Gauzy dream pop has made a nice little renaissance for itself over the past few years, to which this reviewer, who wrapped himself in its progenitors’ plush layers during his formative years, offers a hearty “Huzzah!” Of course, the flip side of this is the droves of like-sounding bands proffering this sound that is, admittedly, ripe for accusations of peddling nostalgia. Austin, Texas quartetWhy Bonnie started out as one of those bands, offering perfectly fine and wistful shoegazey fare across their first pair of EPs. Their third, Voice Box, however, breaks the band from this mould.
While lead track, “Bury Me”, fits squarely in the dream pop aesthetic, its production is sweeping and cinematic, country miles beyond the band’s previous work. Furthermore, the title track’s concretizing a woman’s voice as her literal voice box to illustrate frustration with expression lends the proceedings a welcome depth typically absent from a sound known more for its style over substance. While thematically, “Voice Box” is the spoke around which the entire EP revolves, the heady whiplash pairing of “Athlete”s skulking, vampirish dissonance followed by “Jetplane”s diaphanous fingerpicking are the prime exhibits of Why Bonnie’s growth. Pulling elements from their bread and butter and pushing them toward their boundaries elevates Voice Box above merely enjoyable dream pop.
Really, there’s one quibble and one thing left to say – we need more, Why Bonnie, bring on the LP.
Porridge Radio have the ultimate band trajectory. Step one: Start a band even though you haven’t figured out how to play your instruments yet. Step two: Book your own shows and build up your reputation as a must-see live band. Step three: Spend years perfecting every tiny detail of the songs that will comprise your eventual first studio album. Step four: Release that album to overwhelming critical acclaim and chuckle at how long it took people to realize what you knew from the beginning—that you’re the best band in the world. This Brighton, U.K. foursome recently released their debut studio full-length Every Bad, which follows their 2016 self-recorded first album Rice, Pasta And Other Fillers. After signing to Secretly Canadian last year, it was clear they were going to lose their title as the best-kept secret of their British seaside town. Porridge Radio, led by their entrancing singer Dana Margolin, are headed for the big time.
They put out three of the most incredible singles (“Lilac,” “Sweet” and “Circling”) to kick off an album campaign in a very long time and planned a U.S. tour with noticeable anticipation building for their SXSW debut (the festival was later cancelled). Margolin is glad people have finally caught up with the band, especially now that they’ve unleashed the grand, dynamic rock songs they’ve always wanted to make after years of uploading experimental, lo-fi recordings to Bandcamp.
“Born Confused” has existed in some iteration for at least four years now, both in demo form and as a live staple accessible via YouTube, but the version that appears as the intro to the Brighton ensemble’s Secretly Canadian debut is significantly more three-dimensional. Shaved down a minute, and with its shitgaze production value swapped for pristine strings, accordion, and layered vocals, the intro manages to lean into the same emotive repetition as its demo, setting the listener up for plenty more peaks and valleys over the record’s ten additional tracks.
“Naked Winter” is an angsty track from the New Orleans band Mighty Brother. Bending genres, Mighty Brother seems to traverse sonic landscapes of folk, rock, funk, and jazz. The video captures familiar feelings of isolation, uncertainty about the future, and the feeling of being held hostage by uncontrollable forces…. a timely watch during these isolating times. As the first release from their upcoming double album (no, that’s not a typo) we can’t wait to see what comes next from this group.
Based in New Orleans, Mighty Brother carves a unique space in today’s modern soundscapes with a distinct mashup of styles that has been described as a “blend of Avett-Americana and Radiohead-esque art rock” (Offbeat Magazine). A menagerie of musical influences led Mighty Brother to develop an indie-rock sound that simultaneously pays tribute to folk, singer-songwriter, funk, and alternative soundscapes with soaring harmonies and striking melodies that knit an eclectic sound, guiding the listener through unconventional grooves and adventurous lyricism. Their third album – a double album – The Rabbit. The Owl. is an introspective look into the band’s emerging theme of duality in both their music and their writing. Straddling the lines between genres The Rabbit. The Owl. is a prime showcase of the band’s unique musical flair and serves as an introspective look into Mighty Brother’s exploration of sound, concepts, and ideas.
Band Members
Ari Carter, Nick Huster, Quinn Sternberg, Jonah Tarver
Naked Winter is the first single from Mighty Brother’s upcoming Double Album “The Rabbit. The Owl.”
In the ever-expanding universe of Americana music, I have a few criteria, two of which are 1) is the instrumentation, for the most part, real and 2) can I drive to it .When considering the newest release from neo-psychedelia practitioners The Dream Syndicate, I found The Universe Inside chock-full of amazing musicianship and suitable for a long, winding road trip.
