Cape Breton’s Cyrus Robertson Orkish has diverged from his guitar-driven Dali Van Gogh for a solo effort under his own name, or at least most of it. Cyrus R.O. has just released his second single since August, with the hard left turn of “Black Sheep.”
Where Dali Van Gogh was a distortion driven band of hard rockers, R.O. digs in with a lyric heavy brit-pop inspired track with some messianic conundrums. His earlier solo single “Pulp,” released in 2017 is even further out with R.O. invoking Jens Lekman gone jazz, or maybe Ben Folds with a horn section.
“I’m very excited to share this piece of work with the world.” says R.O.. “Between the sheer attention to detail, the expertise of the engineering team, and the continuing development of my own vision, this release might be my favorite project I’ve ever been involved with so far.”
R.O. explains that his influences while writing the song were a little bit all over the map. “I took a lot of influence from Queens of the Stone Age, Brand New, Gordie Sampson, and St. Vincent. I’m very heavily influenced by Mitski, who is one of my favorite artists, as well as Boston art-rock group Bent Knee. Kendrick Lamar, D’angelo, and Hiatus Kaiyote are also worth a mention.”
“Black Sheep” is about an experience R.O. had with a former musical mentor that had soured in some aspects; particularly the mentor’s stance that they were liberating the students from the oppression of academia.
“I wrote the song at a point I where was very frustrated with them. They kinda viewed themselves as being this sort of saviour of their students,” explains R.O.
“What pissed me off was that this mentor was one to do things like threaten a student’s academic performance if that student said something they didn’t like.
It’s a bit of a silly thing in hindsight, but the hypocrisy of it at the time really irked me and a lot of the song is just about sort of rebelling against that kind of presumption of being somebody’s saviour.”
While R.O. remains mum on who the mentor was, inevitably he learned from them – one way or another.
“Some stuff that happened at the time [that] made for a good song.”
If you want to catch Cyrus R.O., he’ll be performing Plan B in Moncton on December 3rd, 2018.