There’s a certain audacity in writing a song about a schizophrenic patient breaking out of a mental facility, stumbling into a circus, and watching lions eat clowns. On paper, that sounds like the kind of pitch you’d get from someone cornering you outside a record shop in the ‘90s; wild, messy, and maybe brilliant, maybe awful. Powers of the Monk, however, lean into that exact chaos with “Bread & Circuses” and, against the odds, make it work.
The Michigan-based duo of David s. Monk and CasSondra “Pontiac” Powers have always thrived on the fringes, dabbling in noir rock, blues covers, and left-field collaborations. But this track feels like their manifesto: unsettling, oddly beautiful, and defiantly uninterested in radio polish. The story at its core becomes less about the literal hallucination and more about the way society itself chews up and spits out spectacle. It’s a metaphor wearing clown shoes, but somehow it doesn’t trip.
Musically, the track sounds like it’s being pulled apart at the seams on purpose. Monk’s guitar grinds and staggers like it’s drunk on its own distortion, while guest drummer John O’Reilly Jr. holds the rhythm together with an anxious pulse, as though the whole thing might collapse if he lets up for even a second. But the real centerpiece here is Pontiac’s voice. Her delivery lands in that rare space where you think: oh, this is a bit Björk. Not in the sense of mimicry, but in the way she refuses to treat her voice as just a vessel for lyrics. It becomes an instrument; wavering, breaking, sometimes jagged, sometimes fragile. She doesn’t just sing about delusion; she performs it, embodying the tension between fragility and defiance.
This is what makes “Bread & Circuses” more than just a “weird rock song about schizophrenia.” It doesn’t sensationalize or reduce its subject matter to cheap theatrics. Instead, it leans into the uncanny, letting the jagged violin lines and fractured vocal styling mirror the disorientation of its protagonist. The lions devouring the clowns could be hallucinations, sure, but they’re also painfully on-the-nose symbols of our own political and cultural circus; hungry, grotesque, and eager to turn suffering into entertainment.
And that’s what makes the track effective: its sincerity. It doesn’t wink at you, it doesn’t reassure you that it’s all just a metaphor. It drags you into its strange little world and dares you to sit with discomfort. By the time it ends, you’re left unsettled but strangely moved, wondering not just about the patient in the story but about the clowns and lions we’ve all been feeding in our own lives. “Bread & Circuses” is jagged, haunting, and utterly committed to its own vision. Which, frankly, is what makes it kind of brilliant.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
