Hero Fisher - Farewood - The Camino Side Project - Moscow Apartment - Malhini - Gabriella Rose
Hero Fisher's new album has finally dropped and to accompany this excellent and long-awaited release Hero has made a video for one of the lead tracks called 'Life Through Closed Eyes'.
‘Glue Moon’, Hero says of her new album, (in part inspired by Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 novel Housekeeping,) ‘is the place in my mind I’d go to when I was writing a lot of the tracks on the album. For Hero, Glue Moon is an idyllic sense of mental calm, the image of a pale moon above a still lake at dawn. After a year of triumphant singles, including ‘I Let Love’, ‘If I Die And Nothing Happens’ and ‘Lonely’, she is now releasing her long-anticipated second album, and while she’s kept much of what worked about her debut album Delivery, including her collaboration with guitarist and musical director ‘Saul Wodak’, Glue Moon finds Hero wading into deeper creative waters.
The addition of rising Italian co-producer Marta Salogni (Sampha, The XX, and MIA) adds vibrant new sonic avenues to her expansive sound. From the spectral majesty of opener ‘Bird of Prey’ and the propulsive bass honking crawl of ‘Binder’ Glue Moon is a serious sonic and lyrical display of an artist arriving at the peak of her powers. With its expert production and wide emotional palette, on Glue Moon Hero Fisher channels the spontaneity and deep poeticism of narrative songwriters like PJ Harvey and Nick Cave while offering something new and vital. Glue Moon arrives with the video for her brilliantly atmospheric and ambient ‘Life Through Closed Eyes’.
British-born, French-raised and London-based, Hero Fisher (yes, that’s her real name) has had a career that has so far seen her collaborate with Alison Mosshart and Boy George in the Mark Ronson-scored ballet Carbon Life, open for The Rolling Stones and Neil Young at Hyde Park, and get shortlisted for the 2014 Glastonbury Emerging Talent Prize. In 2015 she released her debut album, the critically-appraised Delivery which won her fans in The Horrors and Blur. By turns a blistering rock and roller in the vein of Patti Smith and PJ Harvey, and an experimental folk storyteller à la Jeff Buckley, Hero Fisher resists easy generic categorisation with her protean and cinematic musical storytelling.
Able to expertly strike a variety of different narrative poses, she is at once the spurned lover and the fired-up rabble rouser, predator and prey. With Glue Moon previous singles ‘Sylvie’, ‘Push The Boat Out’, ‘I Let Love’ ‘If I Die And Nothing Happens’ and ‘Lonely’ Hero’s lyrical imagination proved unique and bountiful. Glue Moon adds to her magical body of work and takes her sound into uncharted territory. It’s a testament to her limitless artistic range as one of the most magnetising rising stars around. WEBSITE.
Over the last year and a half we have been mightily impressed by everything that's come our way from Hero Fisher. I have to say her brand new album entitled 'Glue Moon' is as spectacular as I had hoped for, the creativity, performance and production being top notch.
Having already featured the singles 'Sylvie', 'I Let Love', 'Lonely' and 'If I Die and Nothing Happens' we now have a new music video for 'Life Through Closed Eyes' that's five of the thirteen tracks on the album (yep, I know it only took one hand to work that out). So what of the rest? Well you can expect even more musical explorations, each song has impact and the variations in style or direction are given some consistency through Hero Fishers vocals and personal feelings that are there in abundance.
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Hailing from the "Silver City" of Meriden CT, the band Farewood has been cultivating their style of ethereal rock for almost two decades.
Led by the husband and wife songrwriting team of Lou (vocals, guitar) and Leah Lorenzo (vocals, bass), and bolstered by the propulsive rhythms of long time drummer Kyle McCarthy and guitarist Eric Ieraci.
Farewood have emerged again with a new album of dream weaving, ethereal rock. Compelling from start to end, 'Under Burning Sun', the group's latest offering is their boldest yet, and perhaps the high water mark of their career. WEBSITE.
If you like your rock music to have plenty of melodic hooks, intriguing lyrics and a distinctive musical arrangement that gives clarity to each musician, then 'Under Burning Sun' consistently delivers along those lines.
Described as ethereal rock, that's better than any overarching categorisation that I could come up with. The quality is constantly good, whilst there's enough feeling and passion to give the album a personal and emotional vibe.
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To recap - Multi-instrumentalist Paul Farran originally hails from Montreal, Canada, and proficiently practices the poetic baritone of the city's patron saint, Leonard Cohen. But Farran’s influences extend far beyond his roots, having lived internationally and travelled extensively, including his work for the United Nations in Rwanda, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe and Viet Nam.
Paul began his music career in the alternative rock band Pacer which released two albums between 1998 and 2003, chalking up hundreds of shows each year. But balancing globe-trotting work and new family obligations made it hard to keep his role in the band rolling, and he reluctantly shelved his music ambitions to make room for new dreams. In 2008, Paul and his wife walked 400 miles of the “Camino de Santiago,” an ancient route that crosses Northern Spain, and tied the knot at the end of the journey. In 2016, they undertook another life-changing trip, both quitting their UN jobs to backpack with their young kids on a half year trip from Africa to South East Asia and back, then onwards to Europe.
It was during this journey that Paul revived his musical aspirations and conceived The Camino Side Project, with the Spanish word “Camino” meaning path or way. He put his master’s degree in international relations to good use, enlisting the musicians he met along the way and reviving musical links from his past to join him in documenting his travels, inspirations and introspections. This musical journal turned into 11 songs about 11 countries, each entry reflecting on the genuine experiences in life that impact one’s own perspectives and decisions. Often Paul’s guests provided an additional instrumental texture and on other tracks it led to full blown collaboration, like with Vietnamese hip hop artist Radical on “Highbeam”. WEBSITE.
