Everyone loves a solid summer banger but there’s something to be said for summer songs that lie on the other side of the spectrum. Music that moves us inward into a state of reflection as the fragrance of sweet magnolias drifts on the warm breeze. Summer possesses a beautiful sense of ennui. A languidness that settles with the heat and hangs in the thick humidity. It’s no mistake that Joy Division’s masterpiece Closer was released in July or that the Cure dropped their introspective tour de force Pornography in May. Lou Reed also chose July to bring his heartbreaking album Berlin into the world and graced us with the raw beauty of poignant songs like Candy Says.
Vancouver’s duo Focus Your Audio’s latest single On Your Own hits just before daybreak on summer nights when it’s too hot to sleep. When we sit at open windows looking out over the stillness of the city as solitary cars move silently on dark streets. It’s a gorgeous reflective song that uses one voice to present two perspectives. As Focus Your Audio states in their press release,
“Not everyone we love chooses to stay and not everyone who asks us to stay understands why we can’t”.
This predicament is felt in the strength and nuance of Sarah McArthur’s voice. Mike Young’s (of Mother Mother fame) artful production is perfectly understated and he allows the vocals to carry the song’s weight and intent.
“Bobby McAloney’s instrumentation supports the sense of quietude and contemplation with a subtle atmospheric quality. This an immersive song. It pulls us into a familiar emotional place where questions are unanswerable and holds us there softly with a sense of love. In the swell of the final chorus McArthur’s voice rises in an emotional plea for certainty. When she sings “Maybe I could stand here and change your mind” it resonates in a familiar place deep in the heart of every sleepless summer night.
Christopher is a freelance writer/journalist residing in Texas and currently writing for several magazine publications. Prior to freelancing, he was the co-owner of Immediait, a media company that provided commercial enterprises with visual and written content for their social media platforms and websites.
In addition, Christopher spent four years as a reporter/staff writers for two Texas newspapers, The Fort Stockton Pioneer and Del Rio News-Herald.
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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.”
The post The Len Price 3 – The Strood Recording Company EP appeared first on ForTheLoveOfBands
Simon was born in London but now lives in beautiful Cornwall. Whilst waiting for his first novel to be discovered by the rest of the world, he spends his time reading anything and everything, and listening to and writing about the music he is passionate about.
“Anyone who lives long enough in a country learns that it has its up and downs,” Devin Reardon says. “‘Ireland Song’ is about me learning to find warmth in a handful of good people around you. It really just wants to wrap you in a blanket of calm… That’s how I feel it’s been moving back in with my family in Ireland.”
Ireland Song, released a few weeks ago on the 30th April, is the debut single from Devin Reardon, an Irish-American, indie-folk singer-songwriter, hailing from North-East Florida, but now based in County Wicklow. It is a heartfelt and intimate ballad, described by some as, “mountain manish”.
“I had a bad break-up after college,” he reveals. “I felt I needed to get out of the States… start over.” And so he moved to Ireland, following in the footsteps of his mother, a native of County Dublin, who had moved back whilst Devin finished college. Within a few months, however, the first lockdown hit.
“It was hard,” he admits now. “But it also helped me realise that songwriting was a way for me to manage my mental health… reflect.”
Songwriting, something that had always been an overriding passion, went from being a hobby to a form of “self-actualisation”, as he calls it now, and Ireland Song emerged from out of what he sees as a beautiful experience. Built along a simple, acoustic melody, revealing auto-biographical lyrics are coloured, lifted and swept along on the haunting tones of a grateful voice, and with a depth of warmth that comes from eventually finding newly found friends and family to help spite the cold rattling outside:
“Though this place is just so cold, grey, damp, and dark
It’s started to warm the darkest place in my heart”.
“I just want to share my own lessons and the joy of discovering positives on the other side with other people. Just giving something to people as we emerge from this mad time. I think music can really help people,” Devin continues, “and I think this song can do that. I’m happy to share that. I just want to make some real art and music out of this madness.”
