Eric Anders and Mark O'Bitz have shared a beautiful Americana song entitled 'Careful Now My Son'. The impassioned vocals cry out for attention and the slow rhythmic musical arrangement just adds to the emotion and feeling this track conveys. ===== JEWLS debut song 'Take It' is a heartfelt and touching piece. Her natural and refined vocals are immersed in a gentle soundscape that seemingly dances around her singing, adding more depth to this gorgeous piece.
"Careful Now My Son" is the first song of the collection Eric Anders and Mark O'Bitz have named "music in the time of coronavirus." Eric decided to have three separate releases for this collection so that each release would be more consistent style-wise.
Everything done for this collection--from songwriting to recording to mastering--was done remotely during shelter in place (Eric in NorCal; Mark and Mike in SoCal). Most of the songs were inspired by the isolation, anxiety, and cultural upheaval of the pandemic year of 2020.
"Careful Now My Son" is the only song that was done in a truly Americana style, so they've decided to release it as a single. They also thought that its foreboding feel and lyrics worked well to represent how we were feeling during this pandemic--so it would make a good kick-off song.
From the Artist:The song is about both the pandemic and the authoritarian and cultish politics of Trumpism. We were deeply afraid of both infectious diseases during 2020 and as 2021 gets going. With regard to Trumpism, "Careful Now My Son" can be understood as an Americana companion song to our song, "Wounded Son"on our 2019 album, Ghosts To Ancestors.
JEWLS released her debut single 'Take It' an alternative pop gem that takes you higher.
JEWLS is a melancholic pop alternative to hold on to. With her debut single 'Take It' she shows her mixture of a husky, sensitive, sometimes even moody voice and heartbreaking honest lyrics. JEWLS her music is predestined to go under the skin. For her, writing and composing music is a way to express what’s underneath. The release comes with a self-directed music video:
JEWLS: Will is lost. The cold has returned. Hearing footsteps above and the rain outside. Blue pretends to be my colour now. Moments of the past rushing back, cloaked in ice. Everything seems to be a reminder and silence has never been so loud.
Myths just shared 'When You Go Where You Go When You Die' and it's a catchy, melodic and gorgeous psychedelic song with timeless pop sensibilities and yet still manages to retain a fresh and modern feel. ===== Big Little Lions have also just released a new single entitled 'Turn It Off'. Mixing folk and high class pop the song has refined dual vocals and harmonies and a whole load of musical hooks running throughout this refreshing track.
“When You Go Where You Go When You Die” is the latest offering from Australian psychedelic pop band Myths. The song comes as the first single from their upcoming second LP “The Art of Pretending” – a project over two years in the making, and due for release in 2021. The track is a playful ode to the macabre and surreal experience of trying to reconcile everyday life with unexpected bouts of nihilism. Much like their previous releases “When You Go Where You Go When You Die” is entirely self produced by the band’s songwriters Mike Nutt & Jamie Turner and was recorded throughout the last year in various makeshift home studios.
The track was mixed by Sydney-based producer and musician Jack Mo ffitt (The Preatures, I Know Leopard) who the band is currently working with to put the finishing touches on their new album.
Myths formed in 2017 and are based in Perth, Western Australia. Their music is best described as neo-psychedelia, taking inspiration from the styles and sounds of the 60s and 70s, and merging them with a modern approach to sound design. This comes to the forefront in their new single, opening with an 8-bit collage of old video game death sounds before layers of vintage synthesizers, sitars and more take over. In 2018 the band released their self-produced debut album “Paradigm”, and work on a follow-up has been underway almost immediately.
Big Little Lions have been described as ‘a blissful marriage of new folk and sophisticated pop’. Prolific songwriting, infectious folk-pop style, and an offbeat, memorable live show. This award winning duo consists of Helen Austin and Paul Otten who, despite living thousands of miles apart, have found a way to connect and create music together. Despite being in two different countries, they have found common ground to share their message.
