MARBL - Kindsight - Allegra Krieger - Sandy Bailey - Silva & Steini - William The Conqueror

MARBL - A Song For Mom.

Tel-Aviv based singer songwriter MARBL is releasing her new single "A Song for Mom", that is part of the artist's unique piano project. "Mom has always let me paint my unique trails to walk along. She knows best how to plant the confidence and passion in me, to do whatever my heart desires the most, and quiet down the voices of fear.

She is an eternal home to me, where I can find endless support, listening, and unconditional love. "A Song for Mom", is the least I can give her as a gift." - Moria Or MARBL's music has its own widely spread range of influences like Sufjan Stevens, Laura Marling, Norah Jones, Big Thief, Iron & Wine and more. 

MARBL has already drawn the attention of dominant radio stations, music bloggers, journalists & publicists in France, the UK, Spain, Italy, Germany, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland, Israel, the USA, Japan, and more, and hit some big official Spotify playlists around the world, alongside leading TV commercials and campaigns. Nowadays, MARBL is releasing a unique piano project, in which she offers a glance into her very first musical passion - the piano, that draws the likes of Norah Jones, Tori Amos, Kate Bush.

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Kindsight - Tibet.

Danish four-piece Kindsight make music that draws from 80’s and 90’s alternative rock and combines it with the shimmering Scandinavian pop that the region has become so renowned for, resulting in a sound that is both fuzzy and melodic in equal measure.

This week the band share the new single 'Tibet'. The single follows the atmospheric 'Love You Baby All The Time' and experimental slowly building "Madhouse Breakout Multitool" and continues to expand the band's sound without losing their lovable characteristics. The band is playing Roskilde Festival on June 26th, a festival they've attended many times and as so many danes before them, partly grown up at.

About the track, Kindsight says: "Our most political love song to date, Tibet celebrates the wildest forms of conformity and anti-self-realization."

In 2022, the band released their debut LP via Rama Lama Records to praise such as "your new favourite band". Titled "Swedish Punk", it's an album packed with charming and infectiously catchy noise-jangle-pop melodies full of exuberant optimism and coming-of-age tales inspired by acts such as Pixies, Cocteau Twins, Snail Mail and Big Thief. The album was followed by tour dates in Scandinavia, UK and Germany as well as several shows at SXSW.

Atop jangling guitars, Nina Rasmussen’s distinctive voice dances somewhere between that of Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval and Alvvays’ Molly Rankin, leaving the listened renched in the nostalgic optimism of summers gone by. There’s not a single song that would feel out of place in an 00’s independent movie. The band possess an unmistakable talent for crafting disarmingly buoyant yet achingly nostalgic indie-rock songs based on the everyday.

Rama Lama Records · Kindsight - Tibet

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Allegra Krieger - Lingering.

In May, the New York-based songwriter Allegra Kreiger announced her signing to Double Double Whammy (Florist, Babehoven, Hatchie) for the release of her new LP I Keep My Feet on The Fragile Plane (out July 21st). The first single from the album, "Nothing In This World Ever Stays Still," attracted immediate attention, earning praise from outlets like FADER, Stereogum, BrooklynVegan, Exclaim, NYLON and Paste, who called Krieger "one of the best working songwriters."

This past Sunday Krieger played the release show for Greg Mendez' new LP at Purgatory in Brooklyn, and this week she's sharing a new single entitled "Lingering." "Lingering" neatly captures the chaotic possibility of city living. Rich with little details – black mold on an apartment ceiling, the smell of piss and garbage – the track has a timeless quality, and showcases Krieger's ability to imbue the outlines of everyday experience with a deep emotional resonance.

"Lingering is about new love, entering that fragile plane, shared pleasure, returning to the stasis of a room, of an apartment in a city that is always moving," Krieger explains to NYLON. "Objects sitting and hanging. Wanting something, but not wanting to want anything. Crossing the street. A nice day, a nice moment."

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Sandy Bailey - Get The Message Through.

Massachusetts-based singer-songwriter Sandy Baileyhas unveiled “Get The Message Through,” the lead single from Daughter Of Abraham, her first LP with Red Parlor Records, set for release on August 18th.

“The latest single from Sandy Bailey -a soft-country power ballad about mortality and heartbreak and everyday existentialism -is the kind of song that country music was built on,” says Hollerin their premiere. “Delivered with a faux breeziness, it’s both painfully real and bleakly comical. Her almost throwaway, conversational delivery making the lines land even harder as she ponders her grown up children leaving home, while the song slowly spirals towards a deeper truth about how disconnected and isolated we become from each other as adults....

