Showing posts with label Allison Lorenzen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Allison Lorenzen. Show all posts

Monday, 3 July 2023

Paris Paloma - Allison Lorenzen - Alex Nicol - Gal Musette

Paris Paloma - yeti feat. Old Sea Brigade.

Singer-songwriter Paris Paloma has released her enchanting new single “yeti,” the anticipated follow-up to her break-out single “labour”. Featuring vocals from acclaimed indie singer/songwriter/producer Old Sea Brigade, the song offers a unique perspective on the transformative power of closure in a relationship.

Guided by her captivating vocals and lyrical prowess, Paris takes listeners on an emotive journey through the complexities of human connection. “‘yeti’ is about the quiet, healing realization that comes with giving oneself closure after a relationship; when you’ve moved through a period of intense intertwinement - almost obsession - with another, and what feels like the vast chasm of time and space between that passion, and the point of indifference towards them that is reached in the healed-over aftermath.

It’s not a spiteful, false indifference, nor a bitter apathy, but a breathing-out of sorts, when those feelings let themselves out quietly in the night, without saying goodbye or marking the day. The gentle accompanying vocals from Ben Cramer of Old Sea Brigade completes the presence of both parties, who share in this realization, so these two people become eerily connected in their acceptance of how far apart they have grown,” elaborates Paris.

 

======================================================================

Allison Lorenzen - MTO.

Colorado-based Allison Lorenzen's latest track "MTO (More Than Once)" is out now. Weaving some of the most muscular guitar work we've heard in Allison's work around her buzzing synths and rafter-reaching vocals, "MTO" sounds like the final climax of a Mark Fischer-influenced hauntological prom scene. Leaning into the well-deserved Julee Cruise and Kate Bush comparisons, the resonant core of "MTO" is a meditation on the cyclical way patterns retreat and return several times before we recognize them - and make choices to either embrace or change them.

The grace for self required for this work is one that Lorenzen is well acquainted with. After a nomadic stint following the breakup of her band School Dance, Allison wrote this song while contemplating how this era in her life would close. This led her operating a hot springs in Southern Colorado where sojourners come to rest and recuperate.

"MTO" was written and recorded in the shipping container that doubles as Allison's living quarters and recording studio. Following on the heels of 2022's "The Fourth Cycle", and her beloved cover of "Glycerine" with Midwife, "MTO" presages a follow up to 2021's critically acclaimed solo debut record Tender released on Whited Sepulchre Records.

======================================================================

Alex Nicol - Hollywood.

Emerging like the score of a silver screen classic that never was, the Montreal artist’s latest single ensnares with all the potency and poison of its namesake. Casting strings of a knife-edge tension against the unexpected twists that unfold with its dramatic key changes, “Hollywood” finds Nicol play a starring role in a song of downbeat and disturbing Lynchian thrills.

A song about living with the tension of unrealised aspirations while striving for gratitude in the present, “Hollywood” hits home like a bruised lament for what could have been and what may never be.

“I’ll never go to Hollywood, I’ll never be a star” sighs Nicol, seemingly stepping into the well-trodden shoes of an actor down on their luck and feeling the weight of the world. Yet for all the despair that surrounds its lead protagonist, a cathartic chorus adorned with glimmering and atmospheric arrangements finds Nicol offer a silver lining of hope; a contentment to be found in the acceptance of our fates. Mirroring some of the resentments and realisations that have earmarked chapters of his own life story, Alex explains:

“Lyrically, “Hollywood” is a reflective song in which I begrudgingly accept that I have failed to find success yet, with Hollywood symbolizing the fame-in-youth narrative that, because I am no longer young, I will never be able to claim. But if the verses are where I list all the things I will never do, in the choruses I remind myself of all that nourishes me at home, and how far I have come. I have always considered myself a late bloomer, and Hollywood ends optimistically: me and the great blue sky, and all the opportunity that it conveys. Hollywood is a signpost in my path as a musician, marking the end of my youth, in which I was ravaged by self-doubt, and the beginning of my next chapter, in which the sky's the limit.”

======================================================================

Gal Musette - Into the Blue.

