Showing posts with label Foyer Red. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Foyer Red. Show all posts

Friday, 24 March 2023

Anna Elyse - Lilac Haze - Tipps and Obermiller - Alice Howe - Mary Lee Kortes - Foyer Red

Anna Elyse - Faster Than We ran.

A poet at heart, Anna Elyse is a singer, songwriter and producer who draws inspiration from prolific songwriter like Neil Young and looks to modernize her sound with influences from  producers like No ID, Mike Dean and Illangelo."I always found solace in music, especially when I connected to the stories. And I hope to provide that for someone else."

After graduating from UCLA, with a concentration in Creative Writing (Poetry), she went on to Audio Engineering School and found that one of her very favorite places to be was in the studio. She was used to spending many hours in the dance studio growing up, and stepping into the recording studio was like slipping into an immersive world she knew she fit.

She worked behind the scenes in recording studios and serendipitously ended up on a few prominent hip-hop albums (Logic's albums: Under Pressure, The Incredible True Story, and No Pressure). But, it wasn't until a couple of years ago that she decided to let go of her reservations and release her own music. Her self-produced and mixed debut single, "Trading Glances" landed her on several upcoming folk-pop playlists (Greywood Records, Dave Powers, HQIndie).

Anna Elyse is excited to share her newest track, "Faster Than We Ran" with the world on March 23rd. Here's what she had to say about it: "This song came to me one foggy morning at the beach while staring out at the water and the thick mist hanging over everything. It felt like I was about to watch a portal open up into a different world. 'Faster Than We Ran' is about looking back on something that was magic and feeling immense gratitude for it. It may have been short-lived and incongruent or wrong in some ways, but it still lit you up and that's what life is about. It's looking back and saying, 'That was so awesome, the human experience is such a magical thing.' even when it's imperfect".

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Lilac Haze - The Ghost That I Once Knew / Lilac Haze.

Bath-based dream pop artist Lilac Haze is pleased to announce the release of her debut double singles ‘The Ghost That I Once Knew // Lilac Haze’ today March 24th 2023. Lilac Haze is the project name for Bath-based songwriter Katrina Swift. Greatly influenced by bands of the ‘80s/’90s, Swift draws inspiration from The Cure, All About Eve, Eva Cassidy and Fleetwood Mac, combining atmospheric and ethereal textures with a sense of nostalgic romance.

Lilac Haze’s stunning debut double singles The Ghost That I Once Knew // Lilac Haze were produced by Calum Wotherspoon (Nightswimming) and mastered by Adam Ayan (Paul McCartney, Lana Del Ray, Carrie Underwood), with guitarist Sam Allan (Nightswimming) and drummer Torin Moore (Nightswimming) collaborating on the tracks to create the backdrop for Swift’s hypnotic vocals.

With a background performing across the U.S and Europe fronting ensembles and orchestras and classically trained with a high, gentle voice, Swift’s angelic, haunting vocals gently soar upon soft guitars, delicate strings and dramatic synths.

Speaking about the inspiration behind the singles, Swift explains, “In December 2021, I wrote Ghost after a period of self-reflection during a time when I felt unsure and lost in my new surroundings. It’s a reflection of the loss of innocence as we mature… a farewell to your old self. Lilac Haze however is a song written for anyone who has been affected by loved ones lost to Alzheimer’s and Dementia.”

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Tipps and Obermiller - Thick As Theives.

It took no time at all for songwriters Hilary Tipps and Steve Obermiller to fall in love and start their lives together. But it was a decade of trying to create life, deal with death and build careers before they wrote their first songs together.

“Love (and Other Mysteries”) is a debut album that bursts open a dream deferred: tunes written long ago, newly developed duets, and their first three co - writes that promise great things for their future. It is a collection of songs with equal parts contemplation (Willow Tree, Heart, Rewind Repeat), wisdom (Mrs. Montgomery, These Hands, Jack), and simple fun (Thick as Thieves, Ferris Wheel, My Love Will). The album ends with a raucous version of Trouble in Mind, recorded in 2017 and added as a tribute to late friend and guitarist Joe Ward.

This is a songwriter’s record that defies genre: folky in its roots, dabbling in country, jazz and rock. Yet, it avoids being too many things. Trey Ware (drums), Aden Bubeck (bass), and Matt Tedder (guitar) give this album a distinct continuity. Their personalities can be felt weaving through Hilary and Steve’s well - crafted songs and offer a through line to the whole of the album.

