Released yesterday we have a really cool music video from Kim Bingham for 'Beppe Green'. The song is upbeat, fast flowing and melodic indie pop/rock, that's very catchy.
Rina Mushonga returns for a fourth time on Beehive Candy with the brand new track 'Cassiopeia'. Last time we stated that "Rina Mushonga continues to consistently impress us with her distinctive and charismatic music." Well, she has done it again and in a very creative manner.
From Jesse Marchant we have 'I've Got Friends' accompanied by an in the studio video. The song is a gentle predominately acoustic affair from this very talented indie folk artist.
We featured Piney Gir a couple of times last year and with a new album due next month she returns with a a fabulous duet 'Variety Show' featuring Sweet Baboo. A refined and melodic song, it's full of hooks and the musical arrangement is perfect for the style and feeling of the piece.
Finally today and back for a fourth feature we have Paul Mosley and The Red Meat Orchestra and another track from the new album ‘You’re Going To Die!’ this song being entitled 'Because I Did Not Die Today'. Once again the originality and distinct musical style of Paul Mosley is notable, the band (or should I say Orchestra) are rich and so well arranged, this act really are worth checking out further.
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Yesterday, Winona Oak released lovestruck, mesmerizing new single “Let Me Know” via Neon Gold / Atlantic Records. “Let Me Know” springs to life from the outset, soaring on bursts of rhythm and emotion and an anthemic chorus that explores the passion and insecurity of new love. For the stunning video, the Swedish born, LA based artist once again collaborated with director Andreas Öhman, following a diverse range of couples throughout Sweden’s cities and idyllic countryside, while chronicling the ups and downs of young love.
Born and raised in the Nordic forests of Sweden on a small crop of land called Sollerön - known as the Island of the Sun - Winona Oak is every bit as enchanting as her origin story. With a childhood spent encountering more animals than people, she grew up a trained horse acrobat and pursued creative expression however she could, writing poetry and songs from a young age. Born into a musical family, Winona sang throughout her youth and began playing violin at 5 years old and piano at 9 years.
After moving to Stockholm to pursue her passion for music, a leap of faith to attend Neon Gold Records’ writing retreat in the Nicaraguan jungle in 2017 led her to Australian electronic maestro What So Not. She would go on to co-write his next two singles "Better" and "Stuck In Orbit", eventually stepping into the spotlight as both the writer and featured artist on his 2018 single "Beautiful", which took home the 2019 AIR Award for Best Independent Dance Single at the Australian Independent Music Awards.
Last year, Winona Oak covered “Don’t Save Me” from fellow Neon Gold Records signees HAIM for the label’s 10 year anniversary compilation: NGX: Ten Years of Neon Gold. The minimal production allows Winona Oak’s ethereal voice to shine through, slower than the original and drenched in ethereal melancholy. Now signed to Neon Gold / Atlantic Records, she closed out 2018 collaborating with The Chainsmokers on their viral hit single “Hope”, co-written by Winona and featuring her stunning lead vocals with over 350 million streams globally. Debut single “He Don’t Love Me” has been a runaway success, amassing 10 million streams across all platforms to date, and sophomore single “Break My Broken Heart” is off to a similar start, hitting 1 million views for the video in just its first week online.
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Kim Bingham is a Canadian singer-songwriter, guitarist, vocalist, and composer. She began her career as front-woman of the Montreal third wave ska band Me Mom and Morgentaler, and started her solo career in 1994 as Mudgirl. She released her debut album in 1996, and shortly after reformed as The Kim Band.
Kim has released solo albums and singles in both French and English, and her 2012 album Up! was recorded with Canadian co-producer John Kastner. The video for the song "Up!" was a winner for Best Short Form Video at the 2013 Independent Music Awards.
Kim Bingham was also a guitarist and backing vocalist for David Usher and Nelly Furtado. Her collaboration with Bran Van 3000 is still active. She has worked with the collective for the albums "Rosé" and "The Garden" and on live shows from 2008-2010.
Bingham wrote the score for the TV show Les Invincibles, and in 2007 was nominated for Best Original Score at Québec's Prix Gémeaux television awards, where she won Best Theme Song. She continues to act as president of the independent label Mudgirl Music Group.