Gal Musette is the artist name used by Grace Freeman, who began writing piano and guitar based lyrical compositions and performing at open mics in her home city of San Clemente, CA at the age of 10. Her graceful approach to melody-driven indie-folk has captured audiences all over Southern California.

At age 14, inspired by The Magnetic Fields’ triple album 69 Love Songs, Gal recorded her own collection titled 70 Love Songs, which caught the attention of the band, and won her an opening slot on a few of their Midwestern U.S. tour dates. In more recent years, Gal has opened for several renowned artists such as Macy Gray, Suzanne Vega, Todd Snyder, and Donavon Frankenreiter. While her artist name is taken from bal-musette, the accordion-based, waltz-style French instrumental music, Gal’s primary inspiration is drawn from songwriters including Joni Mitchell, Regina Spektor, Björk, Cocteau Twins, Burt Bacharach, Big Thief and The Cure.

In October 2021, Gal released her debut album, Backwards Lullaby, featuring a vocal duet with one of her biggest musical inspirations, Rufus Wainwright. The record explores the pangs of hopeless romances and unrequited love, what it’s like to move beyond idealized love into the acceptance of what is real and constant, as well as the cyclical nature of life and love in relationships. In July 2022, Gal released an orchestral EP consisting of three re-imagined cuts from Backwards Lullaby featuring the musicianship of Via Mardot a talented multi-instrumentalist based in Detroit, Michigan.

Gal's latest single "Into the Blue" is a breezy, euphoric song immersing the listener into a free-flowing and dreamlike aura of kaleidoscopic sounds and hopeful narratives. Gal confides, "Into The Blue" is "about letting go of all the expectations I clung on so tightly to, and attempting to break the delusional patterns of my mind, self-loathing and narrow minded thinking. The catharsis of realizing the lack of control I have even over my own mind."

======================================================================

Tuesday, 4 October 2022

Nathaniel Bellows - Allison Lorenzen - Hannah Schneider - Derrero

Nathaniel Bellows - Well Water (feat. Shara Nova).

My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Nova joins Nathaniel Bellows on the single “Well Water,” just released through Harmon Blunt Music. The pairing–built upon multiple past collaborations– creates a conversation between the two contrasting voices, which in turn captures texture, contrast, atmosphere, beauty, and surprise.

“Well Water” swims in introspection while inventorying “the self” in moments of challenge, ambiguity, indecision, or indirection. Simply put, the message is: The search for one’s place in the world–or in one’s life–is ongoing, as long as you’re willing to participate. Bellows says, “I wrote this song throughout the pandemic, and in the wake of my father’s death, all the while reflecting on the question: What makes us who we are?”

The contrast of growing up surrounded by the quiet beauty of the natural world in rural New England and now living in New York City’s urban landscape creates tension in Bellows’ music. The songs are an ongoing dialogue between internal, reflective wonder and an external sense of outward, urgent searching.

Bellows works in three creative fields simultaneously–writing, music, and visual art– exploring a cohesive artistic point of view among the three mediums to undergird his songs. He says, “I explore emotional terrain with these various creative outlets in an attempt to understand–through different vantage points–what matters to me.” He writes about memory, affect, family, legacy, the natural world, human frailty, injury, redemption, and resilience. He says, “I’m interested in unresolved images and fragments of unfinished thought and dialogue.” The engine of most of his work–writing, music, and artwork–is the constant process of reconciling the past while existing, in an ever-changing state, in the present day.

======================================================================

Photo - Jake Stephens
Allison Lorenzen - The Fourth Cycle.

As the weather is starting to cool down a bit we proudly bring you this appropriately autumnal single release of "The Fourth Cycle"  by Denver based Allison Lorenzen. A staple in her live shows, "The Fourth Cycle" centers Lorenzen's prodigious and classically trained piano and features a particularly tasty pop hook that is difficult to shake once it gets it's hooks in you.

Lyrically, it seems that Lorenzen is turning her face towards the other side of the cathartic nature of the critically acclaimed Tender released last year on Whited Sepulchre Records. Lorenzen states that "The Fourth Cycle", "explores themes of intimacy and change, and the spectrum of emotion -  from grief to empowerment - that arise from facing and allowing said change." If Tender charted a way out by going through the crushing span of personal tragedy, then "The Fourth Cycle" stands on the other side of it, looking back a bit more wisened and grateful.

