Mishka, you really can’t sing. At all.

— Robert Christgau

 

Bob Christgau says Mishka can't sing, and the boy assuredly cannot.  This grand tradition, recently choked by emo whiners, has been revived by this gruff chronicler of fuckups and fuckovers.  He smothers the bullshit out of fractured folk.

— Village Voice

 

Mishka Shubaly is this week's unknown that you don't want to miss.  Dirty, down-and-out, hungover country rock songwriter Shubaly writes some of the best lyrical lines you've never heard, and delivers them in a gruff, only semi-musical voice while punishing a guitar for some imagined sin.  He was bass player for New York City's almost hot COME ON, while laying his own stubbly tunes on a 4-track in his spare time.  Shubaly is currently homeless, having vowed to stay on the road for a year without a break, and should be just weathered enough by now to sing it like he means it.  Great stuff.

— Tampa Weekly Planet 1/28/04

 

Our pick of the litter for the week is the ramblin' man Mishka Shubaly, who left Colorado for New York a couple of years ago and last year packed it all up in a mini-van to live on the road. Shubaly is one of those who grabs attention with his anti-hero, lo-fi attitude from the likes of Robert Christgau ("you really can't sing") and the Village Voice ("He smothers the bullshit out of fractured folk"). Christgau is wrong of course; Shubaly's great (sometimes off-keyed) growl is as deep as an oil barrel full of polluted gunk. Combine that with Shubaly's moody, minor note melodies, and his less than poetic lyrics and you've got some good stuff. Raw art is in and Shubaly knows how to paint.

— Fayetteville Free Weekly 5/13/04

Some friends and I were putting on a show at the Shannon Lounge in Hoboken recently and someone put on this disc for background music. I swear, three different people came up to me and asked me who it was, and Mishka wound up selling more CDs that night than any of the bands who actually played. That’s a pretty neat feat but it’s understandable; this amiable, lo-fi disc finds Mishka Shubaly – whom you might know as the hulking, often barechested bassist of the NYC grunge-pop combo COME ON– doing a mean Tom Waits, singing bar room anthems in a dusky, deep voice with simple acoustic guitar backing. Damn if all six of these songs aren’t instantly hummable and worlds more clever than any singer-songwriter stuff you’re going to hear on Lite FM these days. Hey Mishka, you can crash at my place anytime. And thanks for letting me hear these songs.

— Jim Testa, JerseyBeat

 

Thanks for Letting Me Crash and To Hell With You, Brooklyn-based Mishka Shubaly's two albums reveal his biting sense of humor-- like all good 'depressing' music, there's a wink and a nod behind the bourbon and the smoke.  Oh, and he's gotone of those 'acquired' voices (Tom Waits, Smoke's Benjamin) that's really pretty great.

— Flagpole, Athens OH. 

 

This has been a long time coming. I can remember when the tentative title for this follow-up to the well-received ‘Thanks…’ was ‘Dollar Beer.’ Shubaly’s not the kind of arch obscurantist who leaves the title track off of his album, so, presumably, there existed a draft version of this LP that included the relatively lighthearted song ‘Dollar Beer.’ Hmmm, it’s probably incorrect to describe any of Shubaly’s writing as lighthearted, but he’s got a propensity for writing extended jokes and songs that function as platforms for his cleverness, and anybody who’s seen him perform will instantly know what I man when I say that some of his compositions (‘Dollar Beer,’ the duet ‘We Came Together,’ etc.) allow the singer to mask his disappointment behind humor and wordplay. Well, none of those songs are on this album. ‘To Hell With You’ presents Shubaly as a tough-guy too heartbroken to crack wise, a drunken lover looking to escape himself, excoriating friends and enemies, always intelligent, dangerous as a poorly chained Doberman. This record isn’t as immediate or as cheekily ingratiating as ‘Thanks…’, but it is a whole hell of a lot better, more moving, communicating of a more palpable desperation, more frightening, more willing to jettison sarcasm and glibness in favor of naked expressions of pain and loss. Shubaly’s notorious singing voice makes Nick Cave sound like Mariah Carey by comparison, but this is a taste well worth acquiring, and, commendably, he knows this: the vocals are front and center here, sometimes echoed, sometimes doubled, never subsumed by the shambolic backing tracks. The hung-over, rueful ‘For You’ and ‘My Love is a Gulag’ find power in pathos; the latter a dark sleepwalk through barely-sublimated rage and frustration. ‘I’ve got a secret life that begins when I black out,’ Shubaly sings, and spares us the details—though later, on ‘Drooping the Boom,’ the veil of privacy is further pushed back, as the narrator is found ‘waking up dead’ in a room that the listener can almost smell. ‘Hellbound’ (‘if we were hellbound, we’d be home by now’—did I suggest heartbreak had squeezed all the smartass out of this guy?), by contrast, is a portrait of the artist out of control, murderous, ranting, attempting to suffocate his intended with a gigantic blanket of scathing verbiage. Jimmy Spoiler’s ‘Tagged and Towed’ is rewritten from a cocksure (if slightly unhinged) come on into a pleading duet with Allison Langerak, whose voice provides welcome relief from the claustrophobic intensity of Shubaly’s interior monologue. Best of all is ‘Kansas City Misery’ a break-up song where nobody get away clean; a Great Plains desecration complete with guitar squall from Beauty Supply frontman Josh Taggart and even a harmony vocal break (!). Shubaly could easily have made ‘Thanks for Letting Me Crash II’ and kept everyone happy but himself; instead, he followed his voices and pushed further into the darkness. He might find fewer followers this time out, but those who take this trip with him will be rewarded for their dedication.

— Tris McCall, Jersey Beat

If it isn’t enough that this town’s best rock band, the Broke Revue, and the much-improved (and heavily Stones influenced) Grand Mal are on hand tonight, this is really a birthday party for Mishka Shubaly. That’s him in the opening slot, with his deeply gruff voice and songs about ‘Killing the Ghost of the Girl’ and such. And that might be him in the corner later on, possibly losing his religion, his lunch, or even his life savings… because there’ll be free beer till 9pm! We keep thinking that’s a misprint, too, but that’s what they tell us.

— Mike Wolf, Time Out New York, Editor’s Pick, 2/16/02

 

Mothers, lock up your daughters!  Daughters, lock up your mothers!
Mishka Shubaly is a foul-mouthed, liquor-swilling, gravel-voiced anti-singer/songwriter whose sense of humor is as dark as his black, black heart.  In September, 2003, he gave up his cold warehouse apartment in Brooklyn for a Toyota mini-van and has toured virtually non-stop since.  His live show (one voice, one guitar, one hangover, one swamp full of reverb) will make you laugh, cry, hate him, hate yourself, and drink too much.
— Criminal Records

 

Like Johnny Cash in a slow motion drunken brawl with Tom Waits. Priceless!

— Kingblind.com

The sailing vessel Breath, on which Mr. Shubaly was a crew member, ran aground during the early morning hours of July 4th, 2001. Mr. Shubaly went to great pains to effect a rescue for the remaining crew members and in the process, lost all of his personal effects. Please do anything you can to assist him.

— United States Coast Guard