Just in time for the unofficial end of summer, Poolside producer Alex Kemp and Grizfolk drummer Bill Delia combine as LA-based duo ORNAMENT AND CRIME, and we’ve got the first single from their debut EP, Another Night on The Astral Plane, the laid-back, semi-tropical groove workout “You’re a Mess,” featuring the vocal talents of Virginia Palms.
“You’re a Mess” tumbles from the speakers in a cascade of effortlessly chill bass and drum work, delicate keyboards that seem to evoke the sway of an accordion player at a bistro on the French Riviera, and even the vaguely mystical vibes of a pan flute. All of it combines into a lush, buoyant track, which is only elevated by the mixed male/female unison vocals that sing above it all. As for the lyrics, Bill Delia explains, “Everyone falls for the wrong person once or twice, right? It’s an enjoyable fail, really. This song honors the toxic lovers we all encounter at some point in our lives, the ones we have a blind eye of love for.”
The new EP by ORNAMENT AND CRIME is scheduled for release on October 15th. If the new single is any indication, we could be looking at a belated end to the summer so that this tune has a proper chance to sizzle out of earbuds and speakers across the city. Gabe Hernandez
Press A recently released the first single, "Carcosa Shore", from their forthcoming debut album which is due out on September 24th. The single and accompanying video, which was created with the help of Clustercuss Entertainment, were inspired by the first season of the hit HBO show "True Detective".
This is the work of Jim Gainer (lead guitar/vocals), Colin Gainer (drums/programming), Matt Gainer (bass), and Erik Gainer (guitar).
Half Gringa has released a new single called "Sevenwater". This is the first new music from Half Gringa (aka Isabel "Izzy" Olive) since the release of her 2020 album Force to Reckon.
You can catch Halg Gringa at Lincoln Hall on September 25th with Andrew Sa and Niika.
Compton born and raised artist Brittany Chikyra Barber goes by the stage name “Bee-B,” but despite the cutesy name, she has the productivity and work ethic of a veteran industry stalwart, having released multiple critically-acclaimed mixtapes and EPs, along with having written for and collaborated with some of music’s finest, including John Legend, YG, Theophilus London and Kanye West.
Her hot streak extends itself with the debut of her latest track/video, “Confidence,” an assertive and motivational pump-up track, alternating pep-talk with the types of classic self-congratulating boasts that are an defining feature of today’s female-centered rap music.
The track begins with a low, booming electronic drone, almost like the trumpet of a mechanized elephant, instantly seizing the listener’s attention. The rhythm track itself is quite simple, consisting of alternating kick drums and hand claps, carried along by electric organ-like keyboard sounds. Later in the song, buzzing synths that cascade down in tone insert a level of vague menace that compliments Bee-B’s effortless, unbothered flow.
The video itself lightens the mood. Interspersed with scenes of Bee-B and her crew strutting down a futuristic runway, complete with an attentive audience who are all wearing multi-screen video cubes that reflect the artist back onto herself. It’s a vivid metaphor for a rapper’s ambition to be ubiquitous, to “run the game,” so to speak, but it also carries a somewhat dystopian commentary on society’s obsession with celebrity and social media. Fortunately, Bee-B also has a sense of humor, posing as 1) Michael Jackson on the cover of the Thriller album, complete with 80s Jheri curl, 2)a gold medal-winning USA Olympic athlete, complete with Florence Griffith Joyner’s single-leg running pants, and 3)a winner of a $1 billion check for “confidence.”
Humor and bigger-than-life confidence both have a long lineage in the world of rap music, and Bee-B is proving that it will maintain its place as long as she’s around to put her distinctive spin on it. Gabe Hernandez
I’m not usually one to quote other critics here but since I’m feeling a little lazy, and because there’s some provocative opinions on the latest album by Petite League out there, I’ll just share a couple quick ones here. Like the quote from the Americana Highwayswriter who says there’s no hyperbole at all in calling Joyrider “a lo-fi Pet Sounds” or prematurely naming it “the best album of the year” because “it’s just hard to image [sic] something topping this.” Congrats with that pull quote gentlemen! And over at The Family Reviews, in describing the overall vibe of the album, another writer observed that “the dominant force on this album [is being] blissful in the moment even with the knowledge that when the high wears off the hangover is going to be psychically shattering.” Which sounds a lot like Brian Wilson while making Pet Soundsso I think we have a running theme here.