Recorded, mixed, and co-produced by Mark Anderson in Colorado in 2022. The song was written on piano and then the recording was built around a live drum take which was sent through analog machines such as Space Echo, Binson Echo Rec, and spring reverb to create counter rhythms, bringing the track to life.

======================================================================

Hannah Schneider - Ocean Letters (album).

From the beginning of her career, Hannah Schneider has established herself as a unique musician on the Danish scene. With her love of strong melodies and well crafted lyrics, she constantly treads new artistic paths, carrying the weight of contemplation as a companion. On her new album Ocean Letters, the classic piano composition and the evocative electronic elements form a seamless kinship and create a picture-saturated tale of time.

Ocean Letters is Hannah Schneider's first solo album in 7 years. Behind her, she has 3 highly acclaimed solo albums in her own name, while in recent years she has been busy in the electronic duo AyOwA, and the performance project Philip I Schneider. Hannah has been nominated for several Danish music awards and has performed all over Europe, the UK and the US with her captivating solo performances, where she live samples, loops and creates playful soundscapes on stage. In addition, her voice has appeared in several films and TV series, including the national DR TV series Ride Upon The Storm.

With Ocean Letters, she seeks out new landscapes again. The songs create an intimate connection between the neoclassical and the modern, the near and the universal, and emphasize her cinematic, evocative expression with strength and a human humility. The pandemic as a new worldwide condition became the beginning of the new songs. The album is inspired by the book Havbrevene  (The Sea Letters) by Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen - an exchange of letters between the sister oceans the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean who write together about life in the sea and on earth. 

Central to the songs are the piano and Hannah's spherical and evocative vocals, while the productions create budding hopes with flickering electronic elements. And while it's still the strong melodies that are the focal point for Hannah Schneider, the record marks a new sonic path, with a cinematic sound that creates strong images in the listener's mind.

After the years in the internationally recognized duo AyOwA, where Hannah has written and sung in Danish, she again wanted to write in English with the new songs. But the way of writing - in more direct, minimalist lines, which come from the spoken language has stuck with her ever since. “You write in a different way in your mother tongue. And even though my father was American and I grew up with English as my second language, I had to go around my mother tongue to find my own way in the English lyrics”.

======================================================================

Derrero - High Side.

Celebrated Welsh band Derrero continue an unstoppable 26-year trajectory with their new album Curvy Lines. Recorded back in Nov 2021 the album sees Derrero exploring new ways of working to expand upon their sonic palette and distinctive use of cut and paste song writing. Many ideas were traded across the web and new material was rapidly realised during 4 days of marathon studio sessions.

Maintaining a resolutely DIY approach to music making Curvy Lines demonstrates a strident and confident band who remain steadfastly unafraid to swim against the tide and self-produce and self-release uncompromising music outside of the mainstream

The members of Derrero all met at Falmouth Art college in 1993: after studies, they evolved in Brighton before settling in Newport, Wales. There they released their debut single Tiny Shoes on Size 8 Records in 1997 and also their debut LP later that same year after signing to Big Noise records in Cardiff.

Since the bands foundation Derrero have released 4 critically acclaimed albums and toured with the likes of Super Furry Animals, Catatonia, Sebadoh and Granddaddy as well as collaborating on the film ‘Beautiful Mistake’ with John Cale. The band also recorded three sessions for the legendary John Peel.

======================================================================

Sunday, 21 November 2021

Tomato Flower - Chrystabell - Twin Rains - Julie Christensen - Allison Lorenzen

Tomato Flower - Red Machine.

Baltimore band Tomato Flower have introduced themselves with a new single and video off their forthcoming debut EP Gold Arc, out February 11th, 2022 on Ramp Local.

"Red Machine" is a utopian pop song that envisions global transformation. With lyrics spanning the city and country toward a vision of worldwide solidarity, the single takes the form of a compact pop single to imagine a joyous future. Fittingly, the video -- directed and edited by the band's Austyn Wohlers -- is a panoramic vision of industrial and rural landscapes, focusing on images of movement and transfer. Blending images of industrial modernity with pastoral life, the video reflects the song's imagined future of a transformed city and country.

