Posts

Showing posts from August 21, 2022

Nora Kelly Band - La Femme - MARBLES - Little Quirks - ALASKALASKA

Image
Nora Kelly Band - Right Now. The Nora Kelly Band emerged this spring sharing two rip-roaring singles, “Hymn for the Agnostics” and “Change My Mind,” while destroying audiences at Canadian Music Week, NXNE, supporting Kiwi Jr., and this past Friday celebrating early with a headlining performance in their hometown of Montreal. This week they share a new single “Right Now,” and announce their debut EP, Perfect Pig, out today. Discussing “Right Now,” bandleader Nora Kelly stated, “'Right Now' chronicles the rise and fall of a past relationship. The song was written when I was in the throes of the breakup woes, but it also has a sense of optimism about the future. It’s sort of a pep talk to myself that things will get better, while also being an honest encapsulation of what I was going through back then. I’m proud of the song for its vulnerability, and how it details my ever-shifting understanding of love. Like now when I sing it, I tell people it was once a sad song about my ex bu...

Melby - SPECTRA*Paris - Nick Kizirnis - Quilty Pleasures - Pixy Jones

Image
Melby - Music Should Feel. On a first, careless, listen, Stockholm four-piece Melby might seem like a charming, fun little jangle-pop band. Pay a little more attention however, and you’ll find their waters run a lot deeper than that. The band (Matilda Wiezell, Are Engen Steinsholm, David Jehrlander and Teo Jernkvist) have all the flash and sparkle of your favourite indie band, but add an ability to touch moods and feelings with a meaning beyond most of their peers. Their guitars, drums and synths rattle, roll and flicker around each other, all held together by the soul-shiver in Wiezell’s vocals, to make immaculate little guitar-pop gems, equally dusted with sadness and sugar. Melby’s debut album None Of This Makes Me Worry was released in 2019, and took them on tour in Scandinavia, Germany and the UK, as well as earning them slots at prestigious showcase festivals like Norway’s by:Larm and Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. Now after a couple of years of beavering away, they’re back with the foll...

Rachael Dadd - KiKi Holli - Lukka

Image
Rachael Dadd - Heads Down. This week, the wildly creative free-form songwriter, Rachael Dadd is sharing her new single, "Heads Down". The track is taken from her forthcoming studio album, Kaleidoscope, out October 14 via Memphis Industries – “a terrific album of upbeat but off-beam English folk-pop” (Uncut). Premiering on Lauren Laverne’s show on BBC 6 Music, "Heads Down" came out of a playful music session with Rachael's youngest son, as she explains: "Having just bought my new Gretsch guitar and Wem amp, and cranking it up in my front room with Oto on the harmonica, the chords and rhythm felt fun and energizing. The words followed, inspired by someone on the radio recounting being chased by a gang with baseball bats after naively offending the gang leader. Cockiness and misjudgment are qualities of brazen teenagers and arrogant politicians alike. But rather than just waggle my finger at the others, I looked inward to find that I too have a part driven by...

Julian Taylor - Mamalarky - Queasy Pieces

Image
Julian Taylor - Wide Awake. How do you follow-up a career high point? If you're Julian Taylor — the Toronto-based singer/songwriter who garnered widespread acclaim for his intimate June 2020 solo album The Ridge you double down on upping your game by striving to exceed the creative fruits that have already bloomed from the artistic spark that got you there in the first place. A lot was going on in Taylor's mind at the time of writing his new song, "Wide Awake." We were all stuck in another lockdown and he was dealing with writer's block, feeling a bit self conscious about himself, his music and about his own life and existence. There was some turmoil going on in my family and that was troubling me too. Mostly because I felt like it could have easily been avoided and at the same time a few people close to me and some that I used to be close with were going through some huge losses in their lives. I could feel their pain but wasn't able to be there in person. S...

Louien - Brooke Annibale - Basset

Image
Louien - Second Best. Norwegian indie-folk act Louien has shared new single 'Second Best', the second cut to be shared from her forthcoming EP Figure Me Out. Emerging from Nesodden, a peninsula in the Oslo fjord, Live Miranda Solberg (Louien) fuses the fiercer elements of Feist and Sharon Van Etten’s songwriting with the timelessness qualities present in the work of Carole King and Gillian Welch. We last heard from Louien in the summer of 2021 when she shared her highly-acclaimed, liberating EP No Tomorrow. An attempt to write from a less serious perspective, it was the antidote to her 2019 debut album None of My Words which dealt with the trauma left behind by her father’s death. Out September 16th via Jansen Records, Figure Me Out is in many ways a sequel to last year’s No Tomorrow. Thematically, the EP is about how characteristics we think of as cool, such as aloofness, are often the reverse and that it’s much cooler and, indeed, stronger to be yourself and choose vulnerabi...