Best new indie rock songs, indie news, best bands, reviews
Author: August W. Zander
Author, artist, musician and eco-travel guide manager. Born in Akron, Ohio (The Black Keys!) and raised in locations worldwide as a military brat. Landed out west. Life is short; live it big.
A self-taught producer since age 11, Rosesleeves (aka Sabrine Alsalih) is a 17-year-old musician and songwriter in the U.K.
Influenced by the avant-garde production of FKA twigs and Purity Ring and the emotive songwriting and melodies of Mitski and Radiohead, his sound is best described as ‘constantly evolving alternative pop’.
Alsalih’s music is a “[My music] is a unique, personal journey that creates an ambient atmosphere,” he says. Structured by pop-influenced shapes and nuances, his discography is a sonic experience for listeners of DIY alt/indie pop.
The featured track, “Alphabet,” is an “atmospheric and evocative composition — anyone’s first listen is a memorable experience,” he adds.
FEATURED TRACK: “Alphabet” – Rosesleeves
We recommend listening to more of his tracks on Spotify. Currently, Alsalih has nearly 30K monthly listeners. That’s a sizeable audience for any DIY artist.
Collaborations with osquinn, Noahh, Mag and Ezekiel show Alsalih range and his transcending ability to adopt different styles. Rosesleeves also founded the indie electronic collective Sewerbratz in 2019 and continues to foster its growth.
Fully self-produced and written, he released his debut album 9920deadline in March 2021. He is currently working on developing new areas of his sound through a series of singles. IRC first featured Rosesleeves last summer.
Ryuichi Sakamoto Minamata (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) MILAN for Flood Mag 7/10
Somewhere between an Eric Satie still life and Jerry Goldsmith’s noir-jazz score for Chinatown exists the coolly emotional and subtly effervescent yet earthen music for the film Minamata from composer and instrumentalist Ryuichi Sakamoto. Starting with its gently halting piano opening theme and traveling through quietly whining atmospheric battles between sequencers, breathy voices, and real-time strings (“Landscape,” “Chisso Co.”), tonic glitch-hop riffs (“The Boy”) and their sinister equivalent (“Hidden Data”), opulent cello runs (“Boy and Camera”), and burnt-edged, electro-ambient (with squeezebox) scowls (“Into Japan”), the sonic monologue behind the true-life events of aged American war photographer Eugene Smith (played by Johnny Depp in director Andrew Levitas’ gritty film) documenting the effects of mercury poisoning on a coastal town in Japan is exactly what we’ve come to expect from latter-day Sakamoto.
Far beyond his historic, ethnographic co-penned score for Bernardo Bertilucci’s The Last Emperor (for which the composer won an Oscar), and more moodily along the lines of his intimate, textural 2017 studio album async and his recent soundtrack for Black Mirror: Smithereens, Sakamoto shows off a mind and a taste for menacing, tactile music which meshes the oceanic-winded scale of the elements, be it the organically orchestral or the sumptuously synthetic, with cricket nattering glitches for physical punctuation. If you didn’t think a score emulating the effects of industrial pollution and one man’s dedication to portraying pain and beauty could find a composer, you’ve missed the point of Sakamoto’s long career’s aesthetics.
Though the final track contains every trick in Sakamoto’s kit bag and pulls from his electronic dance past (its thumping, sequenced rhythms), “One Single Voice” was recorded by Welsh mezzo-soprano Katherine Jenkins (famous for a beloved Christmas episode of Dr. Who) after Sakamoto’s involvement in the project. The lush grand finale features all of the self-empowered heft and fine-boned focus of Celine Dion without a hint of the haughty or the saccharine.
Find the vinyl edition of the soundtrack pressed on a pair of 180-gram black vinyl discs and housed in gatefold packaging with liner notes from Levitas, for what the director calls Sakamoto’s talent to “represent both the absolute best of humanity as well as the worst.”
Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology, the compilation of the Indigenous Canadian singer-songwriter’s music issued by Light in the Attic Records back in March, is a joy that imparts two burdensome revelations. The anthology pulls from Dunn’s four studio albums recorded between 1970 and 1999. On each track Dunn cuts an imposing stature. He was blunt, poetic, focused, and diverse. His style ebbed between genres much like how he constantly migrated across Canada. Longtime friend and collaborator Obediah (Johnny) Yesno characterized Dunn perfectly; “… the audience always writes in to ask if the songs are on records. They’re not…most of the time you can’t even find him. He can’t stay in one place.”
Dunn was a singer-songwriter, an artist, a filmmaker, a leader, a teacher, and an activist, raising awareness and protesting on behalf of Indigenous rights. His activism extended to rerecording his own albums and donating the proceeds to Indigenous rights groups despite struggling with finances for most of his career.
The compilation’s first revelation is that recognition has eluded Dunn even beyond his unfortunate passing in 2013. Part of this was by his own admission. He refused record courtships from Columbia Records when signing would’ve had him in leagues with Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash.
The other tragedy is that Canada hasn’t progressed far from its colonial roots despite some pleasant lip service. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau still engages in misguided reparation attempts. Thus Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies is an essential listen beyond its high standard as Dunn’s music is as relevant now as it was when he recorded with the Akwesasne Tribe nearly fifty years ago. Dunn wove history and poetry, both Indigenous and English, into 22 tracks of the highest caliber. Here are five that highlight not just the pristine quality of his output but illuminate Dunn’s character.
The Ballad of Crowfoot
Dunn’s one-man folk epic recounts the story of Crowfoot, the Siksika chief who negotiated Treaty 7 on behalf of the Blackfoot community. Crowfoot has his land pilfered, his morals bullied into the signing of treaties, his guilt racked, and by the end of the ten minute ballad he witnesses the government’s refusal to honour trade agreements. After every wincing detail the chorus chops through with the promise of a better tomorrow. It echoes Crowfoot’s devotion to his clan combatting his doubt in his choices. Dunn shows how lofty hope is by concluding with the vague optimism of finding love as opposed to “usual treachery.”
“The Ballad of Crowfoot” is equally notable as a short film. Dunn directed the piece with grassroots funding and the Canadian government handling distribution. It was the rare combination of the system and radicals working in tandem. Often considered Canada’s first music video, the 1968 short is composed of archival tribal footage and photographs set to Dunn’s track. It was poignant enough that it entered the curriculum of classrooms across Canada.
Dunn’s track operates just as well without the context of the film nor its bleak imagery. His voice booms with the weight of a withering community, his depth mirroring the history and bloodlines Crowfoot upheld against the incompatible force of colonization.
Charlie
The tender, finger picked, “Charlie” is an astounding folk number. Dunn tells of Chanie Wenjack, a young Anishinaabe boy who died mere feet away from a CN (Canadian National) railway track after fleeing his residential school on October 23, 1966. The freezing snow wracks the boy’s small body and his thoughts wander towards his father and his deceased mother and the track grows colder as Wenjack’s time in the frigid winter crawls onwards.
“Charlie” marks a few recurring themes in Dunn’s life. Notably, his finances. He received $600CAD for recording “Charlie.” Dunn was grateful for the then large sum because he knew how brutal the music business was, how rampant exploitation ran throughout the system, and how broke he was. Dunn’s finances were never stable, he was forever in a state of possessing only enough to pass from couch to couch. Dunn wouldn’t find any financial stability until later in his life.
Years later Dunn re-recorded “Charlie” for Martin Defalco’s television series Adventures in Rainbow Country. He omitted any direct lyrical mentions of Wenjack to echo Defalco’s aim. Defalco extrapolated Wenjack’s passing to the flaws of the Canadian system. The track evolved from a singular heart-wrenching recount into a symptom of a larger virus.
I Pity the Country
Dunn’s most famous song houses his unique evisceration of colonialism. His stony delivery, deterrence of radio-palpable friendliness, and honesty disposed of any aesthetic poeticism – one of the lines is “Deception annoys me” and Dunn moves mountains with its simplicity – are the reasons “I Pity the Country” reverberates today and probably why it never grew on the airways. It was too raw. Even Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s fantastic cover from earlier this year is a totem of gathered dust from years of burial. Her version trembles with soot but shows Dunn’s words as ever relevant. Dunn is not so much jabbing into the gut of colonialism; he’s empathetic to the people and disheartened that a system has yet to remedy its colonialist scars. As an Indigenous man he’s furious, but as a Canadian he’s disappointed his country succumbs to such lows.