About Gold Arc: How might a Utopia exist? If the goal is social harmony amidst free-thinking citizens, where do the moral sets and ideals come from? It might include existing peacefully and respectfully with the natural world—agriculture and industry on an equal playing field. Maybe, an earthly utopia might not be what we expect. It might not be constant, and it might only exist in minute moments. For the Baltimore quartet Tomato Flower, utopia exists in the compromise between escapism and intellectual inquiry, between conceptual philosophy and pop-rock bliss.

Their debut EP Gold Arc finds Tomato Flower at multiple crossroads. Their sonic curiosity plays with tension between sweetness and a destructive heaviness. Conceptually, Gold Arc hungers for an alternate reality. Sometimes that is a “sustainable paradise,” as drummer Mike Alfieri puts it. Or, on “Lovers Arc,” it’s a desire to be loved constantly. “It's not that all these songs are straightforwardly positive, though,” explains Austyn Wohlers. “I think all of the songs are about longing for a different world and a different future. But, they take various shapes,” she says. “The song ‘Truth Lounge,’ for example, has a lot of pain and longing for a different world. ‘World to Come,’ has maybe a cultish edge to it.”

==========================================================================

Photo - Mathieu Bitton
Chrystabell - Midnight Star.

Chrystabell shares “Midnight Star,” the enchanting title track off her new album, which releases January 21 via Love Conquered Records. Accompanied by a music video starring wayward alien lifeforms seeking redemption amongst the crystal planets, the album’s opening track marks the start of a wide-eyed odyssey into the great beyond. The video was written/directed by Polish filmmaker and longtime collaborator, Archon, and featured this week at FLOOD Magazine, who said “The single slowly progresses from a collage of spacey sounds, from ambient synths to an energized string section, before erupting into a pulsing, dance-friendly beat.”

"The lights go down, the curtains go up and the musical quest of the album Midnight Star begins with the song ‘Midnight Star,’ setting the tone of high drama, mania and ultimately transcendence,” says Chrystabell. “The trip from impending doom to cosmic dance party takes under 5 minutes, so you can do it over and over again, without a shred of space trash.”

She continues, “When I asked Archon to direct, I knew he could take it way out. I was not disappointed. He meticulously manufactured an alternate reality, literally sculpting worlds with his hands to bring the vision to life. This is one of four videos he made for the record, this grand and bizarre voyage is just getting started.”

A sci-fi fantasia assembled as a collection of episodes, Midnight Star tells the story of a beneficent being seeking to save humanity from life on a troubled Earth. Chrystabell fully transports listeners into a dimension of her own making with a collision of post-disco, synth-pop and space-age psychedelia. Her unearthly storytelling permeates with a worldly insight, offering up tender instruction for living more ecstatically. BlackBook recently praised the debut single “Breathe Into Euphoria,” declaring “the new track gleefully draws on the enduring tenets of ’80s synth-pop, landing ultimately somewhere between Kate Bush and Nina Hagen – yet also sounding somehow spot on for 2021.”

==========================================================================

Twin Rains - All Of The Angels.

Toronto dream pop duo, Twin Rains, is about to release their sophomore album, Unreal City, but the mood is less than celebratory.

“This album almost didn’t get made,” says the band’s Jay Merrow of the new LP, the follow-up to 2016’s critically acclaimed Automatic Hand. Although the band’s first album established the duo as songwriters to watch —earning them a contract with Rough Trade Publishing and a song placement in a Seth Rogen film — the last couple years introduced physical and mental health struggles that almost unraveled the duo’s resolve to produce another work.

“It’s also been hard to find the energy to release it, to believe it even matters to put out music right now,” confesses singer Christine Stoesser. “I don’t want to add more confusion or pain to the world, but this is a ‘dark night of the soul’ kind of album. You could say I’ve been going through an existential crisis, something like that. And I don’t know if that’s relatable or just depressing and unessential.”

==========================================================================

Julie Christensen - Find My Way.

