Showing posts with label Chris Pellnat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chris Pellnat. Show all posts

Tuesday, 27 September 2022

Shelf Lives - Chris Pellnat - Eliza Edens

Photo - Derek Bremner
Shelf Lives - Skirts & Salads.

South London duo Shelf Lives return this week with new single and video "Skirts & Salads", marking a year since the release of their self-titled debut single "Shelf Life". The new single is released today alongside a typically idiosyncratic video created by Ben Pollard. "Skirts & Salads" is the first new music to be heard following their widely praised debut mini-album 'Yes, offence' - released on the band's own Not Sorry Mom Records imprint in April earlier this year.

Originating from Toronto, Canada and Northampton in the UK respectively, Shelf Lives consists of vocalist Sabrina Di Giulio and guitarist/producer Jonny Hillyard – who now both reside in South London. New single "Skirts & Salads" was co-produced by the band's frequent collaborator SPACE (IDLES, Do Nothing) and was written shortly after the recording of 'Yes, offence' was wrapped, at a time when the pair had the likes of Vegyn, Deftones, Aphex Twin and Turnstile on heavy rotation.

That diverse sounding board helps to assimilate Shelf Lives' own unique sound. An unholy melting pot of explosive electronic percussion, searing guitar work and irrepressible vocal turns, "Skirts & Salads" lyrically finds Sabrina taking aim at societal female stereotypes.

Speaking on the lyrical inspiration behind the new song, Sabrina said: "Skirts & Salads is inspired by general female stereotypes, we've kept it pretty obvious with the lyrics. It's written and delivered in a tongue in cheek manner and we thought it would be interesting incorporating chauvinistic language but using it to our advantage in a way; referring specifically to the line "I like/want my girls like that".  Without really realising it we are highlighting how annoying it is, as well as how deeply rooted these ideas and language are in our society and....sub-consciousness."

A high-octane trashy pop banger based on a porn sample that spawned a shopping list of female stereotypes; rather than mount a soapbox, however, Sabrina absorbs those stereotypes and spits them back out in the chauvinistic hook “I want my girls like that” – delivered in an ironic drawl. The title itself mocks the reductive way society still thinks of women, with Sabrina contemplating the first things that generally come to mind. “I was like… I love a salad? That’s one,” she laughs. “And that’s the whole point. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s about the annoyance of that being the whole definition. What are women? Skirts and salads.”

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Chris Pellnat - Go (Album).

Recorded as the pandemic was ebbing and recently released (Sept. 16), "Go" is a rather positive statement overall, but is colored by darkness as well. 

It brings together unusual instrumental juxtapositions (vibraphone, dulcimer, guitar, clarinet, guitars...) and direct lyrics that build a distinctive message and vision.

Chris Pellnat is a songwriter from Hudson, NY, USA. In addition to solo work, he also plays electric guitar in the band, The Warp/The Weft and is 1/2 of the duo, Teeniest.

Having been featured as a solo artist and with his other musical ventures here on Beehive Candy on a number of occasions, Chris continues to impress both creatively and with some beautifully crafted songs.

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Photo - Anthony Mulcahy
Eliza Edens - Tom and Jerry.

Eliza Edens final single off her beautiful new LP We'll Become the Flowers. Tom and Jerry is a beautiful country-pop tune, buoyant and classic, a nod to childhood cartoons and that deeply relatable running on a treadmill feeling.

Here's Eliza on the song: I watched hours and hours of Tom and Jerry on Saturday mornings when I was a kid. The story is the same every time and yet it’s always so satisfying. Somehow it resurfaced in my mind as a way of explaining how hard we try to accomplish things that are forever out of reach—such as fighting for a dying relationship—even though Tom will just never catch Jerry! It’s an apt metaphor for the tension of always wanting or yearning for something and for two characters always going after each other. I wrote this song to try and find some levity during a difficult breakup.

"On Eliza Edens’ sophomore album We’ll Become the Flowers, she seeks to understand what happens after the end. Whether grappling with heartache or a loved one's mortality, the Brooklyn-based songwriter reimagines endings not as finite events but as devotional experiences that give way to new beginnings. Edens takes inspiration from folk luminaries such as Nick Drake, Karen Dalton and Elizabeth Cotten, sowing her compositions with introspection born from her own grief. What emerges is a glowing collection of songs that serve as a map through tumult, toward hope.