The songs on The Universe Inside are, to say the least, expansive, clocking in between seven and a half and 20-plus(!) minutes. That latter opus is the lead track, “The Regulator.” Paired with a video shot by David Dalglish, the song, at times lounge-y, other times nearly frantic and swirling with sax (courtesy of guest Marcus Tenney), paints a picture of adulthood in decay and youth stepping up to take over. Band founder Steve Wynn, in heavily-manipulated vocals, sings of “Calendar boys dusting off the rust/The scarcity of the soul/Blown fuses.” A little apocalyptic, but aren’t we all feeling a little that way right now?
Since the band’s 2012 return, their music has been based around four-minute rock songs with an experimental flair, with occasional detours into jam territory. Here, though, there are no such limits or boundaries. Perhaps guided by a sense of mortality that shows in his lyrics, Wynn has decided to make the album he’s long wanted. “(All That’s Left Is) The Longing,” a somewhat more straightforward song, directly addresses a life of efforts made, summed up during one last death rattle – “All that’s left from before/Is the final twitch and spasm.” “Apropos of Nothing” has a little bit of twang amongst its nine and a half minutes before a drastic tempo change two-thirds of the way through. And “Dusting Off The Rust” has the band doing just that, prog playing their hearts out in a nearly 10-minute instrumental.
The Universe Inside wraps with its most song-like offering, “The Slowest Rendition,” a two-parter stretched across eleven minutes. Part One, the most lyrical offering on the record, is a frank examination of putting away childish things – “To think I once would have welcomed/In delight, this chaos that flickers in the night” – and a true look at aging – “The waking hours and questions slowly seep/Into one another.” It’s a good damn song. Part Two features a tempo change, more sax, and a man grasping one last time for some measure of control: “I’m the amateur director/On a badly lit mystery.” We all want control. And, right now, none of us have it.
The Universe Inside was produced by John Agnello, Adrian Olsen and the band, recorded and mixed by Agnello and Olsen, and mastered by Greg Calbi. The Dream Syndicate is Wynn (lead vocals, guitar and harmonica), Jason Victor (guitar), Chris Cacavas (keys), Mark Walton (bass), and Dennis Duck (drums). Featured players include Stephen McCarthy (electric sitar, guitar, bass, pedal steel and background vocals), Marcus Tenney (sax and trumpet) and Johnny Hott (percussion).
“The Longing” by The Dream Syndicate from the album ‘The Universe Inside,’ available April 10th
The Dream Syndicate is:
Steve Wynn – lead vocals, guitar, harmonica
Jason Victor – guitar
Chris Cacavas – keyboards
Mark Walton – bass guitar
Dennis Duck – drums
Special guests: Stephen McCarthy (electric sitar, guitar, six-string bass, pedal steel, backing vocals)
To celebrate the new single and EP Methyl Ethel will be supporting Peter, Bjorn & John on their American tour dates throughout March and April. On return to Australia, Methyl Ethel will tour in solo mode at intimate venues in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
“Hurts To Laugh” marks the ongoing output of Methyl Ethel producer and multi-instrumentalist Jake Webb’s restless mind. Time and again he’s proven that while there’s no distinction between music and art, psychologically speaking there is a difference between feeling and emotion. One is a conscious response to a set of circumstances, the other is the unconscious conditions of our very being that only occasionally surfaces through feelings. Hurts To Laugh excavates this ambiguous site, implied by its very title. You can laugh so hard it hurts – pure joy. Or laugh despite the pain – despair. These paradoxes run throughout the EP, as well as everything that came before.
‘Majestic AF’ stumbles into its bubbling oscillator and analogue polyrhythms, while a kick-free drumbeat marches right into an atonal synth melody supporting Webb’s equally idiosyncratic falsetto.
Indie-pop punks Candy Hearts changed their name to Best Ex in 2017, and they’ve been changing their sound to something a little more synth poppy too. You can very much hear that on these two songs off their upcoming EP Good At Feeling Bad, due May 22 via No Sleep.
Formerly fronting the awesome punky-poppy outfit The Candy Hearts, the chance signing of Mariel Loveland’s incredible new project ‘Best Ex’ came about with not some small level of involvement from former Kerrang Ed James McMahon. Introducing us to her on Twitter, we soon realised we were mutual fans – so it seemed a natural step really, especially once we’d heard her sensational EP ‘Ice Cream Anti-Social’!
Written in an introspective kick after seeing her friend’s band play a great show, making her think of the struggle they’d all been through to make something of themselves, singer-songwriter Mariel Loveland called the song “a sort of anthem to the most insecure parts of myself — the parts that felt like the best I could do was never really good enough.” Demonstrating open-book lyricism coupled with dance arrangements, Best Ex is very much a reflection of Mariel’s coming into her own as both a person and musician.