The Carver
Dunn was adamant about retaining his own image when Columbia Records tried to recruit him in the late ‘60s. They wanted him to play the cowboy and indulge in his country influences. And Dunn could’ve excelled as a country artist, “School Days” and “Crazy Horse” being two of his strongest takes on the genre. But he was far too rebellious to be confined by a lasso.
“The Carver” is Dunn’s most overt example of his wide influences and output. Dunn’s music, much like the man, couldn’t remain in one place for long. He bounded between genres while maintaining his own identity. “The Carver” is the sonic encapsulation of his propensity to remain in motion. Take it as a microcosm of Dunn’s large output palette. Even within the realm of folk Dunn was hard to characterize, and even harder still when he ventured outside of it.
“The Carver,” conceived during the recording sessions of “The Ballad of Crowfoot,” may be Dunn’s most divergent piece. The track is a psychedelic session where Dunn’s hearty register skips across the flowery guitars like a stone on atop a lake. Dunn never replicated the approach, at least not on any of Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies‘ other tracks.
Sonnet 33 and 55/ Friendship Dance
Dunn’s native heritage was as key to his artistry as his English blood. The singer is the mediator between both worlds on “Sonnet 33 and 55/Friendship Dance” as he was in real life. He coagulates tribal drumming (provided by Akwesasne Singers from a Mohawk Nation on the banks of the St. Lawrence River) with Shakespeare’s flowery prose. Dunn was a vested student of English poetry but melding Shakespeare with tribalism insinuates a deeper purpose. It’s the veil Indigenous people have to adopt in order to fit into Canadian society.
Dunn reimagines Shakespeare’s poetry as speaking to the image of the First Nations. He converts Sonnets 33 and 55 into celebrations of Indigenous identity. The prose, teeming with metaphor, gains traction from the rhythmic drums, bringing it closer to earth. Likewise Dunn’s pointed recitation adds a poet’s flair to the traditional accompaniment.
The post Five Essential Tracks from Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology appeared first on ForTheLoveOfBands. The post is from Colin Dempsey is a Toronto-based writer who covers music, dabbles in fiction, and spends too much time calculating his macronutrient intake.
The post-reunion phase of a rock band’s lifespan can be a strange period to navigate. Provided the fans are on board, it is often a chance to make the sort of serious bucks that are out of reach during a band’s first flush. But a reunion often lays out an unwritten contract of expectations between band and fans; we want the nostalgia, we want the hits, do it this way, not that way.
In this respect, Sleater-Kinney have not entirely followed the letter of the deal. Their second post-reunion album, 2019’s St Vincent-produced The Center Won’t Hold, felt like a makeover of sorts, the roughness and rage of the band’s early days subsumed in a glossy, radio-friendly production that divided critics and fans alike. But the real shock came when, a month before the album’s release, drummer Janet Weiss announced she was leaving the band, citing Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker’s increasingly exclusive musical partnership: “I said, ‘Can you tell me if I am still a creative equal in the band?’ And they said no. So, I left.”
For a band often used as a byword for feminist solidarity, this sudden intrusion of personal animus came as a shock. But then, Sleater-Kinney have always been about kicking out against the expectations loaded on women. As Carrie Brownstein has it on Complex Female Characters, one of the standout tracks from their 10th album Path Of Wellness: “You’re too much of a woman now/You’re not enough of a woman now”. It’s that old story, so familiar to female musicians: damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Path Of Wellness was written and recorded in the long, hot summer of 2020 in Portland, Oregon, with Brownstein and Tucker assisted by a host of local musicians. It is the first album that Sleater-Kinney have produced entirely by themselves, although that doesn’t mean a return to the raw riot-grrrl sound of old. On the contrary, there’s a full, rich quality to the record, which is thick with Wurlitzer and Rhodes, and often echoes various genres of a ’70s vintage – country and glam, funk and hard rock. The latter, in particular, powers some of the record’s best moments. High In The Grass is an exultant summertime anthem steeped in the histrionics of ’70s rock: “We lock when the pollen’s up/We love when the party’s on”. Wilder still is Tomorrow’s Grave, a knowing tribute to Black Sabbath that makes some entertaining rock theatre out of that band’s doom-laden clang.
