Mimosa Hygiene is the first collection from Nashville based duo The Criticals. The talents of Cole Shugart and Parker Forbes are formidable even after a single listen; this is a band who have their songwriting wrapped up far tighter than your average emerging act and I can’t point to a single track among the six included as an obvious example of filler. The Criticals, instead, come out of their corner swinging…
Somewhat somber and yet capable of encapsulating the honest optimism of the lyrics in the foreground, the piano plays with a tortured resilience at the start of “Don’t Stand a Chance,” the new single by Mattia Pironti, and its opulence will only grow more noticeable as we press on. Its keys frame a poetic window into the soul of Mattia Pironti that had only been teased in his first two…
With an opening stanza that starts off with the lines “Undercover operations takes / A lotta discipline and patient waitin’ / Gotta secretly manipulate / To speed fate up,” MkX is getting real with us in his new song “right place, at the right time” and causing a stir among critics and fans for the third time in 2019. MkX is no loose cannon in “right place, at the right…
Tummyache’s Humpday opens with “Machine”, an often raucous cry from the heart looking to wrest meaning and purpose from a world often seeming to lack both. The five songs included on this EP release embrace that as theme. Songwriter Soren Bryce, through her inter and intra personal relationships, is an artistic voice chronicling how to hang onto your emotions in the general miasma of modern life. The roughhewn musical feel of “Machine”…
John DeNicola might not be a household name, but he should be, because you’ve probably heard his work in one form or another, whether you realize it or not. And his new album is his debut solo record, but it’s not exactly clear to me what’s all original and what is covered concerning both his own past works and covers of other’s work on this disc. What is clear to…
Black & Blue: Love, Sport and the Art of Empowerment is Andra Douglas’ fictionalized rendering of a lifetime loving the game of football and being told she couldn’t play. Good thing for us she never took those words to heart. Readers are treated to an often picturesque account of her upbringing in the American South, her relocation to New York City to pursue a career in the early Eighties, and…
2019 has been an exceptionally good year for independent musicians, and not very many in the bunch know this as well as AV Super Sunshine does. It wasn’t enough for AV to drop the remix LP Candyland on us over the summer; in his new single, which is also titled “Candyland,” the artist and his eponymous band prove to be the most diverse act in their scene with two mixes of a…
The five-song EP release New Language from the band TLA is a meeting of the minds with long term potential. TLA has a core of Jon Sortland from The Shins, The Pleased’s Jason Clark, and paper cut artist Tahiti Pehrson and their songwriting talents come together in a tight wound guitar-driven pop confection held together by sharp musicianship and superior songwriting. The material has to the point punch that makes this a…
Gold Light’s fourth album release Zephyr and frames Joe Chang’s songwriting talents in sharper relief than any previous collection. There’s nine songs included spanning a wide variety of thematic concerns and imagery but are anchored by an assortment of character types familiar to anyone who has followed Chang’s career to date. Chang has developed his songwriting talents by leaps and bounds with each successive release. His opening track “Cannon Street” is a…
A rollicking beat is adorned with crushing riffage the size of a skyscraper as we listen in on the first couple of bars in Lesibu Grand’s “Miranda,” but as the track presses on, what starts off as a Seattle-style grinder evolves into something that can only be described as pure, unadulterated Pixies worship. In Lesibu Grand’s debut record, The Legend of Miranda, this kind of string-powered thunder is par for the…
“When it was over it was mighty bad it was mighty bad / It was a heart attack / It was the worst damn time I ever had” croons the voice from beyond our speakers in the first three lines of Streaking in Tongues’ “Inside out and on My Ass,” one of the more seductive songs on the new album Oh My Darlin’. There’s a sense of apathy in this vocal,…
Culture Fix: How to Create a Great Place to Work from Liverpool, UK born author Colin Ellis is the latest entry in an ever growing library of books addressing the subject of organizational / corporate culture. It is difficult to conceive of a work more comprehensive and well-rounded on this subject; Ellis leaves no stone unturned in his appraisal of what it takes to implement and nurture a business culture that…
2019 has been offering up some of the most intriguing new hip-hop in a generation-plus, and among the more emotionally-charged efforts that I’ve heard out of the genre’s storied underground circuit on the west coast comes from none other than Hollywood’s Swigga Geovanni. Geovanni is a New York-born newcomer on the scene, but his first single, “DMLY (Daddy Mi Love You),” is a provocative, chicly-mixed power ballad seemingly tailor-made for…
Sonja Béets has devoted the better part of her life to creativity, and in her most recent work – the gilded “De Stad” – we get an up close and personal look at the fruits of her labor in high definition stereo sound. “De Stad,” a cut from Muzikale Stadswandeling, asks us to sit at attention amidst the unfurling of melodies that are at once cunning and simple, cruel and comforting,…
Like a wild wolf howling at the moon, the electric guitar that blasts a hole through the first ten seconds of Jeremy Rice’s “Arriianne” is intimidating, familiar and rife with intensity. The drums click into place and leave just enough space for the bassline to fill the background with warm tonality, and even before Rice starts serenading us with a punkish might, there’s a seditiousness to the undercurrent of percussion…
Few indie R&B singers are getting the sort of buzz that James Cole has been attracting as late, and it’s pretty obvious why when we take a look at his brand new single “Type of Guy,” which is out this August 23rd everywhere that highbrow urban pop is sold and streamed. Cole doesn’t pull any punches with us in this lyrical gem; contrarily, he wears his heart on his sleeve and gets right down to business…
“Let It Melt”, the first and title track from Diesel Park West’s ninth studio recording, serves notice this venerable UK outfit is showing no signs of slowing down. Thirty plus years in the music world are defined by impressive peaks and challenging fallows, but Diesel Park West kept the flame burning throughout thanks to the bonds of shared experience and a passion for their craft. Let It Melt is their first release…
URL: https://smomid.com/about/ Smomid’s Pyramidi Scheme is the latest electronic-themed release from guitarist Nick Demopoulos and his most defiant release yet. I use the word defiant, but it isn’t aggression. His defiance, instead, manifests itself as a resolute refusal to give more than passing acknowledgment to conventional musical structures and instrumentation. Smomid, instead, prefers to follow the road less taken. There are some tracks recorded for Pyramidi Scheme with familiar sounding elements, even melodies, and…
Giadora has made quite an impression on the local Los Angeles scene without ever embracing the attendant eccentricities often defining the pop/dance music style. Her first singe “Twisted” shows she is far from some cookie performer and, instead, rates as one of the more fully rounded talents active in the pop music world today. Despite a beginning in Los Angeles venues that featured Giadora alone with nothing but her acoustic…
Soft vocal harmonies adorn the lush opening bars of the surreal acoustic ballad “Almost an Angel,” and while their boldly evocative textures are all the more pronounced thanks to a brilliant delivery from singer Rachel Adams, they represent but a sliver of the unfiltered emotionality that listeners will discover when browsing the tracklist of Still Gushing, the first studio album from Nocturnal Blonde. Nocturnal Blonde was formed with the mission of…