Ireland Song is deceptively joyous, the range and depth of emotion telling of a traveller’s freshly discovered dawning of wisdom and realisation, and fully capturing that eventual sense of finding your belonging, and now reflecting on a much more balanced moment when coming out of a very difficult period; a returning home.
“I’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons in this time, and I’m excited to come out the other side with those things close to my chest.”
Don’t be fooled by the song’s apparent simplicity, for it is deliberate and calculating within all the tone of revelation. It is a love song to the kindness and affection found within family and friends now gathered about and proving to be the narrator’s salvation in a once distant land that is now shining light amidst the once cold and grey surroundings. When Devin sings of his family the melody changes discreetly, so that both the words and the simplistic tune are no longer regaling of some cold unknown land outside, but of something now far warmer: a place where he feels he would want to be while he grows old.
“Ireland might be icy
But friends keep me warm in the cold
The kind of place I’d like to be
when I start to grow old”.
It is a lament to the place in which he now feels he truly belongs, that he happily calls home. Devin Reardon has finally found his place in the land of his mother and, like him, we too are reassured, and calmer.
Fear is a topical lyrical theme considering we’ve spent the past 15 months in forced solitude. Our faces hidden behind masks as people duck and cover whenever someone coughs in public. With Covid, the debacle of the US election and a wealth of conspiracy theories to choose from the pervasive cultural anxiety has heightened everyone’s fight or flight response. It’s refreshing to hear the Irish duo of Patrick O’Keefe and David Ruth who compose Graham Davy rebuke this base human response in their succinctly titled new song “Fear”.
Graham Davy could be the band playing at The Roadhouse at the end of a Twin Peaks episode—a musical resolve to a story segment as Killer Bob lurks in the dark Northwestern forest and haunts our dreams. Like David Lynch, O’Keefe and Ruth understand the magnitude of fear’s corrosive thread and how it’s woven through our lives. They present a simple answer and this song’s strength is its beautiful simplicity. The drums hit on the backbeat under strummed reverberating chords and the choruses break into a gratifying wall of sound. Like a melodic Michael Gira singing for a Lynchian version of The Shangrilahs Patrick O’Keefe’s deep penetrating voice resonates and sooths our collective dread as he reminds us of fear’s impermanence.
There’s a spiritual quality to Fear and with O’Keefe’s confident delivery it can be heard as a prayer or a sermon. The song steadily gathers momentum and intention like the brilliance of a Beltane fire burning away the psychic shadows that obscure our souls from the light of beauty. As the world emerges from its isolation O’Keefe and Ruth have given us a gift—a needed call of faith to counter our lingering existential distress.
Scott Klein and his newest release of single, “Sunshine,” is a sonic tour of barren landscape and never-ending, prairie vistas that could only come out of the northern provinces. Written for an ex-lover while on the plains of Saskatchewan, Klein culminates his sensory and poetic prose while nodding to the stylings of the bygone years for his latest release.
“Sunshine” takes its time with the listener, never hurried, it plods through its chord structure like a jilted lover with no schedule and only time on their hands. Klein asks of his ex-lover, “what now?” during the track. Lyrically, it’s not an angered lover, more one with burning questions and the weight of being on their own bearing down upon them. ‘Sunshine’ is steeped in classic rock, maybe a smokey overtone of the 90s like that burning thing the bartender puts in your whiskey that you’re never sure what it does, but it’s always welcomed.
Klein and his band expertly set the stage for western, twangy, indie-film-type, negative-spacey vibes. Guitars are hollow, tremolo-kissed and authentic, rhythm section is never in the way, a trusty, gun-fighter’s back up.
Vocally, Scott Klein delivers a performance worthy of note. His almost Brit Pop tendencies and little bit of whine fit nicely in this Americana track. Well-placed, back-up vocals on verses almost gives a Jeff Lynne-type production value; it’s a nice treat against the North American backdrop. Guitar solo is another great stopping point along this track, reverb and delay-soaked, it’s never overplayed and does a perfect job of adding a little tension to the track along with a pivoting rhythm section.