When vocalist and songwriter Julie Christensen first heard Nashville singer-songwriter Kevin Gordon perform, she instantly remembered the first time a song made her cry. Having built her career forging connections through song — including stints as Leonard Cohen’s backing vocalist — Christensen knows the value of a sticky melody and well-crafted lyrics. But Gordon’s artful music and cinematically sweeping, vividly drawn emotional and physical landscapes reached her on a deeper level; she recognized their terrain, because she’d traveled it, too.

Christensen and her band, Stone Cupid, recorded Gordon’s “Saint on a Chain” for their 2016 album, The Cardinal. But in 2020, she decided someone ought to record an entire collection of the Louisiana native’s songs. When she suggested it, she mentioned “someone more famous” should have the honors. “No,” he responded. “I’m glad it’s you.” The result, 11 From Kevin: Songs of Kevin Gordon, will be released on January 21, 2022 — Christensen’s birthday — on Wirebird Records.

Christensen fudged the numbers a little, turning “Heart’s Not in It” and “Down to the Well” into a mini medley. “I had 11 songs picked that I could hear myself doing,” she explains. “Then I realized I needed a song drawn from his Iowa experiences.”
Iowa is one place where they literally did travel the same terrain: both attended the University of Iowa. A Hawkeye state native, Christensen majored in Asian studies there. Gordon earned a master’s degree in poetry at the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop program.

“You can’t sing a poem, and you can’t read a song,” Christensen asserts. “But the way he elides his words and melodies together, they’re just really haunting to me.”

==========================================================================

Allison Lorenzen - Tender (Album).

Still reeling from the gut-punch of the distortion filled lead single “Vale” released earlier this year, many of us wondered what a full-length LP by the Denver based artist would sound like. Using the dystopian fever-dream of the aforementioned Midwife collaboration as a noise floor, the 8 songs on Tender spiral upwards like worried smoke against a low cloud ceiling, reaching towards the light but always within sight of the loamy earth surface. Shepherding lush, heavy compositions by way of synths, keys, guitars and subtle percussion, Tender finds Allison Lorenzen at her most vulnerable. Nursing old wounds from the end of a relationship and her musical project School Dance, Tender is also filled a renewed sense of heartbreak-made-triumphant that comes after the wisdom of solitude, allowing oneself to be taken care of by family and friends and, finally, documenting the way through.

The way through figures heavily on Tender. Imagery of passages through liminal spaces are replete. “Vales” occur as emotional valleys as well as McCarthy-inspired end times, “Mirrors” are portals into deep self-reflection, “Tentacles” keep pulling us back into old patterns, old memories. Musically, this non-linear approach to healing is explored through songs that move from light to dark and back again, often within the same song, if not within the same phrase.

Lorenzen’s voice has an uncanny choral quality to it. Taking a phrase that would have sounded quite beautiful sung straight in her smoky, ephemeral delivery, Lorenzen frequently raises the stakes by taking a single word through several octave changes within the same breath. Treading similar musical paths to Beach House in her penchant for writing quiet, world-shifting crescendos, the nocturnal, Styx-guiding Dream Pop of Julee Cruise and the heavy, distortion filled guitars and world-weary vocals of Miserable and frequent Tender collaborator Midwife, Lorenzen’s work comes alive in its own cinematic universe.

==========================================================================

Tuesday, 28 September 2021

Allison Lorenzen - Alyssa Gengos - Séan McCann

Allison Lorenzen - Mirrors.

Still reeling from the gut-punch of the distortion filled lead single “Vale” released earlier this year, many of us wondered what a full-length LP by the Denver based artist would sound like. Using the dystopian fever-dream of the aforementioned Midwife collaboration as a noise floor, the 8 songs on Tender spiral upwards like worried smoke against a low cloud ceiling, reaching towards the light but always within sight of the loamy earth surface. Shepherding lush, heavy compositions by way of synths, keys, guitars and subtle percussion, Tender finds Allison Lorenzen at her most vulnerable. Nursing old wounds from the end of a relationship and her musical project School Dance, Tender is also filled a renewed sense of heartbreak-made-triumphant that comes after the wisdom of solitude, allowing oneself to be taken care of by family and friends and, finally, documenting the way through.

