Maddy Walsh, the lead singer of the Blind Spots, is a belter, of which there are very few on the Ithaca scene, male or female. Her alto is pleasantly rough around the edges when she is sailing along in the middle of her range, and she is capable of erupting abruptly into a leather-lunged blues shout over which she has complete control, executing acrobatic vocal leaps with surprising power. An especially impressive display can be heard in the blues workout called “Abida’s Role” from their last release, an EP called Small Stampede (2012).

“My whole family sings,” said Walsh. “I’ve been around it all the time. I didn’t always have the control; that comes with time and practice.” Walsh has been in a couple of bands before the Blind Spots, which she describes as “folky acoustic.” But she was a full-time grad student at Sacramento State while she was in her last band and didn’t commit to it as she has to the Blind Spots.

“We rehearse every day we get a chance,” she said. “And if we can’t practice we get together to talk about the business stuff.”

The Blind Spots are about to release their third record, Rhizomatic, on Jan. 1 and will be celebrating with a CD release party at the Haunt on Dec. 27 with the Falconers. The rapper Sammus will open the show. “I met Maddy last summer when she basically reached out to me and asked me to perform at her wedding celebration,” said Sammus. She was happy to be invited to open the CD release party. 

Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo (aka Sammus) is an Ithaca native who is presently in a Ph.D. program at Cornell. Since she contacted organizer Bubba Crumrine, who had been hoping to involve local hip hop artists, she has been part of Ithaca Underground shows. You will be able to experience only about 20 minutes of her music as she opens for the Blind Spots, but her own full set is an hour of prepared beats over which she wraps her nerdcore narratives.

Walsh has her nerd side too, which is revealed in her explanation of the source of the album’s name and also in the first video that has been released to accompany Rhizomatic’s first single, “Hey Boy.” 

“I’m trying to get this story shorter every time I tell it,” she laughed when asked about the album’s title. It is inspired by her reading of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. “Rhizome is actually a botany term from a root structure that grows laterally instead of deeper and opposes the cycle of seed growing into a tree. [Deleuze and Guattari use it to] represent a more expansive way to live, to achieve success a different way.” Walsh sees it as an analogy to how music is spread now. Where once record companies decided what we would all listen to, now music is spread by word of mouth far and wide via the Internet.

The “Hey Boy” video is an elaborate throwback to the mini operas that used to characterize early MTV videos of the 1980s. The style is appropriate as the song is also a throwback to ‘80s New Wave with Walsh’s voice pitched a little higher and processed to squeeze out some of its natural warmth. The band will release four more locally-produced videos over the next several months.

The distance between the glossy pop of “Hey Boy” and the blues heroics of something like “Abida’s Role” is impressive. Even the lightest-weight songs like “Listen Up” from El Camino Dream (2010) is given bite by the tightness of the playing, the crunch of Suave’s guitar, and the smoke in Walsh’s delivery.

While their music is unrelentingly upbeat, their lyrics are not. Being a Blind Spots fan sometimes means gyrating around the dance floor while Walsh sings about a friend with sick father or a housewife who is maybe about to explode after being taken for granted for a long time. All this (and more) is presented in a cascade of imagery rather than straight narrative. It is written to be in the service of the music and the music serves it well. •