When it comes to the song “New Tricks” off the album and it’s newly released music video, Petite League demonstrate their considerable talent for making loneliness and regret and daydreams and succeeding-against-all-the-odds sound transcendent in a low-key/lo-fi kinda way, luxuriating in sharp, sweet suffering like teasing a loose tooth with your tongue. And while I can’t help but think of Rob Gordon at the beginning of High Fidelity when he wonders aloud whether the music or the misery came first, finally you gotta say “who cares!” when you can simply bask in the winsome strains of Petite League and the heart-rending tale of an old dog trying to learn “new tricks" in the parallel realms of romance and roulette.
Now that I think about it, this song’s scrappy shaggy-dog story is straight out of a hardcore country song–talk about a genre that knows how to confront everyday forms of sadness or at least it once did–about a gambler who definitely does not know when to hold ‘em or when to fold ’em as evidenced by all-night booze and baccarat filled bender at the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City spent “betting it all on the wrong dog” and returning dejectedly on the 4AM bus back to the city smelling like ashtray butts and “the bottle I was sleeping in” and then showing up on your doorstep unannounced declaring “I’ve made a terrible mistake please consider loving me like you once did” and boy does this kind of stuff pull at your heartstrings, especially given the dogged optimism of the narrator holding out hope for “one more lucky strike / one more lucky hand / one more lucky night” a lot like the tragic protagonist of nearly every movie ever made about doomed dreamers and gamblers.
And when you’re this hard up you can sometimes find a perverse succor in being a sucker, that is, in giving yourself so entirely over to something or someone so that no matter how hopeless the reality of it you at least manage to escape yourself–like our narrator drawn to pretty faces that “always drinks for free…like sugar and wine in my veins,” providing comfort to “a broken, broken man,” not unlike “the comforting heat from the warmth of a gun” or some other metaphor about being inextricably-drawn-to-what’s-worst-for-you in a way that’s “hard to explain and harder to change” but hey just raise your hand if you haven’t been there before. (Yeah, I thought so!) Then if you dress up the quasi-story-song with gently shimmering Andy Summers guitar chording and bounding basslines and in-the-pocket timekeeping (courtesy of drummer Henry Schoonmaker) and blankly blissful vocals (courtesy of songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Lorenzo Gillis Cook) all wrapped up in the warm glow of the record’s lo-fi production, and you’re likely to experience a slowly spreading sense of deep contentment whatever your current circumstances in life.
And speaking of being bathed in a warm glow, the music video only amplifies this sense of womb-like comfort and warmth with the band’s members ensconced in colorful mall-walker windbreakers kind of like oversized Members Only jackets as they wander around and lounge on a city rooftop decorated with pin-striped partitions and it certainly looks like a pleasant way to spend a day–especially with all the magic tricks and money flaunting and dice playing happening up there. This warm nostalgic aesthetic is only heightened by the video being filmed on Super 8 and 16mm film by band ally and video director KD Sampaio (Good Relation Records) with the resulting visual full of artifacts and vertical hold issues evoking the hazy, sentimental vibe of unearthed home movies discovered in the attic.
And so the moral of the story may be "why not bet all your chips and shoot for the big jackpot, perhaps followed by a joyride in the Mojave Desert, because what else have you got to lose?" or at least that’s my takeaway. At worst, you’ll experience a psychically-shattering hangover and then write a great song about it like this one. (Jason Lee)
HEET DETH has released the first single, "Blood!", from their forthcoming album, HEET DETH Hooray!, which is set to be released on September 23rd via Don’t Panic Records.
This is the Noise Rock duo of Julia B. and Laila E., and the single is accompanied by the wild video below.