The way through figures heavily on Tender. Imagery of passages through liminal spaces are replete. “Vales” occur as emotional valleys as well as McCarthy-inspired end times, “Mirrors” are portals into deep self-reflection, “Tentacles” keep pulling us back into old patterns, old memories. Musically, this non-linear approach to healing is explored through songs that move from light to dark and back again, often within the same song, if not within the same phrase.

Lorenzen’s voice has an uncanny choral quality to it. Taking a phrase that would have sounded quite beautiful sung straight in her smoky, ephemeral delivery, Lorenzen frequently raises the stakes by taking a single word through several octave changes within the same breath. Treading similar musical paths to Beach House in her penchant for writing quiet, world-shifting crescendos, the nocturnal, Styx-guiding Dream Pop of Julee Cruise and the heavy, distortion filled guitars and world-weary vocals of Miserable and frequent Tender collaborator Midwife, Lorenzen’s work comes alive in its own cinematic universe.

Recorded in Colorado, Tender is Allison Lorenzen’s debut full length. Originally intended to come out this summer, an unprecedented supply chain disruption has caused the album’s release date to be moved back to November 2021. Whited Sepulchre Records will be releasing a new single every month prior to the album’s release date.


==========================================================================

Alyssa Gengos - Mechanical Sweetness.

Brand new Egghunt Records signing Alyssa Gengos today releases her new single/video Mechanical Sweetness.

Quote from Alyssa: “Mechanical Sweetness” is a song about my immense frustration with the way we form human (and more specifically, romantic) connections nowadays. Social media and dating apps have turned human interaction into a painful game. These digital ways of communication have caused me so much stress, and my attempts at forging relationships through them have been short-lived and veiled with thin layers of politeness. 

When the charade between two people who don’t really know each other finally ends, these relationships can be exposed for what they frequently are: unbalanced, unhealthy, and lacking compassion. Sonically, this song mirrors my experiences with largely digital relationships. In the beginning, there are quiet moments of sparse communication where anxiety runs high, eventually leading to an outburst of emotion followed by a period of insecurity and self-questioning.

==========================================================================

Séan McCann - Shantyman's Life.

What does it mean to be a “Shantyman”? Much less know what he may do with his time? His life? Leave it to Canadian Celtic folk-rocker Séan McCann to spin the yarn that’ll provide all the answers in this, his new single available now!

Depending upon which side of the Atlantic your ancestors come from, a “Shantyman” is either a simple sailor, or a lumberjack, who leads his fellow labourers in song. Listen to Newfoundland’s McCann, and his new acoustic fable of the same name, and find yourself as both lost in the woods or at sea with an album chock full of anecdotes, and spirited arrangements.

A musician by birth, a professional songwriter since the 80s, McCann has become a tour de force in Canada’s rich musical landscape and history — not only as a solo artist, but also as a former bandmate of world-renowned and beloved folk rock band Great Big Sea, a group he co-founded and performed with until his exit in 2013.

Over his incredible career, McCann has dropped five successful solo albums, each touching on subjects ranging from life in his home-country to tackling cultural moments like the infamous Fort McMurray, Alberta, wildfires (2016) in which he partnered with the Canadian Red Cross. In conjunction with his philanthropy work, McCann also went on to organize a songwriters benefit in 2017 in support of veterans suffering with PTSD and addiction, enlisting his fellow musician friends, Joel Plaskett, Sarah Harmer and Jeremy Fisher. McCann’s good deeds would not go unnoticed – the musician earned the Order of Canada for his advocacy in 2020.

Coming to terms with the hauntings of his past, which ultimately resulted in a spiralling battle with alcohol addiction, coming clean and owning his truth has been paramount to who he’s become as a husband, a father, a musician, and a human. Armed with the strength and support of his wife, Andrea Aragon, McCann co-penned his first book One Good Reason (April, 2020). “It’s the story of how love saved their marriage, and music saved his life. It is the story of a man freed from the weight of a lie; a man who is changing his narrative and never forgetting... that he is not alone.”

==========================================================================

Zanna Black - Smoke and Mirrors Sound System - Remy Garrison - The Names - The Inciters

Zanna Black - This Town. With melancholic guitar and the loveliest vocals, Zanna Black lets out into the world her latest single, ‘This Tow...