Call it destiny, or call it fate, call it a necessary progression for these modern times. Helen lives in British Columbia, Canada and Paul lives in Cincinnati, OH. But the distance provides the necessity to create in a new way. Using technology as their ally and their differences as their strength.
Their monthly single releases are their way of getting through this pandemic while all the usual album cycle release plans don’t make sense anymore. Their music is jam-packed with emotion and tight harmonies, the sound of two people working side-by-side.
Villages recently shared a video for their beautiful song 'Poetry In Motion'. The bands indie folk music has a fresh and pristine feel to it along with some mature pop sensibilities, add in the melodic arrangement and fabulous vocals and this is one special song. ===== KodiakArcade new single 'Silicon Hill' is a fabulous synth driven instrumental track, where the huge array of musical sounds intertwine and create a mesmerizing piece and at two and a half minutes duration leaves me wanting more. ===== Yesterday Paper Tapes released a video for the song 'You And I' which is taken from the E.P 'Homecoming' that was released in October. Fresh, catchy and with gently delivered vocals, the soundtrack is quite addictive and with the new visuals this is a fine recommendation to check out the E.P if like me you have not done so yet.
Having had their praises internationally sung for their self-titled full-length debut album in 2019, the four members of Villages continue to keep the spirit of their home province, Nova Scotia, in their thoughts, whilst letting their minds escape to their fantasies.
Comprised of Matt Ellis, Travis Ellis, Jon Pearo and Archie Rankin; the quartet have managed to spark a genre-bending sound of indie-folk and experimental pop; standing tall with the likes of Father John Misty, Fleet Foxes and Band of Horses. Taken from their recently released EP ‘Upon the Horizon’, new single ‘Poetry in Motion’ delivers a flavour of the bands next full-length album due in 2021.
Directed by Mel Stone, the new live visuals see’s the band gather together; delivering a hopeful message that things will get better. With the ongoing pandemic restrictions, it’s an outlook that we all need to hear from time to time, especially the live industry.
Mixed by American Indie rock legend Phil Ek, their recently released EP ‘Upon the Horizon’ was written aimed to transcend the sense of isolation and dread that we have all faced this year. Frontman Matt Ellis says, “Being locked up naturally conjured visions of escapism. Escaping to the wilderness has always been a way to find peace, but when even that was not an option it was yet another thing that had been taken for granted.
The songs were written on an old guitar with four dead strings that had been neglected for years. There was something fitting about it, given the current condition of the world. This guitar was once a prized possession and over the years just sat collecting dust. Yet, the moment I picked it up the memories it had amassed over the years flooded my mind. It was the comfort and inspiration that was needed—the feeling of a new instrument yet to be discovered, and of new beginnings and endless possibilities.”
As a project, Graeme Cornies’ Kodiak Arcade is a hi-fi homage to the lo-fi sounds of the past. It’s a set of sonic landscapes, where the humanity of the organic performances are intertwined with sounds that can only be created by modern tech.
Graeme spent a lot of time thinking about his own relationship to technology while making Kodiak Arcade’s debut album, Arcade. From the time he spent consumed in the fictional worlds of Sierra games as a kid, and how those stories affected his real-world self.
Focus track, “Silicon Hill,” began with a dream. Two friends sat on a hill at sunset, looking into the distance at a newer sort of Art Deco city skyline. Everything around the city was a desert, though there was no sand in sight. The whole desert was made of a sort of semi-soft silicon with faint lines underneath – like patterns of a motherboard under the desert’s milky surface.
This song title is also a nod to the time Graeme spent in Silicon Valley, at events like the GDC, where he spent many nights year after year talking with passionate artists and programmers in the game industry, getting high on talk of the future, admired artists and the meeting places between art and technology.
GPSs flicker, spirits emancipate themselves from any final destination… PAPER TAPES’ first EP 'Homecoming' was released in October on Geographie.
Native of Lyon (FR), living in Paris and a member of the band Brace ! Brace ! (Howlin’ Banana), Cyril Angleys delivers, under the pseudo PAPER TAPES, an adventurous and immediate pop.