After checking out their debut single “Bourgeois de Ville,” if forced at gunpoint to guess some of the guiding lights in this young band’s musical firmament, I would propose such “old-skool-new-wave” artists as (shameless name-dropping alert!) Wire, Bauhaus, PiL, the Adolescents, the Police (peep that Synchronicity like cover image) Hüsker Dü, the B-52s, and later, the Pixies and the Breeders–as filtered through a Wall-of-Voodoo-meets-Oingo-Boingo sensibility and don’t forget to add dashes of Jesus and Mary Chain’s noisy fuzzed out bliss or Buzzcocks’ headrush pop-punk hooks. We can only hope that our deceptively clean-cut-looking boys keep raiding their cool uncles’ record collections and spinning gold from the old vinyl (yes we’re being presumptuous, but the “cool uncle” theory is a valid one to explore) and that they keep seeking out the human in the monstrous and the monstrous in the human like they do in this song just like their namesake.
Vacillating between first person and third person, the lyrics confront Frankenstein and his monster at once (and as one) coming up with such bon mots as “shut the fuck up you’re a Pisces / probably talking feels over ICEEs” and somewhere Kurt Cobain doth shed a tear. And before long the narrator is proudly reeling off examples of his own pretentious mendacity and overall asshole-acity before suddenly losing his cool and blurting out the unstated desperate subtext (“je suis intéressant!” which means “I am interesting” for all you non-Francophones) over and over again to a growing chorus of babbling voices in his head (that we can also hear) and you just know none of this can be a good sign. But it is a good cautionary tale that points the finger inward too because as frontman Jackson Dockery puts it “sometimes you’re the pretentious asshole” or in other words, doctor, heal thyself, like the crocheted pillow says.
These shifting psychological states are reflected in the music which opens on a tense anticipatory buildup like a slowed down, blunted out version of the intro of the Dead Boys’ "Sonic Reducer" before cutting off at the climactic moment and transforming into a crisp, tense post-punk-disco-beat-bass-groove with occasional guitar outbursts and soccer terrace-style vocal chanting of the title phrase which sounds like the name of a new club in the Meatpacking District. But then the song takes another turn and eventually builds up to a rush of crunching guitars and increasingly Tourette’s-like traded vocal (sometimes in Spanish) and continues apace with ebbs and flows like the tide coming in and out which is all rather fitting since there’s a strong surf-punk vibe at times too like in the breakdown section especially with the “Wipeout” drum rolls and swarming echoey guitar all building to a climactic finale of frantic Johnny Rotten style jabbering and I won’t spoil any more of it, you can just listen yourself.
Anyway it’ll probably make you wanna dance the pogo or smash things, or maybe just topple over a vase due to your spasmodic dancing, because this song doesn’t skimp on the jumpy restlessness or nervous-whisper-to-a-scream vocal acrobatics with Dockery coming across at times like Stan Ridgeway and Fred Schneider’s love child backed up by a band that echoes his manic mood swings to a tee. And by the end you’ll wanna punch your first repeatedly in the air while surfing in a moshpit in righteous fury against mindless Mobius strip banter at Bushwick rooftop parties that threatens to turn you into just another pretentious asshole, but one who likes to dance and to rant entertainingly at least–which I hope the band plan to do themselves at their upcoming gigs on 9/10 (gold sounds), 9/18 (Berlin) and 10/5 (bar freda). (Jason Lee)
Before embarking on his next great adventure, Austin ukulele sensation Sho Humphries made sure to bestow his loving local community with a parting gift. Sho’s debut EP Dream Again is a triumph of creativity, an exploration of sound and style from a young musician whose bravery surpasses even his immense talents.
In Sho’s nimble hands, the ukulele is transformed. Empowered. Liberated. He embraces the instrument as something far beyond its simplistic representation in public perception—more than a toy, more than an instrument for beachside celebration and casual singalongs, the ukulele is an embodiment of possibility itself. In Sho’s hands, the ukulele seems infinite, irrepressible. It breathes water and whispers fire and sings of a bright tomorrow.
The growth showcased between earlier releases and this new EP are striking. Sho’s 2017 instrumental album Making Summer Memories flirted with musical expressionism, pushing and pulling at the boundaries of expectation while staying firmly rooted in a larger framework for what ukulele music is and can be. Opening track “It’s Shotime!” is a notable exception, its near-frantic urgency and rock-and-roll aesthetic harbingers of both Sho’s sonic fearlessness and profound, near-brooding pensiveness. The rest of the album tends toward bright and buoyant, though the assertive percussiveness of each strike sometimes seem to belie an underlying (and typically teenage) impatience.
