Career Woman - Rubber Blanket - Bird Streets - Achings
Career Woman is the promising musical project of Melody Caudill, a singer songwriter from Los Angeles, CA. At just 19 years old, she exudes a genuine passion for crafting impactful indie rock songs.
Growing up, she found solace in songwriting and released her first EP at the age of fourteen. Caudill was raised in a creative household that has shaped her deep connection to melodies and lyrics from a young age.
Career Woman draws inspiration from a range of artists such as, Lomelda, Snail Mail, Samia and even the scores and soundtracks of her favorite video games like Life is Strange. These distinctive styles have left an indelible mark on her artistic voice.
"'Jupiter' was the first song I wrote since coming to college and it encompasses all of the new feelings that come along with starting a new life" says Caudill of the new single, adding "I was experiencing overwhelming joy but also paralyzing fear because of all of the new people I met and everyone I had to leave behind. The lyrics are all really specific and I tried to capture details that only me and the people involved could pinpoint, while still speaking to a larger message that could be universally relatable. The song started out as an acoustic folk track but my bandmate Jackson turned it into the full band sound it has today, and I think it was definitely a smart musical choice. I hope the song communicates the feeling of being in a completely new environment and starting a new life stage because it definitely articulates how it felt for me."
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Los Angeles' Rubber Blanket (members of Wounded Lion and The Intelligence), a group that proffers a distinct humor/horror consciousness that is coaxed via a crate of oddball musical machinery that is arranged in a manner that bucks all subterranean boogie, is set to release their sophomore album. Our Fault, via Mt.St.Mtn on June 29.
Our Fault thoroughly trounces the laziness cabal. Its 10 tunes beckon listeners to embark on a preternatural sojourn under the collective Blanket of Brad Eberhard, Lars Finberg, and Jun Ohnuki (survivors all of WOUNDED LION), three artists and composers, working together forever and then some.
Unless there’s literal goo-goo-gah-gah, the notion that rockish musics with discernable peculiarities must possess childlike predilections is shite nouveau, serving only to signal that the experimental market is not blonde enough to churn hype butter. This kind of trash-think ignores the existence of real wonderment, as if the constant ingestion of multiverse stimuli couldn’t / wouldn’t / shouldn’t impact the capacity for marvel within the living human sponge. Our Fault is bright enough to recognize and even reproduce this strange ever-growing awe. A tumultuous, and somehow scientifically programmed spontaneity, is bottled on Our Fault. Different Rock’n’Roll, bright and strange.
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When John Brodeur began his recording career in the early 2000s, he never imagined he would someday have his most rewarding musical experiences – working with members of Superdrag, Wilco, Big Star, and Jellyfish, artists he greatly admired – while struggling through one of the most difficult periods in his personal life. But that has thus far been the story of his project Bird Streets, whose first album was released concurrently with Brodeur’s separation from his wife of more than a decade, and whose latest, Lagoon, plays almost as a concept album about the emotional weight of divorce and regret. Released in November by newly minted Los Angeles label Sparkle Plenty, Lagoon is as personal a statement as you’re likely to hear this or any year–a rollercoaster emotional ride from “one of [the] prime architects of present-day rock” (Americana Highways), bolstered by masterful production and an array of guest appearances, including Ed Harcourt and Aimee Mann.
On June 30, Lagoon will be reissued as a deluxe digital edition with an additional eight tracks, including two new songs: the Patrick Sansone-produced “California High,” and “What In The World,” featuring Sting drummer Zach Jones. The re-release will be accompanied by a series of live engagements in the Northeast U.S. and Sweden.
“California High” marries layers of soft-strummed acoustic guitars to a lyric that could either be about seasonal depression or impostor syndrome, with a bridge section that takes a surprising leap into prog-adjacent territory. Recorded in 2019 at Nashville’s famed Creative Workshop, during the first Lagoon sessions, the track finds Sansone in full multitask mode, serving as producer and mixer, plus playing bass, additional guitars, piano, vibraphone, and singing backing vocals. With pedal steel by session legend Jim Hoke (Dolly Parton, Paul McCartney), the windswept folk-pop of “California High” would sit comfortably alongside Harvest-era Neil Young, America, or The Thrills. In another universe, it might have been Lagoon’s lead single, but Brodeur shelved it because “it didn’t fit the narrative. Had it been a 15-song album–which it easily could have been–this would have gone on side one.”
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LandLand Colportage recently announced that they signed Philadelphia's Achings, and the band are releasing an album titled All These Shapes, All These Days for the label on July 14th. Now the band is back with a new single from the LP.
Achings formed in the fall of 2018, almost by sheer accident. Singer-songwriter Rebecca Joy, having just started maternity leave, happened to overhear one of guitarist Justin Myer’s guitar tracks. The synchronicity was instantaneous: “I immediately knew how the song should go- I heard it with total clarity, and wrote the accompanying melodies and lyrics on the spot, and Justin was thrilled with the results; we both were.” That song was Abdication, Planet Earth.
One week later, Rebecca’s daughter was born, and over the course of her leave, Achings began to take shape, and an EP soon followed. While the EP largely tackles the specific life transition of becoming a parent in an increasingly uncertain and tumultuous time, the upcoming full length, “All These Shapes, All These Days,” broadens its scope, grappling with the various types and tones of connections past and present, and their indelible impact on our sense of self and place in the world.
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