Influenced by the 70s film score, the outsiders that became heroes like Stereolab and Air, the psyched pop from Todd Rundgren or the R’n’B from the first The Neptunes’ albums, he assumes boldly but with finesse his carelessness of time and genres.
It is while composing with Brace! Brace! That he feels the need, this desire to start a solo project. Drum machines, synthesizers… he starts writing and experimenting from home, in his flat during the 2018 summer.
With 'Homecoming', co-produced by Barth Bouveret (Brace ! Brace!, Good Morning TV, Marble Arch) PAPER TAPES offers us a first magnetic and luminous EP. Five little hits nestled between some modern soft rock and emancipated pop, to listen to while traveling or at home… even though we know travels always start home.
Another Sky return for a third time this year with another gorgeous song entitled 'Sun Seeker'. The band have garnered plenty of attention and the latest song demonstrates why, it's beauty lies in the subtle and intricately arranged musical backdrop that grows with intensity and the fabulous vocals that add breathtaking emotion. ===== Is there a finer artists name than Petunia-Liebling MacPumpkin possibly, but that's not really the point when you take the delicious song and video for 'The Marionettes' into account. It's the ninth video from her second album so lovers of creative and "out there" music have plenty of catching up to do, well I have anyway! ===== Charlie Nieland has appeared on Beehive Candy a few times as one half of Lusterlit and it's a real pleasure to share the title track for his forthcoming album 'Divisions' which is one hundred percent impressive. ===== Whizz Bomb (Paul Wishart) has released 'All I Want Is You'. From the outset his vocals are just so rich and wonderful as they add intensity and genuine feeling to the song, the musical arrangement adds even more, this is one rather special song.
On the first day of 2021, Another Sky will release their latest body of work, an EP entitled Music For Winter Vol. I. Today, the band released the second single “Sun Seeker.” “Lyrically, ‘Sun Seeker’ is about being the only one who can say who you are,” vocalist and lyricist Catrin Vincent says. “It’s also about letting things self-destruct and then rebuilding. Someone once said they’d tell me when to quit music. This is me saying, I say who I am and I say when I’m done.”
Having confidently stepped into the spotlight with their performance of ”Chillers” on ‘Later… with Jools Holland,' Another Sky has earned praise from Paste, Under the Radar, The FADER, and NPR Music, who invited them in for a Tiny Desk Concert earlier this year. Front woman Catrin wryly credits some of their early success to the fact her distinctive, haunting vocals are frequently mistaken for those of a male singer. “People say I sound like a man - maybe that means they’ll listen.”
On how Music For Winter Vol. I came together, Vincent explains, "some songs are old, some are new, all are entirely collaborative. After being kept apart because of the lockdown and writing a bunch of our second album separately, we just wanted to get back into our studio and record." The entire EP was recorded, produced and mixed by the band themselves at their South London studio, The Lighthouse, in October 2020.
"Where do we find our portable paradises?" - Catrin found herself staring at this very poem by Roger Robinson on the London Underground in March 2020.
For the first time in six years, the band couldn't see each other, and the band's bassist Naomi was able to sit still long enough to confront her intense fear of going to hell for being in a same-sex relationship, due to a Christian upbringing.
Catrin explains, "After lockdown eased, myself and Naomi revisited the opening track ‘Pieces,’ an old track originally sung by Naomi. We wrote lyrics together from an imagined conversation with a loved one telling Naomi she was going to hell."
Naomi’s journey became the lyrical foundation for each of these six songs as Catrin drew universal comparisons with others' lives; "a struggle with identity, walking past churches you are no longer part of and the person you become when you are in pain. If there is no end in sight of struggle, where are our white sands, green hills and fresh fish? If we can't ever truly escape, which is what we were exploring in our debut album I Slept On The Floor, can we carry paradise in ourselves?"