As Path Of Wellness came together, the state of Oregon was in a strange flux, grappling with the pandemic, encroached on by wildfires, and gripped by protests against racial inequality that saw police suppressing crowds with batons and pepper spray. In places the album seems to address this explicitly. Favorite Neighbor is a righteous skewering of hypocrisy that accuses those “putting out fires/When your own house is burning”, while Bring Mercy finds Tucker singing, “How did we lose our city/Rifles running through our streets…”
Elsewhere, the turbulence outside seems to have brought out a reflective tone. The title track uses the language of self-help and self-care to interrogate personal insecurities, while the sleek, funky Worry With You addresses that feeling of anxiety when the shit has hit the fan and the loved one you need is out of reach. Once upon a time, Sleater-Kinney records were righteous and declamatory. More often here, the tone is open and inquisitive, a band trying to find their bearings when the times are a-changin’.
In an interview about her departure from the band, Janet Weiss spoke of the tight relationship between Tucker and Brownstein: “I just think the two of them are so connected and they really agree on almost everything.” Listening to this new clutch of songs, you’re often reminded of this. Even as Path Of Wellness grapples with the world outside, its songs often speak the intimate language of a private conversation – the words of one friend, or lover, to another.
Fans who listened to The Center Won’t Hold and baulked at its lack of righteous rage might also find moments here wanting. But Path Of Wellness proves Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein haven’t forgotten the empowering, life-giving qualities of rock’n’roll fun. Sleater-Kinney are turning their reunion years into a reaffirmation of the importance of support and solidarity on a private, personal level. As they sing on album closer Bring Mercy: “If it’s coming for us, darlin’/Take my hand and dance me down the line”.
The post Sleater-Kinney – Path Of Wellness appeared first on UNCUT.
If, at any point during the recent crisis, you found yourself thinking, ‘What would Billy Gibbons do?’ – and there are probably worse role models – you might have pictured the ZZ Top frontman lighting out for some cactus-pocked desert redoubt in one of his garageful of hot rods. A scarlet coupe, perhaps, flames painted along the bonnet, packed with some of Gibbons’ legendarily vast guitar collection, and sufficient provisions to ride out lockdown.
Breaking News: ZZ Top Bassist Dusty Hill, 72, has died
Read our post about the long-time, iconic bassist, Dusty Hill.
You wouldn’t have been too far wrong. Hardware was recorded in the rocky mesas of California’s Mojave, Gibbons teaming up with drummer Matt Sorum (Guns N’ Roses, Velvet Revolver, The Cult) and guitarist Austin Hanks; Rebecca and Megan Lovell of Larkin Poe contribute backing vocals. The single West Coast Junkie (“I’m a West Coast junkie from a Texas town/And when I get to Cali it’s going down”) serves, in this context, as a Southern surf-rock mission statement, Gibbons channelling Dick Dale over a pulsing go-go beat, the drums quoting The Surfari’s Wipeout before the guitar solo.
Gibbons’ two previous solo albums have been obvious departures from ZZ Top. 2015’s Perfectamundo was a joyous excursion into Latin-rhythmed rock, and 2018’s Big Bad Blues was what its title said it was. But Hardware, whether part of some planned cycle or not, is Gibbons going back to where he came in: were it presented to a focus group of ardent ZZ Top fans as a new ZZ Top album, it would be surprising if anyone spotted the imposture.
Certainly, there is little chance of mistaking Billy Gibbons’ guitar: that smooth swagger along the frontier between the blues and Southern rock (the latter genre being one that Gibbons can claim to have helped invent). The first notes on Hardware are the opening riff of My Lucky Card, a characteristic Gibbons motif: an insistent guitar fusillade with which you can hear him placating some rumbustious early 1970s Texas honky-tonk as the empties start hitting the chicken wire.