Sunshine is a playlist worthy track, road trippin’, late night, pensive, creative, whatever your upcoming day demands of you, take this Sunshine along.
The London-based rock duo Ora Violet are joined by vocalist Jeet Mulkerj and bassist Adam Liston on their new single out now via Black Tiles Music.
‘Have You Met Me’ slinks along the dancefloor. Ora Violet’s punchiness recalls 70s punk with a delectable groove. The track seduces with a driving bassline and flirty guitar.
“Influenced by Grinderman, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Marmaduke Duke & Earnest Hemingway, the song was inspired by the realization that the same way we go down, we come back up; gradually and then suddenly,” Ora Violet says. “The antihero protagonist has lived a life of unapologetic excessive in all ways and despite nearing the end, the statement is clear… I won’t go down.”
‘Have You Met Me’ is available on all streaming platforms.
If you are passionate about music and would like to turn it into a career, do not expect an easy route. There are plenty of other talented musicians who have had a head start and are on their way to the top.
On the other hand, even if the music industry seems a bit oversaturated right now, the time to start now is pretty great. Why? Well, the ongoing pandemic is making people stay at home, and for some, music is one of the best ways to forget about their woes, even if it is only for a while.
Music fans are eager to discover new artists on the internet. If you play your cards right and get a bit of luck, you can become a recognizable musician. However, you will need to work hard to reach that point. Here are some ideas on how to increase the odds of succeeding as a musician.
Get Reliable Equipment
The first thing you need is proper equipment. Do not think that purchasing a cheap microphone and recording your voice on a computer will impress others. Unless you are super talented, you will need a proper microphone, headphones, and music editing software.
A computer is also a must. If you plan to work from home, a PC should be the go-to choice. On the other hand, you may need to travel eventually and work remotely, meaning that investing in a laptop is not a bad choice either.
MacBook Air could be one of the options. Besides work, you can also use the computer to video chat with fans or other musicians who may want to collaborate so long your Mac is functioning properly. In case you run into issues like macbook air microphone not working, you may need to take it to a computer service store or look for a solution yourself. Overall, though, Macs are quite reliable, and various performance problems occur rarely.
Set Small Goals
Once you set up your equipment, start writing a goal list. Working without a clear idea of what you should do is not the right approach. Besides, when you reach a certain milestone and cross it off the list, it will give you motivation as you will see clear progress.
As a rule of thumb, it is recommended to start small and be realistic. A goal can be as simple as having your first view on YouTube or a positive comment below the recording. Finishing a song and recording it is another great example.
There are many aspiring musicians who believe in having what it takes to succeed, but they never get past the first hurdle, which is making actual music.
If you succeed as a musician, it will be interesting to look back at your early goals and see how much you have managed to achieve.
Look for Opportunities to Perform
The opportunities to perform live are pretty much non-existent for many professionals because of the pandemic, meaning that the situation is even tougher for amateurs.
Nevertheless, if you get an opportunity to showcase your voice to other people, do not hesitate and go for it. The performance can be as simple as singing karaoke in a bar or having a get-together with your friends and letting them know about your dream.
The goal here is to let reveal your skills to as many people and have them become interested in hearing more from you.
Grow Your Network
Once you have a few performances lined up (even if they are relatively small), make sure to interact with people and grow your network. It can be fans, other musicians who may wish to do some stuff together in the future, or people from the music industry that could help with your career.
Similar to growing a fanbase, networking will also lead to growing your brand and leading to more opportunities to perform. Even a small connection could prove to be significant in what it does for your career.
Establish Online Presence
It is still too early to tell when the pandemic is going to disappear. Thus, you will need to put most of your resources into establishing an online presence. And it is not just about developing a decent website.
No, as a musician, you have opportunities to reach audiences on platforms like Spotify and Soundcloud after creating a profile and uploading your music there.
YouTube is another great example. Some world-famous musicians have started their careers on YouTube. Uploading a video where you perform and having the video go viral is pretty much all one needs to become a star.
Lastly, there is Twitch TV. Even professional musicians are joining the platform to keep in touch with their fans and make money at the same time.