We featured 'Vilma's Soundtrack' just a few days back and now we have another track to share called 'Wheels'. Then we said "The production is superb and refinement and quality are key elements, along with the heart and feeling that is always there", I reckon this adds weight to that summary of the album, if these couple of tracks have impressed you, check out 'of movement & music', it's got plenty more songs of this quality.
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“Orange” is about the weird twilight-zone feeling that happens sometimes at sunset – when things suddenly don’t feel real, like everything around you is a movie.
We originally submitted the demo for “Orange” (produced by Samantha Martin) to the Canadian Songwriting Competition and wound up winning in the Under 18 category. Joel Plaskett was one of the judges and we got to spend an afternoon with him in Halifax picking his brain about music, songwriting, and production. It was amazing.
We then went back into the studio and co-produced the final version with Guillermo Subauste who engineered two of the songs on our last EP and our last single, “Be You”. The recording experience was fun because we had really strong ideas of what we wanted “Orange” to sound like and we were able to manifest those ideas with Guillermo’s help.
We’re currently hard at work on our second EP which will be released in the future through Hidden Pony Records and are super lucky to be a part of the Slaight Music family after winning their It’s Your Shot competition. Thanks to that, Kevin Drew heard our music and really liked it – we were so excited when he came to one of our shows in Collingwood! TWITTER.
'Orange' is a superbly arranged song, where musical hooks (and there are a ton of those) compete with the gorgeous vocals and harmonies. It's my introduction to Moscow Apartment, and I am totally impressed by this piece, it's vibrant, catchy and reading the background from the duo above, gives some folk in the music industry a very positive thumbs up.
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Lo-fi pop duo Malihini will release their debut album 'Hopefully, Again' through Memphis Industries on 8th March 2019. Produced by Richard Formby (Wild Beasts, Ghostpoet, Darkstar), 'Hopefully, Again' was written in Sicily and recorded at the remote Giant Wafer Studios in Wales. Malihini, aka Rome-based couple Giampaolo Speziale and Federica Caiozzo, have unveiled the first single to be taken from the album, the soulful, superficially pretty ‘Hopefully Again’: its languid drums and woozy electric guitar hook-line usher in a sort of conversation between circling lovers – Caiozzo taking the first verse, Speziale the second, the two combining for the redemptive and addictive “Love is coming back” chorus line. “It’s about when you’re first really into one another”, explains Speziale. “When you try to be someone, as seen through the eyes of the other. It's about flirting, and the moment when you come back from the slowness of depression, you dress up and you’re ready to confront with the fastness of love/life again".
'Hopefully, Again' is accompanied by a video filmed and spliced together by the band themselves from footage of their travels to Rome, Portugal, Sicily, Iceland and London.
Their name may mean ‘newcomers’ in Hawaiian, but Malihini deal exclusively in the music of lived experience and time-honed emotional intelligence, their disarming musical universe never less than distinctive, yet resonating with a confessional, modern European pop sophistication of a kind elsewhere purveyed by the likes of Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jose Gonzalez and Our Broken Garden. Listening to the ten co-written songs that grace Malihini’s exquisite debut long-player, 'Hopefully, Again', can sometimes feel like eavesdropping on a couple’s intimate emotional dialogues, such is the ingenuous honesty of the duo’s writing. Yet combined with their minimal, yet opulently textured arrangements (“classic songwriting matched with pared-down electronics”, according to Clash), crammed with subtle melodic hooks and an embarrassment of earworm choruses, they transform the personal into the universal with a delightfully unforced eloquence. FACEBOOK.
Warm and sensitive 'Hopefully, Again' has tender duel vocals that work beautifully together. The video makes everything personal to Malhini, adding a level of intimacy, whilst the song charms and works it's way into your own world.
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Gabriella Rose is based in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho (outside of Spokane), and her forthcoming Lost In Translation EP was produced by Chris Molitor. The songs on the EP wander through the secluded halls of her mind, as she glides through memories of her late grandmother whose life came to an abruptly devastating end, her own journey into adulthood, and much larger social issues facing the world. Molded in the raw poeticism of Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground, Rose’s stories come from a deeply broken place. Her grandmother’s appetite for literature clearly rubbed off on Rose, whose own rich storytelling is plentiful across her new EP. In Gabriella’s words regarding her debut single, “The song is a wistful melody about how I wish I could reach people around me,” framing imagery of the Greek myth Icarus as an impetus for the story’s revelations. “I see others sometimes like that: the ideal of what I would like to be. But then I see them fly too close to the sun and melt their wings. So I don’t know if I want to be like them completely, it's a dilemma.”
Rose was homeschooled until sixth grade, and coming from an early dysfunctional family life resulting from her parents divorce, she became hyper-aware of relationships and her place within them. Rose is quick to acknowledge that despite the familial turmoil of the past, her entire family has banded together around her music. Over the years, when visiting her rather eccentric father in North Hollywood, she recalls late night recording sessions just for fun then diving into such popular films as Clockwork Orange, Pulp Fiction and Blue Velvet with a cup of coffee at midnight.
Of course, things weren’t always so rose-colored, and she remains tight-lipped on those not-so-perfect circumstances. Her roots inject even more piercing context to her forthcoming Lost in Translation EP. Her voice houses her turbulent past, the loneliness, the uncertainty, and the gloom. But in analyzing her truth, she comes to shine a light for those who continue to fight for their lives in the shroud of darkness. When left to such devices, Rose is a vision and an artist ready to turn pop music on its head. FACEBOOK.
'Lost In Translation' is fabulous, maybe that's all that needs to be said. It's atmospheric, catchy, there is a level of emotion that courses throughout and like I said, it's just fabulous...
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