Eddie Pepitone: A Great Stillness

Fans of Marc Maron’s WTF know Eddie Pepitone as a bellicose screamer who appears on the popular podcast’s live tapings to vent, rail, and generally serve as the show’s unofficial mascot and living emblem of righteous rage. Pepitone has developed a persona of savage tenderness: He’s a sensitive, spiritual, and politically engaged man who screams his pain in great cathartic bursts. Audiences are understandably skeptical of comedians who read their Tweets onstage, but on A Great Stillness, Pepitone’s self-released second album, the veteran comedian uses his take on the warped, myopic world of the Twitterverse to comment insightfully on our all-encompassing need for validation, whether that takes the form of retweets from strangers or giant billboards that elevate characters on The New Girl and Whitney to the level of minor deities through size alone. On A Great Stillness, Pepitone’s righteous if sometimes fuzzy rage is directed inward and out: He rages against the cartoon fat cats that are the target of the Occupy Wall Street movement, yet ends the album by heckling himself from somewhere deep within his own psyche. Vulnerable yet fierce, sweet yet strident, A Great Stillness is exhausting in the best possible way.