Naomi adds about her experience, "It’s so easy to push things to the back of your mind. You never really know the impact this has on you until it becomes overbearing, and you're forced to address it. I found it incredibly cathartic to tackle these issues head-on by visualising certain situations and being able to say whatever I needed to say, both in therapy and in writing music.”
It’s a curio to see… It’s a curio indeed! Join Petunia-Liebling MacPumpkin as she tells a special holiday tail about her encounters with the magical marionettes. Follow them through their adventures, trials and tribulations.
With childlike wonder catch a glance behind the curtain of the grandscale show that we all belong to.
Petunia-Liebling MacPumpkin is an escaped ghost from an old coloring book that was left out in the rain at some point in the 20th Century. The Marionettes is the ninth video taken from her second album (I Left My Heart in Uncanny Valley).
She also recently curated a remix album entitled All My Friends Live In Uncanny Valley, featuring the likes of Renaldo & The Loaf and Toxic Chicken gleefully rearranging her songs into strange new forms.
My heart is full and I made a solo album, Divisions. It will be out early in the new year. The title song was Inspired by The Hidden Life Of Trees by Peter Wohlleben and Charlie is joined on the song as follows.
Charlie Nieland: Lap Steel, Electric Guitars, Electric Piano, Korg MS20 Synth, Piano, Virtual Mellotron, Synths, Percussion, Vocals, Brian Geltner: Drums
Musician/producer Charlie Nieland creates a variety of cinematic music. Engaging the boundless creativity within his musical community, including the duo Lusterlit and the Bushwick Book Club, he reaches for an ever widening range of songcraft and textured sound. less
Growing up in rural Kent, also known as the Garden of England, Paul Wishart (aka Whizz Bomb) learnt classical piano and church organ. In this traditional English environment that viewed any music more modern than Beethoven with extreme distrust, Paul started writing his own music on the piano and organ to amuse himself, and offend others.
At the age of 13, Paul managed to persuade his parents to buy him a Roland SH101 analogue synthesizer as a reward for passing exams, thus starting a love affair with strange noises, nobs, sliders, sequencers, and generally avoiding school studies.
Originally influenced by the early electronic music of Wendy Carlos, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Vangelis, Paul embraced 80’s synth pop when his contemporaries were listening to prog rock, then 90’s shoegaze guitar bands when his friends were twisting their melons.
The dance / rock cross-over acts of the 90’s such as Jesus Jones started to bring an interest in darker and louder electronic music, with Depeche Mode’s move to introducing guitars with synths and Nine Inch Nails ability to use synths and samplers to create alternative music that jumped from loud and discordant noise to quiet and often melodic piano music or even dance-influenced beats, led Paul to believe that much more was achievable with electronic music now. These predominately electronic music influences, though of considerably variation, have influenced Paul and his vision for Whizz Bomb. Paul’s lower-range and slightly raspy voice is a “character” voice for rock music that is “lived in”, and has been favourably compared to those of the late Lou Reed and Nick Cave.
A plan emerged, and all that was required were the financial resources to build a rig that could actually allow reasonable multi-instrument performance, sequencing, and recording. Paul has had to endure years working, with only brief interludes entertaining friends and family on the piano, to put together all his musical equipment and now release material to an unsuspecting public. His first single, an electronica cover of U2’s All I Want is You, is now released on iTunes and other major online stores and streaming services. There are numerous other works in the pipeline, and will be ready for release from early 2021 onwards. In December 2020 All I Want is You introduces Paul, and his characterful voice to the world.
Sun June have shared 'Bad Girl' and the song has been getting plenty of attention over the past two days since it's release. Accompanied with a video this gently melodic and dreamy song still packs plenty of emotion and is an excellent foretaste for their upcoming album 'Somewhere'. ===== Palberta return for a fourth time on Beehive Candy with the final pre-release song 'The Way That You Do' ahead of the album 'Palberta5000' due on January 22nd. As always their vocals and harmonies are exquisite and juxtapose a somewhat quirky musical backdrop wonderfully. ===== From SLUGS we have 'Super Sane' and the four piece alt rock outfit out of Los Angeles really do impress. This is fine and original track, the music arrangement is notable as are the refined vocals.
