Yeomans - Chloé - Los Colognes - Alan Getto

Yeomans - Just As You Want.

Background - Yeomans new single "Just As You Want" is out April 30 via NYK. This is a video for anyone who’s ever been sober at a party. It can be a strange and isolating experience to watch everyone getting gradually more intoxicated and their judgement getting cloudier without experiencing the same effects. Sometimes you have to get creative to make it fun for yourself too." - Kieran Heilbron (Yeomans).

Garage rock bands always tend to weigh heavily on the retro vibe and Toronto’s Yeomans are no exception, naming themselves after the hardworking farmers of colonial America. However, their music isn’t quite that ancient. Glimmers of 60s fuzz pedals, melodic surf, psych grooves and reverb soaked vocals haunt the Yeomans’ sound.

The band formed in 2013, during the height of the Rob Ford crack scandal. Guitarist Kieran Heilbron met then Yeomans’ drummer Jocelyn while selling “Rob Ford Smokes Crack” t-shirts to raise money for the Gawker "Crackstarter" campaign. Realizing they were both into psych and both looking for a new project they started jamming and Yeomans was born, joined by Calgarian Ian Kilburn on vocals & guitar.

Signing with NYK Records in 2016, Yeomans released “My Fish Got Drunk”, a shimmering surf instrumental, as their first single with the label in November 2016. Facebook here, Bandcamp here.

We featured the bands first single back in November last year and I had no hesitation in sharing the new single 'Just As You Want'. The sparkling surf vibes are there again, along with some psych rock overtones and a melodic hook that courses it's way through this dazzling song.


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Chloé - The Dawn.

Background - Sounding the promise of long days ahead and late nights to follow with its opening salvos, Chloé’s The Dawn heralds the return of the Paris-based DJ and producer, and a new dawn in her ever-evolving career.

Indeed, The Dawn is her inaugural release on her own label Lumière Noire, which she recently set up as a separate entity and of course for her infamous Rex Club night, which has since 2014 become a bit of a club house for Parisian electronic music fans. Operating Lumière Noire as a fully-fledged label will enable Chloé to release a new full-length album (of which The Dawn is the lead single) sometime in the next few months.

Over the ten-plus minutes of The Dawn, a spoken-word track languishes over melodic washes in a dramatic progression that evokes a novel, or noir-ish cinema – a method that the producer has taken a shine to since Take Care. This cultivation of the strange and the beautiful has become her calling card, putting her in a league with likeminded producers, who take the basic tenets of techno and inject them with their own singular poetic visions. A visual-arts analogue could be found in Noémie Goudal’s photographs which grace the EP’s cover as they will Chloé’s upcoming releases.

This stirring aesthetic gives The Dawn a slightly cerebral dimension, which is taken to new depths by Dixon’s stubbornly technoid remix. The Berlin-based whiz kid, who has over the last few years risen to the top of the international electronic music scene, inverts Chloé’s light-drenched, full-bodied production into a tense, captivating chiaroscuro. Website here, Facebook here, live dates on Beehive Candy's tour page.

'The Dawn' is ten minutes of electro bliss. The songs rhythmic flow slowly evolves through sonic alterations, whilst the spoken word lyrics act as a central piece and add to the atmosphere. Wonderful!

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Los Colognes - Sneakin' Breadcrumbs.

Background - Nashville quintet Los Colognes will release their third album The Wave on May 12th via Big Deal Media / Thirty Tigers. One of the highest and rarest aspirations in popular music is to reach for the transcendental, to access the spirit. On The Wave, Los Colognes succeeds at this – in breaking through the confines of everyday pop song lyricism to tell a holistic story. It’s not a concept piece, but it’s a brooding and joyful song cycle filled with philosophical rumination, effortless hooks, inspiring musicianship, and expansive arrangements. It’s an album perfectly suited of the current zeitgeist of unease and hope.

Unlike the live approach used to record the group’s previous records, The Wave was built from the ground up with attention to each part. There is a certain economy of space in the songs that feels deliberate, while never ceasing to be warm and inclusive. Guitar and keyboard lines drift off each other in between lyrical exchanges while Mortenson propels the beat, sometimes meditative, sometimes driving. 

The journey to finish recording The Wave was its own quest for Rutherford and Mortenson, a more deliberate process of creation and craft that shows a band becoming fully aware of its voice and its vision. Los Colognes have given us a singular collection of quietly anthemic tunes held together by philosophical reflection and damn fine rock and roll chops. The Wave is coming. Website here, Facebook here, live dates on Beehive Candy's tour page.

We featured the first track shared from the new album back in January and were pretty excited about the forthcoming release then.  'Sneakin' Breadcrumbs' pretty much confirms the optimism was well founded and only a few days now, to wait for the rest.

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Alan Getto - Into the Briars.

Background - Alternative folk rock singer-songwriter and guitarist, Alan Getto announces his debut album, Versus, due out August 2017. The LP was recorded over one long weekend at Studio 101A in Southern New Hampshire. The recordings were mixed by Simon Katz and mastered by Jonathan Wyner (David Bowie, Nirvana, Miles Davis) a Berklee professor and Chief Mastering Engineer at M-Works.

Inspired by paradoxical elements of life and examining his own transition into his current lifestyle, Getto finds a perfect balance between various dualities through his artistic expression. Having recently located to an unfinished farmhouse in Western Pennsylvania from Brooklyn, Versus presents Getto's personal confrontation with his own ambivalence. The album intentionally plays with cliché oppositions such as nature vs. the city, good vs. the bad and male vs. female. One can’t exist without the other, and for anything to exist, there must be a degree of conflict: "the versus." 

Getto's guitar-driven, simple melodies act as a backbone for the lyrical emphasis in his music. Having studied literature, theology, and philosophy in college, his lyrics pay homage to these intense, existential topics, but with a unique, irreverent spin. Tracks, "Soap In My Whiskey," and "It's Fine; You're Ugly," present Getto's blunt voice and narrative, with gorgeous melodies and organic, roots-y instrumentals. Getto is inspired by rock, blues and folk legends, such as Tom Waits and The Band, and newer folk artists including, Steve Gunn, Lady Lamb, The Tallest Man On Earth and Deer Tick. 

Once Getto had the concept, which was embodied by Leah Blanchette’s cover art, he enlisted friends to play on the album: three out of four members of the Boston “guerilla roots” band Damn Tall Buildings, along with cellist Kurt Villiard, drummer Tim Maxwell and pianist Jeff Davison.

Having previously released a live EP, All Different Times, Versus is the first full-length body of work to be released by Getto. While in Brooklyn, Getto performed around the city at various venues but has since moved out to the country, where he'll finish renovations on his farmhouse during the release of the record. Facebook here, Bandcamp here.

Alan Getto's vocals are personable and engaging as 'Into the Briars' beautifully demonstrates. The songs understated folk rock music allows the passion and power to develop through the singing, and boy it does.

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