This first official DIY edition of 2022 features new music from artists both familiar and those that are brand new to our ears.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Melbourne, Australia
Electric Lecture – Los Angeles, California
Strangejuice – Perth, Australia
The Flashcrackers – Dublin, California
NEEDSHES – Tula, Russia
HYDE OUT – London, England
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard- Butterfly 3001
As late arrivers (like really late) to the King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard bandwagon of musical pranksters, their new drop is a remix album of hit (mostly hit) and miss mixes.
That said, the band’s abundantly creative exploits into offbeat, even wacky-rock, experiments are exciting artistic sonic paintings – like Picaso meets Pollock and they eat some shrooms. Once you start to dig into their discography, it becomes apparent why they have a loyal following.
Interestingly, the band has their own label – KGLW – and so, they are effectively DIY.
If you’re not on the King Giz and Liz Wiz band wagon, and remixes are not your favs, check out releases like 2016’s Nonagon Infinity or their last two studio releases – L.W. (2021) and K.G. (2020). Those might just be the ones that get you to hop aboard.
The guests making contributions include Vril, DJ Shadow, Yu Su, DaM-Funk, The Flaming Lips, and many others.
Electric Lecture – “Beam Me Up”
Los Angeles-based band Electric Lecture has dropped another new dream-pop/alt. country rock style single with the single “Beam Me Up.”
The new single follows a number of singles dropped by the band over the past couple of years.
“Reverse Evolution” plays like a laid back alt-country pop anthem that pulls together a wide variety of influences.
The track successfully marries elements of Tom Petty and Beck, while presenting an arsenal of inspired sounds unique to the new band. Reverse Evolution hits home in a familiar way, yet it’s unlike anything you’ve heard: ‘Reverse evolution/we want a war/find a solution?/we just want the war.’
Musicians and songwriters Bronson Taalbi and Greg Ansin, the band’s fronters, sing drunkenly in the chorus. This lyric says a lot about the state of some people in the world who are set in their ways instead of welcoming change.
“The ship is sinking!” Bronson sings out as overdriven guitar harmonies steal you away for a monster hook, and what happens next can only be described “as a deconstructed orchestra, flying through space at fiery speeds, and crashing onto a timpani that tosses us int
The third band member, Anthony J. Resta, is a multi-platinum producer, composer and guitar collector whose collaborations include Collective Soul; Elton John and Duran Duran among others.
Ansin, a songwriter, producer and filmmaker is the co-creator of the movies The Drive-In Horrorshow and Infinite Santa 8000.
Taalbi, a singer, songwriter and guitarist, is the second-half of the guitar duo Taalbi Brothers. Their music has been featured in the TV shows like Breaking Bad.
Strangejuice – “The Moth”
Last year, one of our favorite Australian DIY artists, Strangejuice, was featured on our pages because his amazing 2019 album, Raising Cannibals, was, and is, a DIY, under-the-radar classic.
He lives on Mount Nasura in Perth crafting a banquet of sounds, styles and moods such as tracks like “Ghost” “Embreyo” and “The Moth,” to name just a few.
“The Moth” is a grungy rock number with a theatrical element that rolls into a full-on chorus and a romping, slightly meancing beat.
“This is the second track and first single from my 13th album release “The Last Year,” Michael Andersen, aka Strangejuice, says.
A moth symbolises tremendous change, he says, and the song “is about the relationship breakdown of the mother of my child and the change that lead to me being a single father.”
“A moth thinks its beautiful like the butterfly, but it is neither beautiful nor majestic.”
For the actual recording and production process, Andersen used a number of techniques and gear.
“I use tape stops instead of faders to bring music sections in and out,” he addds.
He recorded the song in his home studio with cardboard boxes to “insulate the squawking chickens next door to my makeshift studio using a PRS custom guitar into a Klon Pedal out to a Fender Princeton amp and a Neumann U87 microphone.”
“The Moth” appears on Strangejuice’s 17-track album, The Last Year, available on Bandcamp.
The Last Year is an album written as part if a grieving and healing” he says, adding that he was partly inspired by Beck’s Seachange album
“Into the Sea” is a minimalist and dreamy new track from Dublin, California indie band The Flashcrackers.
The warm track is full of melody and emotion with a sweet rythym to keep it grounded.
“The bass is the anchor of the song with guitar, piano and vocal hanging off it,” says frontman Dave Fedorenko (Curbside Journal; Brave Music).
There are no extra notes, he says, with each instrument “used to maximum effect.” The lyric is about “staring down the future and realizing our best years are ahead of us regardless of what noise our culture throws at us.”
Written and recorded in 30 days, the recording, Fedorenko says, was “a personal challenge to start and finish a song in a limited time frame.”
The Flashcrackers forge decades of varied and disparate influences into their own distinctive style of dreampop. Their music is full of seeming contradictions: sparse yet full, melancholy yet uplifting.
We were immediately taken by the amazing motion picture collage video, and the song itself too, for the new track “One Day” from a DIY band in Russia.
“One Day” is a dreamy retro ode, emotive and epic composition that makes us think about living in the present instead of being caught in dreams of a better future.
The track comes by way of NEEDSHES – an indie rock/alternative band founded by songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Otabek ‘Beck’ Salamov who is originally from Uzbekistan.
“I wrote the melody for the verse probably in 2010 in my hometown of Tashkent. The sketch was in a bad condition until 2020. Sometimes it takes something from outside to push you,” Salamov says.
“For me, it was my friend, music supervisor who asked me to show something old school and dreamy enough to be a song for the closing of the movie. This movie has never been finished but I got the song. I can tell for sure this song was easy to sing and record. It’s personal stuff, I can feel it one hundred percent…”
The story about the kite was a “really bright event” of his childhood Salamov exclaims. “All I had was this kite. When you grow up in poverty and have no future, you don’t waste time on dreams. You have to think about how to find your piece of bread tomorrow.”
Salamov encapsulates his art for composing soaring ballads with funk-soul anthems mixed with swagger rock and suffocating alternative. While studying at the music academy, Bek was awarded the first prize for his precision on clarinet.
As a teen, he was drawn to compose metalcore. He growled hardcore music in nightclubs with the cross-painted face. One day he decided to dilute the hard album with melodic undertones.
The switch gravitated to his liking leading to the formation of NEEDSHES in 2013. Among his main influences, there are Jack White, The Killers, James Brown, Queen, RHCP, among others.
Salamov’s music has been featured in commercials in 32 countries of Europe and television/cable programming.
Currently based in Tula (Russia), he continues to expand his eclectic style rooted in David Bowie, Queen, and James Brown in 2022.
Hyde Out is a London hard rock duo by Omar Merlo (from Switzerland and Australia) and Jaka (from Slovenia).
Last week, the duo dropped their sophomore album, Tunnel Vision, featuring a set of 12 original songs with stronger hard rock influences, opening up yet a new style and direction for the band.
Omar and Jaka come from broad creative musical backgrounds and have played in several groups around the world. Their musical style and influences are diverse, ranging from British alt-pop to American folk music, and from pop-rock to hard rock.
Their music often tries to blend different styles and genres, leading to creative and interesting musical results. Hyde Out make music simply out of passion, looking for new ways to bring to life the sounds that defined their own musical origins.
Following a few experimental self-produced demo projects and collaborations, in November 2020 Hyde Out finally released their first studio album, Smoke and Mirrors , a collection of original songs showcasing Hyde Out’s varied influences and softer side.
Two songs from that album have done particularly well: “Alive” and “Smoke and Mirrors” (the latter was a semi-finalist in the 2021 International Song-writing Contest).