New Music, Emerging from your Local Scene
Thompson Springs have released a new single called "Too Close For Comfort".
This is the work of Jacob Bicknase (drums, piano), David Thrift (Bass, backing vocals), Jeff Sullivan (electric guitar), Alex Charland (Saxophone), and Matt Smith (acoustic guitar, vocals)
You can catch Thompson Springs at Schubas on August 20th with Soul Honey Records, and Julian Daniell.
Trickshooter Social Club has released the first single, "Honey, I Believe", from their forthcoming EP, "Monte Carlo", which is due out via The Animal Farm Music later this year.
This is the group led by guitarist Larry Liss and frontman Steve Simoncic and this is the first new music from them since 2019’s album, American Experiment.
photo courtesy of the artist
L.A.-based band Inner Wave has announced the coming release of their fourth and latest album, Appotosis, on September 30th by releasing a music video for album track “Take 3.” Inner Wave are managed by Cosmica Artists + Records.
The track begins with a thick, honky, effortlessly funky bass line rolling alongside a languid but insistent four-on-the-floor drumbeat, both sharing space with polished, delayed synth mallets. Frontman Pablo Sotelo’s vocals are pleasingly lethargic in the way his syllables land in the pocket with the four-on-the-floor groove. Sotelo’s vocals are accompanied by delicate, echoed guitar strums and mournful, siren-like, infinitely stretched synth lines that seem to underline the melancholy and emotional fatigue of his vocals. Plucked synths that dominate during the chorus add an extra layer of dancefloor gloss that wouldn’t be out of step at a local club some night this weekend. The icing on the cake is the lush middle section that leads the song into it’s conclusion, which has an “everything but the kitchen sink” feel, while managing to remain stately in its unraveling.
The track is special in that its music video also marks Sotelo’s directorial debut. It’s a fairly simple affair, but full of symbolism for covid quarantiners. The singer spends the bulk of the video standing camera center, viewable only from the waist up, and wearing a simple white tank top. Footage of vintage road scenes are projected onto the upper part of his face (an enigmatic but potent visual, to be sure), which alternate with multi-exposed versions of himself. Some are lit from the front with a blood-red glow, some from behind with a single blinding white light, revealing a sea of fog at his feet. It’s definitely a pick for best use of minimal prop resources, and the shot where Sotelo slowly struts across the multicolored stage wearing a full military gas mask apparatus is a not-too-subtle nod to the Covid pandemic. It’s an effectively narcotic video for a lush and hypnotic track that accurately reflects the breakdown of time and space that the covid crisis created, and another artistic document to note the events of the past year and a half. Gabe Hernandez
Pop Punk group Cleveland Avenue has released the latest single, "If I Needed Help, I Wouldn’t Call (911)", from their forthcoming EP, "The Things Better Left Unsaid", which is due out on July 30th.
The single is accompanied by the Alex Zarek-directed video below.
You can catch Cleveland Avenue on August 27th at Bottom Lounge with Guardrail, Wolf Rd, and The Weekend Run Club.
Jillie (aka Jill Goldberg) recently released her latest single, "Takin’ A Ride", which follows a string of singles in 2021. This one is accompanied by a fun video that finds Jillie "Takin’ A Ride" around the city and State.
Photo by Ashleigh Stanczak Photography
photo credit: Jacob Boll
L.A.-based art-folk auteur Gregory Uhlmann (guitarist and vocalist with local act Fell Runner) has today released “Goosebumps,” an atmospheric one-off single—following up on his Neighborhood Watch album of last July—on Topshelf Records.
The art-folk track begins humbly with a simple muted acoustic drum fill, announcing the entry of two strummed nylon-string guitars and an hypnotic, elliptic bass line. The atmosphere of the recording is warm and open, quickly inviting the listener into its center.
Uhlmann’s voice is alternately deeply resonant and choir-boy pure, with a bit of breathiness, especially during the chorus, where his voice fades into a deep ocean of reverb on a single syllable. The addition of a gooey, tremoloed synth about halfway through the song changes the flavor but does so tastefully, as does the entrance of plucked instruments, pitched somewhere between mallets and a ticking clock, along with oceanic synth pads that resemble a school of shimmering sea creatures.
By the time the swelling single-note guitar lines double Uhlmann’s vocal melody and a lone, perfectly-timed cymbal crash signals the conclusion of the song, the listener has been taken on a unique aural journey, where contrasting timbres that shouldn’t fit well together still somehow manage to do so. Gabe Hernandez
Alex Banin has released her debut EP "Did I Imagine". The EP’s lead single is called "Forget About It" and is accompanied by the Michael Del Rosario directed video below.
Christian JaLon has released intro, "Spoken Words of MINE, #1”, to her forthcoming visual album "MINE".
The next single to be represented visually as part of "MINE" will be the Gospel anthem "Ego-Tripping". JaLon blends R&B, Gospel, and Jazz with her deeply rooted faith to create music that is positive and necessary.