Ice Cream Anti-Social is a glistening artistic re-imagination for Mariel and only the beginning of this fine new project, which has taken the heartfelt lyricism and hooks from her previous punk leaning work and brought them into looser, poppier arrangements. ‘Girlfriend’, the first single released under Best Ex, was called a “synthpop jam” and “DIY pop charmer” by Billboard (where it premiered last month) and Substream said “the name change comes with a new sound that is downright impossible to resist.”
Songs like ‘February 4th’and ‘See You Again’ retain some of the more guitar-involved sound of past work, with the former a softer, string-backed ballad and the latter combining the more electronic-leaning sound of Best Ex with some of the rock influence that many associate with Mariel. The EP-closing track ‘Jellyfish’ fittingly features just Mariel singing over a ukelele, bringing a record that explores a lot of sound and emotion to a close with the most intimate spotlight on the words and music of the songwriter at the heart of it all.
It’s been four years since the last Elvis Depressedly full-length, 2015’s New Alhambra, but there’s been no lack of new music from Mat Cothran. He’s released two solo albums in that time, 2017’s Judas Hung Himself In America and last year’s My First Love Mends My Final Days, and he’s wrapped up his Coma Cinema project with Lost Memory. But now the North Carolina-based musician is returning to his Elvis Depressedly moniker this year with a new album called Depressedelica.
“I wanted to experiment and try new things and do weird shit and fail,” Cothran said in a press release. “Everybody’s so scared to fail these days because everybody’s trying to keep up with everybody else on social media, but I just reached this point where I realized that none of it mattered. I’m not trying to pretend I’m too cool to care — I genuinely hope people love the music I’m making — but ultimately all that I wanted to do was make something that I loved, and there was real freedom in that.”
Depressedelica first single is “Jane, Don’t You Know Me?,” which wraps guitars around pitch-shifted vocals, a drum machine, and a persistent barking. There’s a sense of well-worn history, of disappointment and regret and a heavy weight. “I am tangled up in our past/ I am falling off the wagon,” Cothran sings. “On and off the wagon, crazy for you.”
Laura Marling’s exquisite seventh album “Song For Our Daughter” arrives almost without pre-amble or warning in the midst of uncharted global chaos, and yet instantly and tenderly offers a sense of purpose, clarity and calm. As a balm for the soul, this full-blooded new collection could be posited as Laura’s richest to date, but in truth it’s another incredibly fine record by a British artist who rarely strays from delivering incredibly fine records.
When Laura Marling moved Song For Our Daughter up from August, it became a semi-surprise release meant to, hopefully, provide an anchor for people in confusing, traumatizing times. Not that this album is purely comforting, being a series of missives to an unborn child warning of how this warped world would challenge her. Despite coming from turmoil, Marling’s songs — the lilting sigh “Held Down,” the catchy “Alexandra” and “Strange Girl,” the raw and sparse “For You” — are able to harness beauty hidden within the ugliness surrounding us. In the end, it was the exact kind of salve we needed, just when we needed it.
Taking much of the production reins herself, alongside long-time collaborators Ethan Johns and Dom Monks, Laura has layered up lush string arrangements and a broad sense of scale to these songs without losing any of the intimacy or reverence we’ve come to anticipate and almost take for granted from her throughout the past decade.
“It’s strange to watch the facade of our daily lives dissolve away, leaving only the essentials; those we love and our worry for them. An album, stripped of everything that modernity and ownership does to it, is essentially a piece of me, and I’d like for you to have it. I’d like for you, perhaps, to hear a strange story about the fragmentary, nonsensical experience of trauma and an enduring quest to understand what it is to be a woman in this society. When I listen back to it now, it makes more sense to me than when I wrote it. My writing, as ever, was months, years, in front of my conscious mind. It was there all along, guiding me gently through the chaos of living. And that, in itself, describes the sentiment of the album—how would I guide my daughter, arm her and prepare her for life and all of its nuance? I’m older now, old enough to have a daughter of my own, and I feel acutely the responsibility to defend The Girl. The Girl that might be lost, torn from innocence prematurely or unwittingly fragmented by forces that dominate society. I want to stand behind her and whisper in her ear all the confidences and affirmations I had found so difficult to provide myself. This album is that strange whisper; a little distorted, a little out of sequence, such is life. Laura Marling
For a while, it looked like Brian Fallon was riding a wave to superstardom. The Gaslight Anthem, the New Jersey band he fronted, had graduated from playing dirty punk basement shows in New Brunswick to touring around the world in support of their breakthrough second record, 2008’s The ’59 Sound. By mixing their punk roots with driving, heartland rock influences, but also throwing in a little soul-searching tenderness along the way, The Gaslight Anthem tapped into a sound that was familiar—but which they also made very much their own. Even fellow New Jerseyian Bruce Springsteen wasn’t immune to their charms—not only was he a fan, he also shared the stage with the band numerous times, aiding their growing popularity.
