This spring Cactus Lee released a new self-titled album (with R. Crumb artwork) via the esteemed Austin label Western Vinyl. Yesterday they released a music video for the single "Got A Heart Like Rainwater Blues." Culled from Super-8 tour footage this spring, the video captures the nostalgia-tinted quality of Cactus Lee's timeless Texas music.
Fronted by Austin songwriter Kevin Dehan, Cactus Lee's music shares the outsider spirit of the Lone Star state -- the dusty dive bars, the humming jukeboxes, the packed sweaty nightclubs. With a lilt to his voice, Dehan explores the highs and lows of loneliness and self-discovery. Often backed by a pedal steel and a shuffling drumbeat, his music evokes summers long-gone, days spent in the heat and humidity. Throughout you’ll find Dehan coming to terms with change and reflecting on life as memories float by and friendships grow.
The band has toured the US heavily, with headline shows in New York, Chicago, Nashville, and Los Angeles. Their music has been included on Spotify's Fresh Folk, Emerging Americana, Fresh Finds Folk, and NPR's New Music Friday playlists.
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| Photo - Seb Gardner |
Today, UK-based duo Sons of Sevilla announced the upcoming release of Street Light Moon, an album built for endless summers and retro-futurist reveries. Produced by GRAMMY-winning Adrian Quesada of Black Pumas, the album was inspired by a world's worth of influences and the pursuit of a vintage, real sound. The duo of brothers Henry and Reuben Smith have also released the lead single “Butterfly,” an immersive song that conjures up the tranquil daze of Spanish summers.
“We don’t sing about where we’re from,” says Henry. “The music escapes it. We’re trying very hard not to be an English indie rock band, because the world already has a lot of those. Instead, we’re trying to step into something else… and somewhere else.”
With a sound that exists out of time and off the map, the band draws from a world’s worth of influences: the family-owned British pub where brothers Henry and Reuben Smith grew up, watching their parents sling drinks as songs by John Prine and J.J. Cale played over the speakers; the marina in Gibraltar where they spent three weeks aboard an old fishing trawler, writing the album's songs as waves splashed against the dock; the recording studio in Austin, Texas, where they recorded Street Light Moon with Adrian Quesada and a small group of multi-instrumentalists.
Raised on the outskirts of Leeds, Henry and Reuben spent countless hours in their parents' taproom as pre-teens – all that time indoors was a musical education, introducing the young boys to songs by Buena Vista Social Club, Bob Dylan, Terry Reid, Neil Young, and Gene Clark. The summer months offered a different sort of education, with the family leaving their hometown of Featherstone and heading to the Spanish city of Sevilla. The area's Mediterranean climate felt downright exotic after a long, chilly British winter, and the new city helped broaden Henry and Reuben's appreciation for different cultures. Years later, when they began recording their debut album, the brothers nodded to those summertime vacations abroad by naming the project "Sons of Sevilla.
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| Photo - Clare Marie Bailey |
This Friday, July 11, Gwenno releases her hugely anticipated and already highly acclaimed new album Utopia via Heavenly Recordings. Following the singles "Dancing On Volcanoes”, “War” and “Y Gath”, today Gwenno shares a ravishing video for the album’s gorgeous and dreamlike title track. “Utopia” paints a picture of someone living their life against the rapidly fading colors of Las Vegas. That story is sung over an ever-evolving groove that sounds like a Philly Soul band taking Moon Safari on an exciting new journey into the cosmos. The accompanying video was shot “Casino”-style on location in Las Vegas by Claire Marie Bailey.
43 years into her life, Gwenno Saunders has been many people. The disaffected Cardiff schoolgirl; the teenage Las Vegas dancer; the singer in indie pop group The Pipettes. There was a turn in a Bollywood film, a nightclub tour, a stint cleaning floors in an East London pub. Long before she would become an acclaimed solo songwriter in both Welsh and Cornish, a winner of the Welsh Music Prize, a nominee for the Mercury, a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedh, there were the days of Nevada, London, Brighton; of Irish dancing, techno clubs, messiness and chaos.
Utopia, Saunders’ fourth solo album, is an extraordinary exploration of all of these selves. If the singer regards her first three solo records — 2014’s Y Dydd Olaf, 2018’s Le Kov and 2022’s Tresor as “childhood records”, rooted in her upbringing, her parents, her formative identity, then Utopia captures a time of self-determination and experimentation. These are songs of discovery, of the years between being someone’s daughter and becoming someone’s wife and someone’s mother. They range from floor-fillers to piano ballads, via contributions from Cate Le Bon and H. Hawkline, and encompass William Blake, a favorite Edrica Huws poem, and the Number 73 bus. It is her finest work to date.
There is a sense of revelation to Utopia, a feeling markedly different to that of previous records. Having released three albums in Welsh and Cornish, Utopia is Gwenno’s first album recorded predominantly in English, and presents a very different side to her life and songwriting.
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