Though you might call them Folk or Americana, Hilary Tipps and Steve Obermiller are not genre - specific songwriters. Just as they write about every aspect of life and living, they use every style of music to suit the song at hand.

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Alice Howe - Love Has No Rules.

LA-based, Boston-bred, singer-songwriter Alice Howe new single "Love Has No Rules," is out today March 24th. The song is about those unexpected things that happen when it comes to matters of the heart - you can't help who you fall for, and love definitely has no rules. "Love Has No Rules" is from Alice's forthcoming LP, Circumstance, out April 21st.

Recorded in two sessions at the legendary FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Circumstance chronicles Alice's personal and musical evolution. The songs evoke both the classic singer-songwriters and the seminal music that once filled airwaves, roadhouses, and juke joints.

It’s a deep, personal journey across a soundscape dotted with blues, folk, country, soul, and rock, a personal, soulful nod to her influences and the music she loves. In spirit, it draws from admired singers – Alison Krauss or the 1970s Laurel Canyon circle — but its soul is pure Alice Howe.

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Mary Lee Kortes - Green Sand.

Singer, songwriter and author Mary Lee Kortes has shared a video for her new song “Green Sand” which features Joe Jackson on backing vocals. “Green Sand is partly inspired by the story of Bonnie and Clyde,” writes Kortes, “by the envy and coveting of the riches and plenty of others so prominent in the Depression era—Beulah's era—but also by the more universal desire for what seems forever out of reach. Joe Jackson offered to guest on the record and this song gave the perfect opportunity for the brilliance of both his voice and piano playing.”

The song is the second single from her recently announced album Will Anybody Know That I Was Here: The Songs of Beulah Rowley. Recorded with the Grammy-winning producer Hal Willner, the project presents the story of the fictional dustbowl-era songwriter Beulah Rowley. The record will be released on April 22nd as a Record Store Day vinyl exclusive.

Kortes previously shared the track “Born A Happy Girl,” which premiered with American Blues Scene who writes that Kortes “...has brought her considerable talents to craft songs that sound like they came right out of the Depression Era.” “As a writer, you get in a zone. You get possessed by something. If you're lucky,” says Mary Lee Kortes.

Will Anybody Know That I Was Here: The Songs of Beulah Rowley, Kortes’s new stunning and immersive album, was born from one of those all-encompassing possessions, from a feeling she couldn’t shake, one she had to write through to fully understand. She knew she wanted to expand upon a typical album format to create a more cohesive work with a sense of character that could incorporate her love for writing fiction. “I went to sleep with all of this on my mind,” she says, “and I woke up in the morning with this woman in my head named Beulah Rowley, a depression-era singer-songwriter, from the Midwest like me, and I immediately started writing the song ‘Born a Happy Girl.’” Kortes would go on to create the biography of Beulah Rowley—and her complete songbook.

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Foyer Red - Gorgeous.

Following their more anarchic first single, the new single "Gorgeous" offers a compelling new wrinkle in Foyer Red's sound. Though composed of characteristically eccentric parts, it contains some the prettiest moments in the band's catalog to date, with an arrangement delicately balances the warmth of singer Elana Riordan's voice with the more discordant elements that bubble over wonderfully in the final third of the song. 

The confidence and creativity with which the band explore an unfamiliar sonic landscape provides another engaging example of what makes Foyer Red so exciting.

Riordan expands on the track's background: "We wrote this song organically in the studio together one day. It was one of those songwriting experiences that blows your mind over and over and makes you feel incredibly lucky to have such well-matched collaborators. I recorded a voice memo of us playing (later renamed it “wow gorgeous jam”) and listened to this low quality voice memo on repeat for days, literally bubbling up in bliss. I wrote the lyrics about my partner and bandmate Marco, for whom I keep a list of 'Marco-isms', his ever endearing botched colloquialisms that I hope he will never correct." Yarn The Hours Away will be released on Carpark Records on May 19th.

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Saturday, 25 February 2023

Foyer Red - Murray A. Lightburn - Tomten

Foyer Red - Plumbers Unite.