There are, thereafter, few subtleties. Musically, Hardware is substantially comprised of barely reconstructed boogie. Lyrically, it is almost exclusively concerned with women, whiskey, cars, highways and so forth. Given, however, that this a palette Gibbons did more to define than most, and still draws from more deftly than many, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, still less so given that Gibbons’ 72-year-old fingers have lost none of their way around a fretboard. So while Shuffle, Step & Slide, for example, sounds exactly how a song called Shuffle, Step & Slide by Billy Gibbons might be expected to sound, its glorious solos are another entry in Gibbons’ hefty catalogue of elegant illustrations of the overlap between blues and Southern rock.
The ZZ Top period that Hardware most recalls is the one spanning 1981’s El Loco, 1983’s umpty-selling Eliminator and 1985’s Afterburner, as the group added synthesisers and sequencers to their primal rock trio setup. While Hardware doesn’t venture nearly as far into full-fledged Southern rock disco as some of the aforementioned, there are many instinctive or deliberate tips of the ten-gallon to this period – Larkin Poe’s glossy backing vocals on Stackin’ Bones, the turbocharged production of S-G-L-M-B-B-R, the distorted lead vocal on More-More-More, also punctuated with a growled Yeaaaahhh, which sounds copy/pasted from Sharp Dressed Man.
There are one or two more obviously outré moments, of the kind Gibbons might not have felt able to indulge under the ZZ Top marque. Vagabond Man is a sweet electric piano-drenched ballad, like Steve Miller fronting Drive-By Truckers. Spanish Fly is a gruff rap over clattering percussion and sparse, squealing guitar. Closer Desert High is more minimalist still, a sombre spoken-word narration of the view across the Mojave and what it conjures, in this instance the spectres of Jim Morrison and Gram Parsons.
Overall, the songs on Hardware fly in direct proportion to the degree to which they can be imagined being played on a fur-trimmed guitar mounted on a spindle. I Was A Highway is one such, underpinning the unsubtle metaphor (“You’d think I was a highway/The way she hit the road”) with a climactic post-guitar solo gear change from effortless cruise control to foot-down roar towards the horizon. She’s On Fire is another, a glorious headlong tear-up which could have graced any ZZ Top album of this last half-century or so. For all Gibbons’ often intriguing meandering from his usual path, on Hardware and elsewhere in his solo career, there remains little doubt about what he does best.
The post Billy F Gibbons – Hardware appeared first on UNCUT.
TEMPOREX is San Diego musician Joseph Flores. You may remember from his 2017 hit “Nice Boys”, which garnered a lot of love and play on Instagram and in particular TikTok. That song – and the entirety of TEMPOREX’s previous release, Care – traded in sweet but sickly bedroom pop. Those came out in his teenage years and, now in his early 20s, Flores does, to his credit, try to find new stylistic pop lanes in Bowling, his new album, while finding very few strikes to over the 10 tracks.
The record is purportedly inspired by 90s kids pop culture – Pee-Wee Herman, Rocko’s Modern Life, Rugrats – and the whole endeavour, admittedly, is akin to a sonic sugar rush hit: the production is vivid and gimmicky, wonky and wacky. TEMPOREX also wants to guide listeners through a full bowling game, and a lot of whether you’ll care for this album will depend on your inclination for such sparky conceptual work.
There’s a fine irony at play in Bowling: the references to 90s kids’ pop culture might make a lot of listeners feel old, but the sound of the album is also dated, in its own way. Although it’s more bright electronica than hazy lo-fi, TEMPOREX is still hugely indebted to the bubbly bedroom pop scene that followed Mac DeMarco in the last decade. “Nice Boys” fit very well back in 2017, certainly, but that these new songs sound so ancient already is a testament to how immensely fast music trends are currently progressing. It’s difficult to imagine many of Flores’ peers preferring this style over the manufactured yet sophisticated gloopy pop-punk movement spearheaded by the likes of Olivia Rodrigo right now.