Austin, Texas' Sun June have shared a stunning video for their new single "Bad Girl," the latest from their upcoming new album Somewhere. Of the song and video, Sun June's Laura Colwell says "Bad Girl is about a deep manic drive to regress into the person I used to be - back when being bad was cool and being cool was everything.
I was given a lot of freedom as a teenager and always took advantage of it. After I lost a good friend in high school, my fear of death was overwhelming. The song reflects on how that fear combined with my own thrill-seeking affected my decisions since. It cycles through self-destructive choices I've made in relationships to avoid responsibility, and how my fear of loss has lead me down some dumb paths. The tone is sad and resigned, but also self-righteous somehow.
There's something pushing and pulling between the lyrics and the beat, so we thought a dance video might draw out some internal tension. We filmed around Lockhart, TX, where we recorded the album, because there are so many farms and fields out there that are unchanged despite the area's growth. We took some inspiration from films like "Blood Simple" and "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," which were also shot in rural towns just outside of Austin. Basically, we tried to channel Frances McDormand, Willie Nelson, and Haim (if Haim were an only child)."
Somewhere showcases a gentle but eminently pronounced maturation of Sun June's sound, a record full of quiet revelation, eleven songs that bristle with love and longing. It finds a band at the height of their collective potency, a marked stride forward that is able to transport the listener into a fascinating new landscape, one that lies somewhere between the town and the city, between the head and the heart; neither here nor there, but certainly somewhere.
Palberta's upcoming LP Palberta5000 is due out in a little over a month on January 22nd, 2021 via Wharf Cat Records, and so far has seen high praise on a level unmatched in the band's already celebrated career. After being announced with a deep-dive feature on Stereogum that explored the more expansive and pop-forward style on this new release from a band long-heralded as one of the most idiosyncratic bands in the East Coast DIY scene, the album's early singles have earned comparisons to ESG and Delta 5 in The New York Times, being described as "everything great about Palberta" on NPR's All Songs Considered, and garnering glowing coverage from spots like Pitchfork, NYLON, Paste, Consequence of Sound and BrooklynVegan among many others.
The band are returning with a final pre-release single entitled "The Way That You Do," accompanied by a video directed by band member Ani Ivry-Block. For a band that have always projected an anarchic energy and historically been associated with a punk-adjacent DIY scene (if never quite being what could be called a punk band themselves) the track explores a gentler tone than has been typical for the band, as it focues on the penchant for harmony arrangements that often sets them apart from their contemporaries, but links these vocal forward sections together with a fanciful, and deceptively complex guitar and bass interplay that only Palberta could have created.
"In 'The Way That You Do' we essentially repeat the same phrase over and over with the exception of Ani's passionate 'I been lyyyyying," Palberta's Lily Konigsberg explains. "I've never really thought about the meaning behind the lyrics, but when I think about them now it seems like someone accusing another of deception and trickery. Also the harmonies are sick. It’s our waltz!”
SLUGS is a 4 piece alt rock outfit out of Los Angeles comprised of singer, songwriter and guitarist Marissa Longstreet, Sarsten Noice (bass/vocals), Josh Beavers (lead guitar) and Dash Hutton (drums).
Their influences range from Linda Perhacs with their melodic harmonies and tenderness to Thee Oh Sees with their high energy, spitfire performances.
Their latest single “Super Sane” features high voltage expression along with a calmer wash, showcasing restrained strums of electric guitar which is both divinely gripping and atmospheric.
The delicate lower harmonies are so haunting, while the intimate vocals are gentle and totally skeletal in their honesty. Somewhat warm and somewhat cold, the overall feel is wonderfully juxtaposed with feelings of healing and acceptance. The minimalist sound is also vividly complex in its dynamics and meticulously placed elements.
