In modern country music, the lines of the genre are becoming more and more blurred with every passing year. Some will argue that the genre has never had distinct boundary lines, but with the invention of starlet Taylor Swift, it’s safe to say that the nondescript lines of country and pop became eviscerated beyond recognition, regardless of what the 80s and 90s country stars had to say. URL: https://coreystapleton.com/ Even…
Introducing a concept of faith through more than lyrics is a task every Christian contemporary songwriter has to deal with, but rarely does a player do it quite as well as Lady Redneck does. Her new single, the simple “After the Rain, You’ll Find the Son,” has a lot in common with the surreal country movement we’re hearing more and more out of in 2022, but with one caveat; it’s…
Devinn Le’Raay is hot and bothered in the new single “FaceTime,” and with a little help from Lakes the Voice, he’s going to make sure we know just what he needs to get straight again. Le’Raay’s smooth demeanor punctuates a scandalous string of verses as stinging as they are simplistic, and although the lyrics are on the leaner side in “FaceTime,” the way they’re presented to us in this track…
Judging from the pristine keys that greet us as we step into Bruce Lii’s world ala the new music video for “Toxic,” you would think we were in for a much more elegant number than this rocky, uncompromising performance is, but if you’re a fan of this player’s music, you know exactly what you’re getting in a piece like this one. “Toxic” pulverizes with its brute strength, most of it…
Introspection is a key theme in the music video for Bosco’s ballad “Wicked Woods,” and while the imagery contained within it seems to couple regret with a fleeting sense of reflection, it never extends itself outside of the self-awareness realm. Bosco doesn’t want to give us a sob story in this performance, but instead something tangible and relatable from an external perspective. His words are as heavy as bricks, but…
Coyote Red is a brilliant debut album from wildly talented singer/songwriter Bailey Bigger. Born and raised just outside Memphis, Tennessee Bigger started playing guitar and writing songs at the tender age of nine. Her original song “Wildflower” won “Memphis’ Best Song of 2017” when she was just 17, she’s been playing at venues and festivals ever since. Coyote Red is a beautiful album that highlights Bigger’s honest songwriting and artistry.…
The irreverent Project213, just one of Jared Hallock’s several artistic endeavors, is an idea that finds difficulty sticking to one lane — those of us that have been internet savvy throughout the aughts and beyond might remember the group’s nearly decade-old proto-meme “Everybody Masturbate,” but a quick check of Hallock’s own YouTube page shows that the band has been all the more active since, with their most-watched release gaining an…
Protests and funerals have been walking hand in hand for the better part of the last few years as the ongoing fight for justice in the Black community has raged forward to an unprecedented level, and the new music video for Miss Storm’s single “Quicksand” is a painful reminder of just how real the crisis we’re facing as a nation right now really is. Forget the politics and the talking…
Rebellion in the rock genre is back and better than ever right now, and I’m not talking about the hybrid hip-hop/punk acts that have been taking over the mainstream exclusively. Buried beneath the pop music culture that you’ll find anywhere on the FM dial right now is a feverishly talented underground scene cultivating what sounds, feels, and seems to be some of the realest punk rock we’ve heard since the…
Pop/rock influences combine with a steadily melodic hip-hop persuasion in the new single from Stringz EMB, “Hijacked,” but while this might sound like just another hybrid rap track dropping this spring on paper, this is no run of the mill hip-hop single. There’s considerable depth to the instrumental framework of “Hijacked” that is hard for even the more discriminating of critics among us to ignore, and although Stringz EMB has…
Danger is all around in the new music video for XIIDC’s new single “3 Ninjas,” and I’m not talking about the visual setup alone. There’s an ominousness shadowing the verses that Artshow, Spell the Three and Typhanie & Co. are giving up in this performance, like a night stalker creeping behind us in the shadows, and yet there isn’t a drop of intimidation affecting the performance of these three rappers.…
The concept for Goldthread’s new single and music video “Tiffany Skylight” is pretty simple – push each other as much as possible to get the most dynamic effect out of the music. All the familiar rock n’ roll ingredients have been included in this recipe for rhythm-centric heavy music, but without the energy that these players are nudging each other forth with, “Tiffany Skylight” likely wouldn’t sound like the hard-hitting…
Although it features a heartily synthesized melody at the center of its arrangement, the new single “Say Nothing” from Flume and May-A doesn’t sound inorganic in the least. This is largely because of the vocal charisma its two stars offer from behind the mic, but even relative to some of the other clubby pop music I’ve been spinning this March, there’s something a lot warmer and truer to the artistic…
Geno Marriott’s new music video for his single “Take the Time: Smell the Roses” definitely lives up to its title in more ways than one, starting with the way it uses tempo to get us to appreciate the intricacies of nature on screen. Even though the music is merely a soundtrack, presented by Marriott himself in the video, it feels embedded with every frame of earthly beauty we see in…
A rock single is nothing without a signature riff, and Ignescent’s “Remnant” definitely has something special. The fretwork in this track isn’t quite the face-numbing brutality you would expect from a conventional heavy rock single, but it doesn’t need to be – the lumbering rhythm of the riffage here is enough to make anyone a rocker for life. Ignescent has a lot of competition coming at them from virtually every…
Pop-punk is pretty much everywhere once again in 2022, but this doesn’t mean there are many players in the mainstream doing the genre justice. I’m not talking about the usual suspects, the veterans, or the puritans either – when you’ve got more crossovers in this style of music than straight-up players, the fans can tell, which is why the Fizzgigs are getting the kind of love from listeners they are…
Against a vast urban backdrop like the one we’re introduced to in the opening frames of Goodfella Uno’s new music video for “Peace,” the upstart rapper seems rather small, as any person would beside all of the enormous skyscrapers behind him. It isn’t until his vocal comes into focus that we start to realize the irony of the imagery; in Goodfella Uno, indie rap fans have a giant voice that…
1. When did you first know you wanted to become a musical artist? What was the first song you ever wrote? I wrote a “song” when I was about four years old which was, in retrospect a reflection of my parents divorce. I basically took my mom’s side, and the song was a mockery of my dad. Years later, that song became an easy way to look at my early…
Whether driving home a huge melody in “Way Far Back” or tying together the harmonies in the video for “Why Does It Happen,” the guitars that guide the lyrics in Wave 21’s Brace Yourself are indispensable. Although there’s a lot more to this record than the luster of its string section, there is certainly no downplaying the importance of the fretwork in Brace Yourself, and I think this makes it a bit superior to its…
Some people wait a lifetime for that special person. That instant connection seems like an impossible dream. For others, it’s an instant and feels as though it was there all along. Time doesn’t seem to pass and the world seems to stop in the song “Sweetest of Melody”. Sung by Rina Chanel, with duet parts courtesy of Senghor Robinson, “Sweetest of Melody” is a lush, smooth jazz piece with a…