Aunt Kelly recently released a new single called "Master of Mind". This is the group’s second single since the release of their 2019 debut album, Ready When You Are.
You can catch Aunt Kelly on July 30th at Golden Dagger with Max Subar.
After lighting up a thick stick of incense Taja Cheek a/k/a L’Rain (by day Ms. Cheek is a curatorial assistant at the MoMA PS1 contemporary art center) turns to manipulating a number of electronic modules alongside her bandmates and their guitars/keyboards/drums/digital thingymebobs (taken together the collective itis also named L’Rain, try to keep up here!) as they ease into a musical piece called “Find It” weaving together a sonic tapestry that’s built layer-by-layer starting with celestial washes of synth and other ambient clouds of sound eventually joined by percussion with brushed cymbals and tom rolls and then some guitar harmonics produced by hitting the backside of his instrument with a drum mallet and then some cresting waves of saxophone with its trilling tones fed through a swampy layer of echo—with the band enmeshed in a spider’s web of electronic gear, effects pedals, and wiring which they manage to engage in tandem with their more conventional instruments—and then five minutes into the whole thing of building up an entire sonic sculpture, L’Rain, the woman, not the band, leans into the microphone and sings a short vocal line going on to loop her voice in harmony with itself as she continues singing which creates a spinning/spiraling Spirograph-like pattern against which L’rain adds bass into the mix with a melodic winding line (all this twisting and turning is mirrored in the POV camerawork winding in and out of the individual players) and the opening lyric:
“How did I collect these clouds / from rain that fell for days / feel bad just to feel sane / my mother told me / make a way out of no way / make a way out of no way” and that’s exactly what the musical composition itself does as it builds out its own structure from the inside out, starting from the barest bones and building to criss-crossing patterns of polyrhythms, like an bug spinning a cocoon from within before emerging fully-formed. And it this isn’t the perfect musical representation of “making a way out of no way” then I don’t know what is.
And this is just the start of L’Rain’s mini-set, taped for Seattle’s KEXP as part of their KEXP At Home series, recorded live in L’Rain’s own Brooklyn environs. The album “Find It” is taken from is called Fatigue and it was released late last month and it’s interesting to compare the two versions studio vs. live. But never mind that because you’ll wanna listen to the album in its entirety asap whether for comparative purposes or not because it’s a heavy, heady, head-spinningly immersive album co-produced between Taja and fellow L’Rainer Andrew Lappin). And it also contains “Two Face” which is the other song heard in the live set above. Returning to the notion of making “a way out of no way” the whole record is a sonic and poetic exploration of the struggle to make sense of the senselessness of the preceding months or years or centuries (take your pick) and to emerge out the other side with something of beauty that’s ready to take flight.
So whether you’re already into SAULT or Solange or simply music that’s both soulful and boundary-breaking in equal measure then here you have another one for the listening queue. And then for more L’Rain in audiovisual form you can check out some of the clips below, but most of all go listen to Fatigue in its entirety because somewhat contrary to its name it’s a galvanizing ride even while taking listeners into the heart of darkness. (Jason Lee)
With lyrics about climbing mountains, overcoming obstacles, and coming together, Carry Us is an anthemic celebration of togetherness and pride, dropped during the second week of Pride Month. The song is LP Giobbi’s fourth single of 2021 and her latest push beyond the confines of traditional house music.
Repetitive house piano chords underscore Carry Us while Giobbi’s multidisciplinary production skills buoy the instrumental and push it toward a revelatory explosion. Giobbi’s background as a trained jazz pianist guides her timing, giving the arrangement a defined structure but not anchoring it in rigidity. Djembe drums scatter around a pulsing house beat to rejoice and convey gratitude, while hi-hats and claps enhance the feeling of comradery that the artists wanted to commit to.
The true star in the production is Kaleena Zanders, a towering vocalist whose projection carries the song to higher and higher heights. Her intonation when she chants the song title is church-choir-captivating, almost as if her soul escapes her body for a brief moment. She’s also able to hold a note for an eternity, coming off like an intentional callback to Martha Wash’s
house classic, Carry On. But in Carry Us, Giobbi and Zanders find unity in their will to persevere.
The song was born of a deep respect between the two artists. Giobbi says it took time to come to fruition while she worked more emotion out of the instrumental to match Zanders. “Our bond inspired me to write lyrics about friendship…Ultimately, this song is intended to invoke the feeling of being supported through thick and thin,” Zanders says of her creative process. “We went in with no boundaries and a pure love for soul music.”
That elemental love for soul music ensures that joy is at the forefront of both artists’ work. LP Giobbi constantly reinforces her preference for showcasing women-identifying artists through her platform, and Zanders is an excellent addition to the fold. The spiritual exhalation that Zanders brings to Giobbi’s production truly sets “Carry Us” apart from run-of-the-mill EDM.
Carry Us is out on all platforms now from Thrive Music.
— Mike Floeck