Brooklyn’s Foyer Red makes sweet yet abrasive songs that careen into delightfully unexpected places. The group’s potent art rock embodies a spirit of collaborative exploration, as a seemingly endless supply of ideas accrue and collide as part of a spirited musical conversation between the band’s members, a sensation that is heightened by the often literal conversation occurring between their three principle vocalists. The band started as a trio with singer and clarinetist Elana Riordan, drummer Marco Ocampo, and singer/guitarist Mitch Myers.

The three would email each other song ideas and record the ones that stuck. In 2021, they started playing music together in the same room and immediately came out with the Zigzag Wombat EP, which earned high praise from outlets like Stereogum, BrooklynVegan and Pitchfork. Though they had been a band for only a few months, their self-recorded and charming debut proved that they had hit the ground running almost fully formed with a distinct, tongue-in-cheek, de-constructive take on indie rock.

Instead of sticking to their guns and re-treading similar ground, Foyer Red reinvented itself as a five-piece, adding singer and guitarist Kristina Moore and bassist Eric Jaso, and became a fixture of the NYC scene in 2022, sharing stages with artists like Cola, Empath, Babehoven, Why Bonnie, Peaer, Momma, Mamalarky, and Diane Coffee.

In December, the band announced their signing to Carpark Records (The Beths, Cloud Nothings) and today Foyer Red have returned to announce their debut LP Yarn The Hours Away, which will be released on the label on May 19th. To mark the announce the band have shared the first single from the record, a track called "Plumbers Unite!"

 
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Murray A. Lightburn - Once Upon A Time In Montréal.

Murray A. Lightburn, the longtime frontman of Montreal’s acclaimed The Dears, will release his deeply personal new album 'Once Upon A Time In Montreal’ on 31 March via Dangerbird Records. Ahead of that Murray is pleased to share the title-track single, along with a video created  by the production team at 4-VU.

Lightburn lightheartedly jokes that 'Once Upon A Time In Montreal' is an audio version of a biopic, inspired by the passing of his father - a jazz musician from Belize who moved to Montreal via New York to reconnect with his teenage sweetheart.

Discussing the new single and album title-track, Murray says: "After getting an education in Jamaica and England, my mom got a job in Montreal as a nurse. My father was living in New York. They had dated back in Belize and reconnected years later in New York. My father didn’t really want to leave for Montreal, but he did. And it was hard for him: the harsh winters, the language barrier, the colour of his skin.

He was a skilled musician but that was barely going to keep the lights on — never mind feed a growing family. His lack of formal education, and his lack of French, limited his opportunities. Nevertheless, he just wanted to be with her. So he figured out a way, and that’s what his life was mostly about, I think — what I’ve deduced. Maybe there’s way more to it and that’s the romantic version, but it’s a version at least I can understand. Nothing else computes. My parents stayed married for 56 years.”

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Tomten - Mind How You Go.

Tomten are a baroque pop quartet based out of Seattle, Washington. Brian Noyes (vocals, keys, guitar) and Lena Simon (bass, vocals) (Kairos Creature Club, formerly of La Luz) met in 2008 and began demoing each other’s songs at Cornish College of The Arts.

Tomten started playing shows and rearranging their sound and lineup by 2010, after Gregg Belisle-Chi (guitar) and Jake Brady (drums) joined the band. Tomten‘s debut, Wednesday’s Children arrived in Summer of 2012 shortly before Belisle-Chi left the band. Tomten recorded their sophomore record The Farewell Party (2014) with Jason Quever of Papercuts in San Francisco and Sacramento, CA. Dillon Sturtevant (bass) joined the band as Lena departed.

The Unknown recording studio in Anacortes, WA started by Nicholas Wilbur and Phil Elverum (Mt. Eerie) has become the go to spot for the band’s more recent recordings – the lush piano driven Cremation Songs (2017), and Synth Pop informed Viva Draconia (2018). Tomten‘s newest album Artichoke (out April 28) is a collaborative foray into psych folk, power-pop, and glam country, a balance between songs by Noyes, Sturtevant, and two co-written with Brady.

Artichoke is a warm pastoral daydream, with inspirations drawn from the Madcap folk rock of the Incredible String Band, to the syrup soul of The Delfonics, the country tinge of Happy End or Gene Clark, with the gentle guitar picking of John Martyn or Bridget St. John.

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Berries - Aistis - Will Johnson - Oslo Twins

Photo Derek Bremner Berries - Narrow tracks. In their new video for “Narrow Tracks”, Berries splice fuzzy live footage together with shots ...