Paul Megna has followed a pretty colorful path so far, from budding childhood musician (he quit piano after the death of his step grandmother) to teenage sports star to promising actor. A neck wound from a sniper led to Megna’s role in the Off-Off Broadway production of Coffee with Kurt Cobain, for which Megna bought a black Fender and took guitar pantomime lessons from Jeff Buckley. As an acting exercise, Megna wrote songs to understand his character, but ultimately found himself writing subsequent songs as a release from the anxiety he was experiencing. The songs he documented on answering machine tapes while working as a pig nanny eventually became the Oxygen Ponies’ acclaimed eponymous 2006 debut.

The Oxygen Ponies’ follow-up, Harmony Handgrenade, reverses the polarity of the first album, with Megna replacing the narrow, internally reflective focus with a broader, externally observational viewpoint to shine a light on the evils of corporate America. If that seems like an easy target, consider that Megna accompanies his lyrics with a soundtrack that suggests Jeff Tweedy and Van Dyke Parks collaborating on an album of co-writes with the likes of Leonard Cohen (“Love Yr Way”), Greg Dulli (“The War is Over”), Eef Barzelay (“Fevered Cyclone”), John Cale (“Finger Trigger”) and Tom Waits (“Smile”). With a weary voice as dusty as the attic in a condemned house, a unique guitar style and an organically intuitive sense of songcraft, Paul Megna and the Oxygen Ponies have appointed their acidic indictment of contemporary America with sounds that captivate and howl and put them in a class with some of music’s most creative
purveyors.

--Brian Baker [June 24, 2009]
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