Annie Taylor - Echo Ladies - Avis
‘Love Is Blind’ by Annie Taylor, is the new debut single from their forthcoming new album ‘Inner Smiler’ which is set for release in July via Taxi Gauche Records. Described as Europe’s answer to Wolf Alice, Annie Taylor recorded the new eagerly-anticipated second album in Bristol, UK with producer Ali Chant (Yard Act, Katy J. Pearson, Aldous Harding, Sorry).
England's music luminaries Gigwise describes Annie Taylor as "Mellow, cool guitar romp through desert rock, shoegaze, indie and pop influences. Lush." - and not without reason! The four friends Gini Jungi, Tobias Arn, Michael Mutter and Daniel Bachmann joined the Taxi Gauche Records family when they collectively decided to jump on a train for the most exhilarating adventure of their lives.
From playing at barely equipped shacks to supporting Skunk Anansie on their 2022 tour, the band has been highly active since their debut release Sweet Mortality in 2020. It's a record as seeped in pop as it is in psychedelia and grunge which ends up at a beautiful mid-point (Taxi Gauche Records). With that said, its not surprising that Annie Taylor were inundated with requests to perform at numerous festivals including MTV Music Week, Reeperbahn, Zurich Openair, Waves Vienna and Montreux Jazz Festival, before heading out on tour in the UK, Germany and Switzerland.
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Rama Lama Records proudly welcomes Malmö trio Echo Ladies to the label family. Echo Ladies are Matilda Botwid, Mattis Andersson and Joar Andersén, three school-friends who, after playing in various different bands, realised that they worked best together. In 2014, after looking for “a name that represented their sound”, they became Echo Ladies, partly inspired by the name of the drum machine from a shared favourite band, Echo & the Bunnymen.
After a string of singles and an EP, the band released their debut album 'Pink Noise' in 2018 to acclaim both in Sweden and internationally, including UK tours and praise from Drowned in Sound, Bandcamp, MOJO and more. The band are now back with new material and a new full-length is to be expected later this year through Rama Lama Records and Republic of Music. 'Dirty Dancing' is the first taste of what is to come.
The band on Dirty Dancing: "The title ”Dirty Dancing” was set in the draft-stage, and we liked that title so much so we wrote the lyrics around it. It’s actually about a dear friend of ours, who was to become a parent, and how excited she was to meet her child. It’s also the song that changed the most during the recording session at Studio Sickan. The verse became the chorus, the bridge became the verse and so on."
The band started working on the forthcoming album straight after releasing 'Pink Noise' and it's now finally ready to be released. Their new sound is built on the same foundation that Echo Ladies curated during their past releases, but with a more unyielding presence. Echo Ladies have always tried to balance two emotions at the same time throughout their songs. While their past songs tried to convey the feeling of nostalgia and hope for the future, mixed with worries and anxieties about defining who you are and what you will become, this album instead tries to balance the emotions of sorrow and loneliness, with anger, frustration, and the determination to make a change for the better. The forthcoming album really carries the Echo Ladies mantra that "Nothing Ever Lasts". Good things can come to an end, but bad things will also pass.
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Avis - Sunrise (E.P).
New four-piece band Avis are the latest outfit to emerge from the burgeoning creative scene in and around the Hull and East Yorkshire area. Their nascent ideas and talents have been nurtured over time by the ever-supportive Warren Youth Project and now culminate in the release of Sunrise – a 3 track EP that perfectly epitomises where the indie / bedroom pop genre is headed in 2023.
Produced by local indie sound maestro Adam Pattrick, the release’s title track Sunrise, with its upbeat jangle-pop guitars, keeps the mood bright and optimistic while lyrically touching on subjects of anxiety and working out how to deal with life as it comes at you! Throughout the track lead vocalist Sev has a conversation with their sub-conscious, asking many rhetorical questions that lean into themes of mental health and neurodivergence.
Next up is Copy Paste Street – a lyrical metaphor about the repetitive, architecture of many residential areas around the UK, how it exacerbates a bland, monotonous lifestyle and a sense of being forgotten – “Grey skies, cracked concrete, faceless people and nameless streets. I think time forgot the copy-pasted streets”. To close is the emotionally touching Echo Chamber - with its melancholic groove, the song’s a story of ex-friends and how one of them bullied the other. Feeling outcast by the intimidation, there’s an internal conversation going on in the head of the persecuted one that personifies the alienation and how it eats at the soul!
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