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Having released her second album In A Galaxy earlier this year, the London-based Dutch-Zimbabwean pop innovator Rina Mushonga today shares brand new track, Cassiopeia.
Some four years in the making In A Galaxy draws heavily upon Mushonga’s global transience whilst latterly empowered by a self-confessed year of transformation – a myriad of ideas, personal experiences and reflection, both on a creative and human level transforms the minutiae of ordinary lives into a collection intelligent, relevant and diverse pop.
Although a new track, the origins of Cassiopeia have been around since those mad US elections in 2016. As she explains; “It sort of came up as a response to the infuriating, eye-roll inducing nonsense of it all and I eventually recorded and produced this in Amsterdam at my pal’s Sebastiaan Dutilh’s studio.” Going on to give some context she continues; “I think at the core this song is about resistance, about an army of 'nasty women' rising up. In my head the song kind of plays out like a heist movie with these bad-ass female assassins fighting the patriarchy and re-adjusting the status quo.”
Alluding to the track’s title and in her own inimitable style she says; “In mythology Cassiopeia is an Ethiopian queen who'll tell anyone who's listening that she's basically the hottest woman alive. This kind of self- love and confidence in a woman is often portrayed as contemptible. But Cassiopeia gives zero fks about what people think and I guess I used that as a jump off point to address patriarchal institutions and machinations and how they all better watch out --- Cassiopeia's comin' for ya."
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Jesse Marchant released a new video for track I’ve Got Friends from fourth studio album Illusion of Love filmed live at Dreamland Studio, NY.
Marchant’s fourth studio album Illusion Of Love is the sound of awakening and emergence, from crises both personal and political. Its a farewell to isolation, ushering in an album full of indie-folk-rock anthems.
Jesse has completed numerous headline tours of the US and Canada, whilst performing high profile support slots for the likes of Mercury Prize-winning group Alt-J, Other Lives, Nathaniel Ratecliff, Sondre Lerche, Rogue Wave, Cloud Cult, Heartless Bastards, Local Natives, AA Bondy, Damien Jurado, and many more. Marchant's songs have also featured on several Emmy Award-winning shows including Grey's Anatomy, Parenthood, Shameless, The Blacklist, Eyewitness, and Bones.
Jesse also produced several of his own music videos, including two live in studio video albums and a trilogy starring Christopher Abbott and Amanda Seyfried. In 2018 Marchant produced the Official Video for Sister, I, directed by Brady Corbet, winner of 2 Golden Lions at the Venice film festival.
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Piney Gir shares the new single “Variety Show" featuring Sweet Baboo. The track is taken from the forthcoming album You Are Here, due out on 1 November. She also kicks off a solo tour with Fiona Bevan and Samatha Whates this week, with more shows to be confirmed. The full band show with Spearmint on 14th November will feature drummer Barny Rockford from The Auteurs.
“Variety Show” is a synth-led duet with Moshi Moshi pop darling Sweet Baboo featured on vocals and saxophone. Piney has always had an interest in analog synths since her first band Vic Twenty (released a single on Mute and toured with Erasure) and so this song captures a Stranger-Things-inspired synth world with an 80’s-style sax solo worthy of the Top Gun soundtrack or the ethereal thrall of Twin Peaks. In this ballad Piney and Sweet Baboo metaphorically say will you love me for my flaws aiming for their happy ever after. It is a kind of anti-romantic ballad, boy meets girl, girl and boy fall in love, girl and boy rattle around in confusing, wishy-washy relationship wondering when the limbo will end, neither one of them knowing where they stand with the other. Boy sings tender words to girl, girl sings tender words to boy and the conclusion is simply to live happy-ever-after; if you read between the lines it says, "love me for my flaws."
Known for her eclectic style from alt-country to folktronica to 60s retro pop, for You Are Here Piney Gir explores a more art-pop path with more spikes and spaces. It echoes the darkness on the record, which was the result of a very tough year for her and the songs summarise her journey with loss, betrayal and disheartenment at the state of the world. Piney wrote a record about this collective experience, both broadly relatable and intimately personal. There are still echoes of the signature Piney sound, with strong melodies, tuneful riffs and lyrics that sound sweet at first listen and evolve to a kind of dark & twisted storytelling. Piney’s inner Laura Palmer emerges here with a tender bitter-sweetness, reminiscent of post punk basement bars and cherry martinis.
