is Landis’s voice, as he belts out semi-comic lyrics that would be poetry if they didn’t rhyme. Well, maybe the hidden track, the “I Will Fuck You” song, wasn’t very poetic, but great songwriters are few and far between. Like troubadours of old, his dark, ironic lyrics work best against a minimal background of the lone piano or a single acoustic guitar. This is an artist who can dominate any small venue and who should be recording gems like this in a much better studio tha1n his living room.” — Skratch Mag

A self-professed “lo-fi” acoustic home recording, Feast of Scraps literally smacks the listener upside the head with its audacity and sonic inventiveness. Largely arranged around his accomplished piano playing but frequently willing to throw just about any instrument into the sink, Landis plays everything with bedsit fervour. Suprisingly, Scene from an Alaskan Draft Board’s Mantovani Landauisms (celestes and synths, anyone?) sit surprisingly well asideJunior High’s intimate first-person complaint.

From the romantically ambivalent I’ll Never Buy You Flowers to the cuttin’ and struttin’ untitled surprise kiss-off, you probably haven’t heard this much first person narrative this side of new country. Except that Landis cuts all that smarmy jingoistic 911-i-love-my-mama bullshit with crafty narrative that veers between the plaintive and the plain nasty.

Landis simultaneously honours and flips the bird to singer-songwriter forebears Joel, Cohen, Springsteen and Waits, all the while ensuring his place at the last diner with contemporaries Folds, Oberst and Wainwright.

“So I drank some good absinthe/and I bought a bad synth/trying to write something good” (Something Good)