2020 single Love You! was the virtuoso’s first foray into electronic looping, his airy, math rock-y riffs given ample room to breathe and, in turn, breathing life into a lo-fi trend threatening to sedate swaths of the younger generation. The track showcases a young musician at peace with the process of finding peace — more patient, perhaps in love with the simple joy of making music. The chorus is endearingly heartfelt, and all the more powerful for it: “Breathe in, breathe in/Love out, love in.”
With the Dream Again EP, Sho emerges more confident, more hopeful, that familiar sense of urgency appearing again but tempered now by faith in himself and the future. He is more accomplished than ever on the ukulele itself — every finger-picked run impeccable, every strum irresistible. But the sentiment underlying each song feels more profound, more mature, more complex. What might once have felt like emotional reactions are transformed into careful reflections and reimaginations.
The echoing, atmospheric emptiness of the title track slowly evolves, swelling with elegantly amplified ukulele riffs that complement, rather than overpower, Sho’s stirring baritone (on debut!). Tight songwriting and a deep appreciation for the power of empty space cultivate in a wonderfully distorted crescendo, with Sho’s direct poeticism lending a sense of urgency to Sho’s pleas for the world to “dream again,” to build a better future and to avoid our own mutually assured destruction.
A return to Sho’s sonic roots — hopeful, determined, vibrant — “Rising Hope” builds on that momentum. It is the song of rebirth and reimagination, the sound of grass beginning to grow again as a new sun shines a light on far-off horizons. There is a sadness of sorts underpinning it all, a recognition that new beginnings demand their own sacrifices — what once might have been innocent idealism is tempered by an acceptance of reality that makes Sho’s resolute optimism all the more impactful.
Vision and imagination, determination and dynamism — these are traits we desperately need in our younger generations, who we have collectively burdened with so much responsibility and expectation. Armed with his ukulele and a searching spirit, Sho Humphries is stepping into the world ready to make a change.
The time is almost here for summer fun! And for summer fun, you need summer music! As in, summer music conveniently organized in playlist form! Obviously! As in a MASSIVE EIGHT-HOUR-PLUS SPOTIFY PLAYLIST of songs both old and new (but mostly new) that have a summer theme, or a summer vibe, or an "I’m playing this while it’s summer" thing going on! And then, after you’ve taken a sick day off from work and risked getting fired to listen to the Spotify playlist, you can spend untold hours more viewing the custom-made YouTube playlist below–cleverly titled Beach Blanket Bedlam–which includes not only a bunch of cool music videos (and not very much overlap with the Spotify playlist) but also all kinds of wacky commercials and film trailers and news segments and other visual ephermera tied to summer somehow.
Wait. What? What’s that you say? It’s almost over? Summer’s almost over? Uhhhhh whut?
Well, I guess summer is almost over. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy some beach-appropriate-music while you’re raking leaves and baking pies and crying salty tears into the homemade crust you made for the pie because fall is here and summer is over. IT’S OVER!! JUST DEAL!!
What, what? Ahhhh, ok. So summer doesn’t end for almost a month. On September 21, you say? And it doesn’t even end "unofficially" until after next weekend and Labor Day. So yeah, then…..Better get out there now! HURRY! Summer fun is waning!! FUN FUN FUN FUN!!!! You’re on a summer countdown clock dammit so better get to work!
And hey, along these lines, if you happen to be in the vicinity of Rockaway Beach at 94th Street (Queens, NYC) on Sunday 8/29 you can get in some last seasonal jollies at the NO NEW WAVE FEST 2 which FEATURES SIX HIGH QUALITY LOCAL BANDS playing live on the boardwalk starting at 2PM. And yeah, OK, it’s not exactly supposed to be sunny. But it’s not supposed to rain either. And since beggars can’t be choosers esp when there’s only about a week (or three weeks, or who-the-hell-knows-how-long….) left to Summer 2021 you’d better just get out there dammit!!
P.S. And here’s one last thought re: "things you should do" while I’m handing out orders here —-> You should follow THEE DELI on Instagram if you don’t already. Because if you did, you woulda already known about the two playlists above weeks ago. And while you may live your life with regret until next summer knowing what-could-have-been you never know there may be a Fall or Winter playlist in the making. (Jason Lee)