And yet, despite—or partly because of—the success of his band, Fallon found himself struggling. He wasn’t happy. He didn’t like the amount of attention he was getting as a result of the group’s rising profile, and his personal life was falling apart. In 2015, just under a decade after the band was founded, they went on hiatus. And while the The Gaslight Anthem did reconvene for a brief tenth anniversary tour of The ’59 Sound, Fallon has been busy pursuing a solo career since the hiatus began.
While his first two solo records, 2016’sPainkillersand 2018’s Sleepwalkers, weren’t too distant musically from the emotionally charged, nostalgia-ridden heartland rock of his band, Local Honey is a more stripped-back and folky affair. With only eight tracks, it has the perspective and wisdom of someone who recently turned forty, who’s now a father, and whose rock ‘n’ roll dreams—dreams that were essentially forced upon him—no longer occupy the same space in his heart. It is, as he explains, a step in a different direction both musically and lyrically, but the new record also finds Fallon incredibly comfortable in his own skin as someone who is finally able to take stock of his life and what it means.
Here to remind us of our insatiable, adolescent appetite for music, Art Brut are back together. What started as a break-up album and turned into an ‘in-love record’, Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out! is a collection of post-punk, poppy bangers that recall the distinctive sound that burst out of the Berlin-based band back in 2005. It’s been seven years since the group’s last LP and sees Argos’ self-referential, sincere narrative shape into poignant reflections of encompassing a youthful heart in a world that perpetually forces us to grow up.
Argos was careful to “live a life” before attempting a new album. “I moved to Berlin, I nearly died with Peritonitis. I was in hospital for a bit. I had a son, I had a relationship that broke up. I wrote a comic, a memoir, a musical and had a one man show,” he says. “I don’t want to be that band who writes the sort of songs like “I don’t like touring, touring is really boring”. I think we needed a rest so some stuff could happen to me, to fill me up.”
Produced by award-winning folk musician Jim Moray, Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out! is Art Brut at their pop band best. Argos recorded his vocals in one or two takes, channeling the sporadic nature of his live performances while hand claps and ad-libbed jokes and howls produce a raw and authentic work. Morphing almost any mundane experience into a hilariously candid anecdote – whether it’s watching hipsters eat falafel on ‘Good Morning Berlin’, planning a better diet after a health scare on ‘Hospital!’ or dodging a train ticket inspector on ‘Schwarzfahrer’– Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out! is testament to the frontman’s unconventional approach to finding inspiration in just about anything.
“It’s not a game over, I got an extra life, I was born again, in a pure white light,” Argos trills on album opener, ‘Hooray!’, sparking an exuberant return to an industry where, if we’re honest, Art Brut never really fit in. On Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out!, Art Brut are creating anthems for outcasts.
With the departure of Jasper Future and Mikey Breyer, Art Brut are now made up of founding members Argos, Ian Catskilkin and Freddy Feedback while Toby Macfarlaine joins on guitar and Charlie Layton joins on drums. “I’ve known Charlie forever,” Argos explains. “He’s also the drummer for The Wedding Present but we always wanted to be in a band together since we were kids. Now it’s been about 25 years of knowing each other, he’s finally in our group. Toby plays bass for Graham Coxon normally, he’s in the band cos he’s an amazing guitar player and I love him. Ian found him and I looked at his twitter feed to see what he was about and he had posted ‘A Day in the Life of Vivian Stanshall” from the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band. I was like “yeah perfect! he’s in!’’
Argos describes Art Brut as a democracy, with the new line-up adding new ideas to the pot. “Toby and Charlie both rock the fuck out which is what I like,” he adds. “Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out! is a bit more back to basics Art Brut. It’s sort of the record I was trying to make after the first record and we didn’t quite succeed. I think I’m more confident now and I know what I want. Not being mean about our other records but it’s a poppy punk record which is what I wanted to do. I think speaking is a more honest way of getting what I want across. And I can’t sing too.”
While he wrestles with the realisation that Art Brut are now, as he describes, a “heritage band”, Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out! sees the band producing their most accomplished and innovative work to date. “I think it’s because we love it,” Argos says of the band’s longevity in the face of an ever-changing scene. “I’ve always been quite gregarious about being in a band. I thought it would fix everything. I can’t imagine ever leaving Art Brut. It’s quite addicting really, we’re a fun band when we play live. There’s a nice mix of that and heart, we’re not ironic or anything. I think it’s fun to be in Art Brut. Maybe that’s why we can’t stop?”