It’s like if an AI music generator had been tasked to come up with a Carole King song that perfectly tapped into the futility of doom scrolling and the existential dread of the pre-apocalypse.”“A headline caught my eye in The Wall Street Journalthat read ‘Moms in Middle Age: Rarely Alone, Often Online and Increasingly Lonely,’” Bailey told Holler. “I thought about my love/hate relationship with social media and wrote a song about the irony of the current environment that we live in, where we are more connected than ever through the internet but also lonelier than ever.”For the video, Bailey put a team together from the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

“We knew we wanted the video to have a throwback 70's feel,” Bailey explained to Holler. “In going through a bunch of vintage stock footage for ideas, the director Sofi Taylor was inspired by a video of a clean, empty kitchen. The contrast of a once vibrant house now unlived in was our inspiration for showing change, loneliness, and the passage of time.” 

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Silva & Steini - If It Was.

Entrepreneur, filmmaker and bestselling author Scott Blum has announced his next venture, FOUND, a US-based independent record label focusing on the contemporary music scene of Iceland. The label’s first signings include jazz vocal duo Silva & Steini, composer Magnús Jóhann, and punk band GRÓA.

FOUND is marking the occasion with the release of the music video for Silva & Steini’s “If It Was” from their debut album More Than You Know. The popular song already has 2 million streams on Spotify and was written by Alan Hampton (Andrew Bird, Fiona Apple, Sufjan Stevens, etc.).

The video is directed by noted Icelandic visual artist Anna Maggý and was shot in gorgeous black & white at the unique "Library of Water" location in Stykkishólmur, Iceland, a fine art installation by Roni Horn featuring large tubes of water from glaciers around Iceland. The dreamlike visuals echo the lyrical themes of memory, loss and rebirth from the evocative song. "Anna Maggý used her unique mind and talent to create and capture something magical," notes singer Silva. "She manages to make her work one of a kind because she is so passionate and knows exactly what she wants in the moment."

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William The Conqueror - The Bruises.

William The Conqueror have just unveiled the video to their new single ‘The Bruises’. Taken from their forthcoming album ‘Excuse Me While I Vanish’, out 28th July on Chrysalis Records, the track is the follow-up to last month’s single ‘The Puppet and the Puppeteer’. Produced by the band in a playground of vintage gear and mixed by Barny Barnicott (Arctic Monkeys, Sam Fender, Kasabian), the ten tracks on ‘Excuse Me While I Vanish’ marry earworm tunes with insistent, imperious, soaring rock shapes, punctuated by chorus hooks that are simultaneously nuanced and anthemic. William The Conqueror, who performed to a packed room at The Great Escape last month, head out on a European tour with Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats next week. The band will embark on a headline tour of the UK in October.

"My favourite kind of songwriting is when you have no control over what's happening” explains frontman Ruarri. “The song just arrives, finding its way through your fingers onto the fret board, as the pen wanders the page and somehow says everything you didn't realise you needed to say. The Bruises was like that. It wasn't and then all of a sudden, it was." Bassist Naomi adds, “'The Bruises' will stay with you all day. And with a verse that catchy, you don’t really need a chorus. Which is lucky.”

‘Excuse Me While I Vanish’, very nearly didn’t happen. Following the imposition of lockdown restrictions, Joseph found himself cocooned at home in Cornwall, ruminating on an uncertain creative future, watching on as his wife Mandy, a valiant mental health social worker, engaged with the all-too-real dilemmas of the pandemic-riven here and now. Her example motivated Joseph to become a temporary care worker, an experience which would provide renewed focus and influence the songwriting on the new album.

The Delines - Allegra Krieger - The Royal Foundry - Pierce Turner

Photo - Summer Luu

The Delines - Drowning In Plain Sight.

The Portland, Oregon based country-soul group The Delines have shared the final music video from their upcoming album, The Sea Drift, which will be released on this Friday February 11, 2022 via their new American label home Jealous Butcher Records. The song, a focus track for the album titled “Drowning In Plain Sight”, is a perfect example of songwriter and author Willy Vlautin’s knack for giving you a look into the interior lives of the characters who populate these songs with just a few well-chosen little details. 

As lead singer Amy Boone croons lines like “The kid’s ice cream is melting, my husband’s beer is getting warm / The phone starts ringing an hour after I should have been home”, her soulful and smoky voice gives these storytelling vignettes instant emotional heft, communicating years of struggle in the lives of these characters with just a few words, as lush and cinematic country-soul arrangements gently swell around her. Simply put, the music of The Delines not only makes you feel like these characters are real people you could meet in any of the small towns and cities along the gulf coast of Texas where The Sea Drift is set, but that their lives will continue on long after these songs end.

The music video for “Drowning In Plain Sight” combines footage of The Delines performing the song in their home studio in Portland with scenery from those beach towns along the Texas gulf coast that serve as the setting of The Sea Drift. If you’ve never been to a town like Galveston where this video was shot, the visuals will instantly give you a sense of the way the natural beauty of the ocean is juxtaposed with the desperation, regret and wistful longing of the people who inhabit this world. The houses are all on stilts, the sun sets over abandoned train yards and industrial plants, and lights from carnival rides on the boardwalk glisten across the ocean waves at night.

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Photo - Dallas Starky

Allegra Krieger - Wake Me If I'm Asleep.

