URL: https://www.doublevee.net/ The “alternative” branding, as it currently stands in contemporary pop music, doesn’t mean a whole lot to very many people anymore, and it’s got nothing to do with the sudden death of a culture or the musicians who inarguably brought it to life in the first place. It’s because the term has been overused, misapplied and skewed with inarticulate subtexts; but in the case of Songs for Birds…
Canadian rockers The Respectables return with a new album, The Power of Rock and Roll, an accompanying leadoff single and video certain to solidify their longstanding reputation as one of the best rock acts hailing from the Great White North. The eleven song collection is an expertly produced affair courtesy of longtime Rolling Stones collaborator Bernard Fowler with cuts featuring renowned guest stars like guitarist Waddy Watchel, formerly a member of Keith…
Sonic waves of melody that are as light as a feather find a muscular shape that exploits their textures for all that they’re worth in “We’d Find.” Suffocating harmonies tumble from the heavens above and through our stereo speakers in “Wolf.” After a bit of thinking aloud, Katie Schottland lays into the most poignant ballad of her young career in “Left Hand Path.” Her solo project, Swimming Bell, delivers the…
Young Doctors in Love boast a sense of album structure you just don’t hear from young acts anymore. It is not the point of view of curmudgeon – the album simply doesn’t dominate the imaginative landscape of up and coming musicians as it did for previous generations, music distribution is turned upside down compared to traditional models, and thus much of the feeling and instincts for assembling a coherent album…
Pastoral poet Gary Douglas pulls out all the stops in the new single from his eponymous band, “Million Miles Away,” and by my estimation, delivers some of his very best work yet. Anyone who knows Douglas is more than aware of his dynamic skillset as a singer and songwriter, but few would expect the depth of emotion that he imparts in his latest work, which is captured beautifully in an…
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/ashleydelima/ Few pop singers have been making as big a splash with critics around the country as Ashley Delima has in the last year, and in “Fire in the Sky,” it’s easy to see why. Delima’s vibrant vocal style has been described as ethereal and transcendent in the past, and in this latest single from the acclaimed singer and songwriter we get to experience the full scope of her…
Velvety soft vocals penetrate the silence and immediately spellbind us with their modest melodicism in the opening bars of “Heroine,” one of the ten incredible tracks that comprise the new, self-titled album from Steel Blossoms. As the story in the song begins to unfold, the somber tone of the lyrics bleeds into the bittersweet serenade, and our hearts become bound to the evocative textures in the strings cascading from the…
Soap Bubble Dreams is the new album from indie/alternative rockers Para Lia from Germany. This new release should go up fast on the radar if it gets heard by the right people in the right places, because it contains everything that is no longer being done, and everything that’s still being done without all the proverbial bells and whistles. It features German musicians René Methner and Cindy Methner, each of…
The ever growing, ever evolving presence of technology in our lives means we will be seeing works like Greg Kieser’s Dear Machine: A Letter to a Super-Aware Intelligent Machine (SAIM) more. This slim tome, barely exceeding one hundred pages when you take out extraneous material like title pages and whatnot, nevertheless takes on an enormous mandate – Kieser structures the work as a “letter” composed to a future intelligent and “aware” machine…
“Vibrations,” the new single from acclaimed rapper NoTrace (and featuring vocalist Glenn Travis), isn’t a political song in nature, but its intellectual lyricism and intrepidly stylized narrative can’t help but evoke some pretty strong imagery and thoughts about our society as it stands today. In the track, NoTrace raps about the difficulties of life, keeping his head above the water one day at a time, never allowing too much of…