Edens sings and writes with an equally tender reverie as in her 2020 debut album Time Away From Time. But where We’ll Become the Flowers diverges, is in its narrative vulnerability. Each song is bursting: with sorrow, with anger, with the miracle of existence. “I wrote this album out of emotional necessity,” Edens says. ""I had just gone through a breakup. And around the same time, my mother was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease. I was spending a lot of my time trying to understand what it means to watch the hopeful person who raised me seem to slowly fade away before my eyes.” As the pandemic loomed, Edens turned to music: ""This project was a rope I used to pull myself out of misery, to view the despair I was feeling from a different angle. It was also my escape.”

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Monday, 22 February 2021

Chris Pellnat - Mister K - Bobby Parent

Chris Pellnat - Crossing (Album).

Chris Pellnat is a songwriter from Hudson, NY, USA. In addition to solo work and collaborations, he also plays electric guitar in the band, The Warp/The Weft.

His new album released a few days ago is called 'Crossing'. Chris explains why that's the album title.

"Why Crossing”?

Crossing the line

Crossing over

Crossing the rubicon

Crossing the divide...

"You get the idea: This album is about moving on to something new and unexpected - musically, spiritually and as part of the natural arc of life. But it’s not a dreary lecture - it playfully upends indie norms in a distinctive way, with lots of dulcimer, vibraphone and guitars."

Chris and the band The Warp/The Weft have been featured here a number of times in the past. I never tire of hearing new music from either party, the freshness, creativity and warmth is always notable. Although these day's I rarely comment on new material (it's a given that I like it - see the comments on the top of the sidebar), I'm happy to make Chris Pellnat and the new album an exception.


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Mister K - Tamarak.

Lorette West, MB's folk-pop musician Kevin Roy Kratsch — known professionally as the cosmic Canadian balladeer that is Mister K — has just released his debut album, In Event of Moon Disaster, and single “Tamarack” — available now!

To celebrate, Mister K has recorded a live, acoustic rendition of the song from the comfort of his own backyard in the region of Lorette West. The powerful performance of “Tamarack” features the aspiring musician’s wife Avery on backup vocals and guitar — and their adorable bulldog Luna, for emotional support.

Mister K points out that one of the sonic “easter eggs” found in the new album comes from his little canine companion; every time the word “moon” is sung on In Event of Moon Disaster, Luna rings a bell.

“If you listen hard enough,” he adds.

Overall, In Event of Moon Disaster is described as a musical journey through highs and lows, or “a pendulum swung through the hardship of darker days” (like the song), according to Mister K. Inspired by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it’s ultimately about overcoming adversity, emerging from the darkness and finding the light at the end of the tunnel; or even some sense of hope.

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Bobby Parent - Dogs.

“I saw an angel in the marble and I carved till I set him free” – a Michelangelo quote that would be etched in my mind as I started on my new journey in sobriety. A journey that, at first, would reveal the painful truth about myself and then reveal the genuine beauty and generosity of others. Finally with all my desperation and vulnerability revealed and all my substantial failures confessed, I could be free. Free to have others lead me, free to have others teach me, free to start over.

The album, Real Love, is in part about that spiritual journey and in part about the rediscovery of music and art. I wrote these songs to help me heal and to help me grow. “Emotionally insecure, wrought with fear, anger and self-doubt…all of it, buried under an ego designed to deceive and manipulate the truth of who I was to others and to myself” – this is the harsh and critical self-analysis where the story of Real Love begins.

Addiction and alcoholism defined almost my entire adult life. They were the tools I would use to self-medicate from a disease I didn’t know existed, or at least one that I couldn’t dare admit to having. A disease that eventually, would destroy, from the outside in, everything I ever knew or cared about. My family, my friends, my career, until it had nothing else to destroy but me. By the end of the chaos, with everything and everyone that was ever important to me, injured and gone, I was left with one critical question. How do I move on from here?

The answer was one step at a time with the encouragement and generosity of friends. The potential that my story could perhaps help others, as others had helped me, fuelled me as I embarked on this recording project to tell my story. Not a story about rags to riches or infamy to greatness but just one of hope. For all those that have or still wander the depths of chaos and despair, the self-destructive calamity that is addiction, as I have, there is a way out of that darkness, there is light, there is hope. There is that angel in all of us. This is my story of Real Love.

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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...