Bowling starts with “Bad Pin”, which sounds like a song Triathalon might have considered releasing several years ago. He follows that with “Batter”, whose beginning sounds like a timid ripoff of DeMarco’s “Watching Him Fade Away”. The latter came from DeMarco’s 2017 album This Old Dog, and much of what Temporex does in Bowling is clearly influenced by it, from the twinkling but sincere keys in “Milton Post” and “Plastic Lester” to the R&B drums in “Delayed” and “GUI”.
“U Open Up a Window” is the only time he comes close to replicating the endearing flavour of “Nice Boys”, but it comes too late, right at the album’s close. “Now step back, gonna roll the ball / When it hits the alley gonna knock them all / Pins down, that’s what’s up,” Flores sings earlier in the album on “New Lane”: if he’s ever to get even a spare as TEMPOREX, a lot of innovation has to occur on his next album.
54%
The post Album Review: TEMPOREX – Bowling first appeared on Beats Per Minute.
One of IRC’s favorite European indie-folk duos, Norway’s Kings of Convenience, will drop their first album, titled Peace or Love, in 12 years.
The indisputably talented duo, Eirik Glambek Bøe and Erlend Øye, have already shared one single from the album, “Rocky Trail” (see below).
Set to drop June 18th via Imperial Records, the indie rockers have shared a second single, “Fever.” The singles are creating a lot of buzz and excitement online for the album release.
The first single, released a few weeks ago, “Rocky Trail,” is accompanied by this official music video.
When I was a boy, a man used to wander the streets in our area dressed up and looking like Christ from a 1950’s film epic. Staff and all. He eventually shot a police officer and was then subsequently shot by another police officer. Everyone knew who he was just from his visibility in the community.
Noddy, a character in one of the new compositions from The Len Price 3 — based in Medway, United Kingdom — was a real-life man similar to the aforementioned one. However, the song isn’t only memorable for its lyrical content but the music that accompanies it. From its German count-in and opening chords to the distortion of its outro, “Noddy Goes to the Pentagon,” sounds like a lost psychedelica track from 1966.
“Noddy Goes to the Pentagon is about a local character, Medway character,” told Glenn Page, the band’s singer and guitarist, to For The Love Of Bands via email. “Anyone that lives here would know of him. I began to think he was immortal as he was around when I was a boy and I would still see him around until recently looking exactly the same. He would ride his bike around very fast while shouting and swearing at people quite randomly. Sadly he died in 2020.”
The band’s latest recording, The Strood Recording Company, is an EP follow-up to their self-produced 2017 album, Kentish Longtails, and delivers four infectious power-packed compositions that have something to say.
“We had originally set out to record an album and we recorded about 18 songs or thereabouts,” Page said. “We had them all mixed and ready by about the middle of 2020. When it came to it though, I wasn’t very happy with it. I felt the songs weren’t very good. So we settled on releasing what we thought were the best 4 songs as an EP.”
They didn’t disappoint. The songs tear through a musical landscape layered by a 60’s mashup discussing hippie posers, Noddy, Brexit and social anxiety.
“We’re really pleased with the sound of the EP. We might even venture to say it’s the best thing we’ve done from a sonic perspective,” Page admitted. “It’s the recording we’re most happy with sound wise anyway. Neil (Fromow/drum kit) takes the credit for that. He really did his homework and put in the effort to make sure it sounded good.”
Incidentally, there is no Len Price in the band. It’s Page, Fromow and Steve Huggins on bass.
Revolver comparisons have been made to Strood. Page told Fromow he wanted some of the Strood tracks to have a Revolver profile.
“A few people have commented that “Noddy Goes to the Pentagon” sounds like the Revolver / Paperback Writer / Rain recordings. So it looks like he got it spot on there, ” Page commented.
Interestingly, Page was listening to 70’s roots reggae and modern jazz during the recording of the EP. Yet, he fell back into first loves: the Who, Beatles, Kinks, Clash, Undertones and Ramones.
“I think the music of the 60s as well as 70s punk is in my DNA because that’s the style I’m always drawn to write in,” he said.