For the past three years she has been a singer in Gaz Coombes’ band and had the privilege of supporting him on tour around the UK, Europe and America, she also toured with Ride and sang with Noel Gallagher on tour and on his forthcoming singles.
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Riding high after his ground breaking folk opera ‘The Butcher’ Mosley’s plans for the follow up faltered when his personal life unexpectedly had to take priority for a year. Now he returns with his most personal and striking album to date - and what could have been a dour and contemplative album is a life affirming kaleidoscope of beauty and joy!
‘You’re Going To Die!’ is about grief and what comes after that. 11 songs, 40 minutes, no bull. All urgent, vital and full of life. The songs you write once in a lifetime when only the truth will do. Check out ‘People Are Idiots’. Mosley’s composer credentials (and - let’s be honest - love of Nina Simone) marry with his gift for snappy hooks to keep the 11/8 time signature swinging as the junk percussion, sci-fi synths and pizzicato strings buoy up the all-star singers of the Red Meat Orchestra’s call-and-response backing vocals. It should be a weird mess but it’s an absolute banger.
Or the hypnotic repeated string refrain of ‘Couldn’t Love you More’ which musically doffs its cap to avant-garde minimalist composer Julius Eastman but adds a perfect Mosley pop song about returning to the small town where you were a lonely kid. All heart and swooping chorus it’s both joyous and melancholy at the same time.
Mosley utilizes his Red Meat Orchestra (a 16 piece mixture of bluesy bar band, baroque strings ’n’ woodwinds and found junk percussion) with a sparing intelligence reflecting his development as an in demand theatre composer. (He is currently creating the score for Little Angel Theatre’s new adaptation of Julia ‘The Gruffalo’ Donaldson’s ‘The Owl and The Pussycat’ opening November 2019)
He gives the guest singers room to shine too. SXSW New Folk Award winner Jack Harris testifies on bike-wheel led groove ‘Judge Mosley Presiding’, while Rough Trade’s BBC Radio 2 Folk Award winner Josienne Clarke and ex Mediaeval Baebe Esther Dee add celestial harmonies to the retro synths of night-driving nostalgia anthem ‘The 1970s’.
They are joined by Red Meat regulars Catherine Earnshaw and Darren Allford for gang vocal duties on the title track’s twisted tango which Mosley says he wrote after a previous theatre review described him as ‘The Muppets meet Tom Waits’ adding ‘I didn’t think it was quite true before and I really wanted to live up to that!’ Bangers aside, with grief as the theme perhaps it’s inevitable that the album’s two most melancholy songs hit hardest…
’A Week Of Rain’ (another odd time signature, layers of tuned percussion, beautiful piano and harp interplay) speaks unflinchingly about the reality of looking after someone at the end of life. When confusion reigns and ‘where’ and ‘who’ and ‘when’ are all mixed up - how for those trying to help the simplest thing to do is also the kindest; lie. Pretend. Oh Yes, they were just here, and yes wasn’t it lovely to see them again? In the end only kindness remains.
And in ‘Well Done Son’ (short, sad, just piano and strings) Mosley receives a card from his (usually stoic and unforthcoming) Mother. It has very few words but it says a lot. However, the good time vibes return for album closer ‘Because I Did Not Die Today’ with more time signature fun, shades of Dave Brubeck, more Nina and - keeping a promise to his mother - a wailing blues harmonica. A foot stomping wave goodbye. A heartfelt Thank You.
Mosley’s more-famous-friends fill out the orchestra: Tom Moth (Florence and The Machine) on harp, Joe Peet (Cousteau, Benjamin Clementine) on double bass, Colin Smith (Feist, Shapeshifters) on Saxophones and this time another singer; BBC Radio 2 favourite Jess Morgan duets on defiant drunken waltz ‘Build your Fire’. But this is undeniably Mosley’s album. His voice, his songs set the tone of urgent, intelligent musicality and defiant humanity.
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