Meagre Martin - The Lemon Twigs - Ivan Moult - Tom Emlyn
Berlin via Boston up-and-coming indie project Meagre Martin share their gripping and intimate new single, "All My Thoughts." The track is out now on Mansions and Millions.
On the track, the lead-member Sarah Martin offers: "All My Thoughts' is about the pervasive feelings of grief and how we internalize it. How we continue to reference grief and the ones we've lost for the entirety of our lives. It describes how grief can shape the way we move through the world after those people are no longer here to advise us. It talks about this afterlife connection and also the ultimate fear of mortality and failure."
Meagre Martin is a Berlin-based indie music project founded by African-American musician/songwriter Sarah Martin (she/her) in the summer of 2021. Sarah is originally from Boston MA, but moved to Berlin Germany in the fall of 2017. Searching for meaning in a crumbling global climate, this project was created as a means of survival, and catharsis through uncertain times. A few months into the project's culmination, Freddy and Max joined the band to make a solid trio.
Blending together elements of lo-fi and new-Americana, Meagre Martin is a culmination of experience rooted in healing, through lyricism that gives nostalgia new layers and expands grief’s potential. Although Meagre Martin is a relatively new presence in the Berlin indie scene, they've already made a big impact, performing at shows all over the city. The band is now poised to broaden their reach beyond Berlin, having been hard at work on new music, including their newest single out now via Mansions and Millions.
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On Everything Harmony, the fourth full-length studio release from New York’s The Lemon Twigs, the prodigiously talented brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario offer 13 original servings of beauty that showcase an emotional depth and musical sophistication far beyond their years as a band, let alone as young men. While they eagerly devour musical influences from everything and everywhere, they have somehow arrived at a cohesive and dynamic sound that speaks to our troubled times.
Having bounded onto the music scene with their precocious 2016 debut Do Hollywood, they threw caution to the wind two years later on their followup Go to School. By the time of their third album, Songs for the General Public (2020) The Lemon Twigs had begun to pull from a wide range of multigenerational inspirations, expertly darting from twee chamber pop balladry to full on glam punk, mixing plaintive singer-songwriter confessionals with an almost Syd Barrett sense of outré pop. In an interview from the time, they expressed an interest in creating “something really beautiful sounding” based on vocal harmonies and developing their combined melodic sensibilities into a setting where “the sounds were as important as the songs” themselves.
On Everything Harmony, the brothers have fully realized that vision, with a unified “Lemon Twigs sound” that successfully blends their distinct personalities while giving voice to their diverse and eclectic influences. Opening the album with the unassuming acoustic folk of plaintive “When Winter Comes Around,” which echoes the sophisticated grandeur of classic Simon & Garfunkel recordings, they immediately switch things up to the sunny classic pop motif of “In My Head.” From that point on Everything Harmony makes it clear that the Lemon Twigs can’t be pinned down.
Having recently worked with friends like Natalie Mering, with whom they appeared on the latest Weyes Blood album, they also collaborated with classic rock hero Todd Rundgren on his most recent album, Space Force. Rundgren, himself no stranger to eclecticism, says he can relate to their time-tripping approach to contemporary pop.
“They started when they were five and six years old, doing TV and Broadway and things like that,” says Rundgren. “So, they have built-in appreciation for music that is of a couple of generations before theirs. I think they were bored by the music of their own generation, and since you can’t fast forward to the music of the future, you just start going backwards to music that was made before you were born. I can empathize with that impulse, because I did that too, back in the seventies.”
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Cardiff-based singer-songwriter Ivan Moult announces the release of his new single 'Written On The Wall’, taken from his upcoming album 'Songs From Severn Grove'.
The single is released today May 5th. Following on from his last single, ‘Out Of Time’, Moult’s latest offering showcases hisunique blend of indie-folk, soulful vocals andpoignant lyrics that delve into themes of love,loss and hope.
Speaking about the single, Moult said: "Lyrically a song about having a conversation with a new partner about their previous lovelife/partners. Acknowledging their experience. Questioning whether or not you want to or need to know their romantic past. Trying to reassure them things wouldbe different.
Observing it’s apparent in other ways without needing to be discussed.” ‘Songs From Severn Grove’, which is due out on May 26th, showcases Ivan's voice front and centre, with layered harmonies and a soundscape of delay-soaked electric guitars, drums, and bass.
Ivan Moult is set to release his third album, 'Songs From Severn Grove', this Spring on independent Welsh record label, Bubblewrap Collective. His previous albums have received radio support from BBC Radio 6 Music and BBC Radio Wales, and have been featured on Folk Radio UK.
Ivan's second album, 'Longest Shadow', released in 2018, won him festival slots at Cornbury Festival, Folk on The Dock, and Festival of Voice, as well as support slots with This Is The Kit, Becca Mancari, and Willy Mason. For this new album, Ivan played, recorded, engineered, and mixed all of the instruments himself at his home studio in Cardiff. The album charts a journey of growth and change, beginning with the lockdown during the 2020 pandemic and continuing through Ivan's experiences of fatherhood and the development of his love and relationships.
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Prolific Swansea artist Tom Emlyn has shared the video for his latest single 'It Doesn't Bother Me'. It's the follow-up to ‘Broken Mirror’ and ‘Like a Cigarette', it's the last of three singles leading up to the album ‘Return Journey Revisited: Scaredycat Vol 1’ released today Friday the 5th of May 2023.
Engineered by Randell Denning, BBC studios Swansea in 2018 ‘It Doesn’t Bother Me’ rattles with introspection, as Emlyn sketches out nightmarish visions of characters who lose themselves in the pursuit of success. Amidst a scorched strum of fuzzy guitars, battered acoustics and skippy keys and synths. It’s a raw earworm that tries to throw off the shadow of doubt.
Emlyn says: “This song is from the mind of an unreliable narrator, trying to convince himself of his own aloofness as much as he is the listener. It paints a nightmare picture of self-doubt, anxiety, dead-end jobs, bad decisions, time running out. Schizophrenic images of audible lights in the engine yard. Losing your real self in the pursuit of money, recognition, anything. The masks we wear to convince ourselves and others of our resilience.”
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