Lyrically, Page’s sharp and sometimes acerbic words are front and center. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly and has never been reticent to express it. “Weekend Hippies” is a prime example. The irony of its lyrics sung over a psychedelic sound accurately reflects the message of the song. It’s about a former co-worker of Page.
“They would always bang on about going to festivals, taking drugs, loving music and practicing meditation- mostly laudable things,” he explained. “Unfortunately that person was also a bully and was thoroughly unpleasant to people at work. It seemed to me that they were a peace loving hippie at the weekend and a total bastard during the week!”
And the soul-rooted, early Who-like “Got To Be Together,” is a kind of anti-National Front Disco track that is a pushback against Brexit.
“I was responding to all the division and partisan politics that had emerged from the whole Brexit debate and subsequent fall out,” Page said. “I’m not one for political statement in our music really. All I’m saying in this song is that I’m in favour of things that bring people closer together rather than things that divide and drive wedges between us.”
A sanguine message? A friend of Page pointed out that The LP3 frontman was mired in negative commentary.
“And he has a point because song writing is like a therapy for me,” Page revealed. “It’s where I deal with a lot of stuff that has been troubling me. Since he said that I’ve tried to make more of an effort to write at least some songs with a more positive outlook.
The Strood Recording Company is currently available on vinyl. The band’s preferred auditory delivery method.
“We’re vinyl fans,” Page said. “Lots of our fans are vinyl people too. We sell more vinyl than CDs when we’re on the road. We were drawn to the idea of something only being available in this one format. It’s not inconceivable that we might release it digitally in the future but we’re not planning on it at the moment.”
For more information on the EP and how to purchase it, visit The Len Price 3’s Facebook.
The dreamy, swooning “Rollercoaster” is a delightful track from Drauve, the pop duo comprising Victoria Draovitch and Stephen Grzenda. Now based in Los Angeles, after relocating from Pennsylvania last year, Drauve released their SELF IMPROVEMENT EP this past December. That release saw nice praise, and now “Rollercoaster” makes a strong mark as their latest single. Serene guitar swirls and lush vocals craft an engrossing, accessible initial feel, with punchier percussion and key-laden flourishes emerging thereafter alongside spirited vocals for a more pop-forward feeling. The project struts a dream-pop lightness with ample appeal, strengthed by the band’s production, produced alongside collaborator Jeremy Rosinger (Isaac Lewis, My Favorite Color).
“The song, at face value, is about a toxic relationship with a partner,” says Draovitch, “but I’m actually talking about pursuing a music career. I love it and could never let it go, but it definitely sends me a spiral of anxiety and self-doubt at least once a week.”
The gorgeous track “Past Lives” is a surefire success from Kekko, the Singapore-based husband/wife duo Tim Kekko and Cherie Kekko. The track confidently shows a mixture of shoegaze and dream-pop, the initial gauzy guitars unfolding gently into Cherie Kekko’s angelic vocal touch. The touch of synths during the chorus – “just close your eyes,” – is comfortingly melodic and replay-inducing. The mid-section bridge sees flourishing, lush synths alongside wordless vocals, reminding fondly of Beach House, before transitioning back into a rock-friendly fervor. Captivating throughout, “Past Lives” is among the most melodic rock singles of the year thus far.
19 year old Molly Burman has returned with her latest single, Everytime, following on from the success of her debut release Fool Me With Flattery last month, alongside its accompanying music video. Watch and listen below.
Everytime is another promising release from Molly, a slice of empowering slacker-pop which is effortlessly melodic. Speaking about the track, Molly states
‘’Everytime’ is about my sad excuse for a love life. I used to be so obsessed with dating and getting validation from guys, but they just kept ghosting me, it’s like a sort of love letter to myself, always there to remind me that I am enough and I am exactly what I want.
The release of Everytime is partnered with the release of its accompanying visual, created by her friend and collaborator Harvey Frost who created the setup in Brighton, backing up the homespun, bedroom-pop feel which Molly encapsulates in her music.
As well as this new single, Molly has also announced her new EP, Fool Me With Flattery (out August 21st), a collection of tracks written in the last couple of years which have been recorded and home co-produced by her father.
Ryuichi Sakamoto