Brooklyn, NY based singer-songwriter Allegra Krieger today shared two new songs from her forthcoming album Precious Thing, releasing March 4th, 2022 via Northern Spy Records. On the two tracks that open up the album—“Wake Me If I’m Asleep” & “Isolation”—Krieger sings about the fear of loss and her hope to live more presently. Inspired by a pang of fear that struck her after seeing the paramedics leave a neighbor’s house, Krieger’s anxiety is palpable, yet her resolve remains strong. Listen to the songs here.

In October 2020, Allegra drove across the country to record Precious Thing in Marin, CA with producer Luke Temple (Here We Go Magic, Art Feynman) and musicians Jeremy Harris, Kalia Vandever, Rob Taylor and Jacob Matheus who contributed organs, synths, bass and lap steel. Delightfully mellow but never bleak, Precious Thing is a soundtrack for the daily motions of our lives.

On Precious Thing, Allegra Kreiger tries to capture fleeting moments in a world that is sick from itself. With a voice that rings like a windchime signaling a storm coming, Allegra masterfully weaves together ephemeral moments as life barrels by her unforgivingly. From singing about sharing a gaze with a man on the train to Coney Island as the clock strikes 12 on New Years, to saying goodbye to a loved one, to processing the religious trauma of wine, Krieger portrays the particular pang of being a woman alive in a modern world.

At the heart of this album is a young, working woman asking “Do you see this right now? I can’t be the only one.” This is an album about looking, and Krieger fills up each lonely space she enters with her gaze. Krieger asks you to look, to really, really look, so that you can remember something, however small it is, when it’s all gone.

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The Royal Foundry - Hello Dreamer Baby.

Background from The Royal Foundry - You are made to be that which you dream to be. No matter how you get there, who you meet along the way, or how many detours it takes – it will always be waiting for you, so try and try and try and try.

This is the ethos behind our new single, "Hello Dreamer Baby," written after we took a spontaneous road trip and discussed our dreams, goals, and our desire to accomplish them in the now.

The music video, featuring a sunrise that reveals amazing red rock canyons with each passing second.
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It's so easy to quit and just live with mediocrity, but this life is short so why would you not want to be the best you can be? We wrote "Hello Dreamer Baby" for us, but we hope it resonates with you too.

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Photo - Chris Schoonover

Pierce Turner - Love of Angels.

The internationally acclaimed Irish performer, Pierce Turner, releases a new single titled “Love Of Angels.” Set over a rocking guitar arrangement, the philosophical track combines the teachings of acclaimed The Power of Now author Eckhart Tolle and the idea of the psychological “ego.” This is the fourth track off Pierce Turner’s forthcoming album, Terrible Good, which was created with legendary guitarist Gerry Leonard (David Bowie, Suzanne Vega, Rufus Wainwright). The album is set for release on February 25 via StorySound Records.

“For me, lyrics always have to have a message,” explains Turner. “On ‘Love Of Angels’ I take the phrase ‘you are what you eat’ and expand upon it to a further truth. We are everything that comes in-what we think, read, see, breathe, smell, hear, and believe as well as eat. If it’s good stuff, you will be good, guaranteed. How we move affects us too, I swear!!!!! You can dance to this. It’s The Rolling Stones meets Eckhart Tolle.”

An Irish-American musician in the truest, and most literal, sense, Pierce Turner lives half the year in his hometown of Wexford, Ireland, and the other half in his longtime adopted hometown of New York City. Both places are reflected in his songs, which frequently move between these two different worlds. Since he began his solo career in the 80’s, he’s worked on a broad range of projects including writing for opera, scoring movies, and composing a contemporary Mass. His genre-bending songwriting has led Turner to collaborate with legendary producer John Simon (The Band, Leonard Cohen, Cass Elliot) on 1991’s Now Is Heaven and composer Philip Glass on projects such as 1986’s It’s Only a Long Way Across and “Yogi with a Broken Heart.”

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Julie Jurgens - Buster Baer - Allegra Krieger - Tomato Flower

Photo - Joe Mazza

Julie Jurgens - Appointed tasks (Album).

Julie Jurgens is a singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose fearless, empathetic songs draw upon an upbringing in rural Illinois fraught with experiences of poverty, mental illness and domestic violence, sung from the perspective of a survivor and advocate who is mad as hell and determined to stand her ground. Her clear and honest vocals evoke Patty Griffin and Gillian Welch, and her unflinching lyrics recall Townes Van Zandt and Warren Zevon at their most incisive.

A born performer, Julie began putting on talent shows in her driveway for visitors to her family’s melon stand. By the time she was in kindergarten, her teachers noted her frequent absences – until they discovered her singing in the bathroom, enraptured by the favorable acoustics. In college, a breakup left her with no other option than to buy a guitar and sing out her heartbreak. 

She began to hone her skills in Quad Cities coffeehouses like Theo's JavaClub, singing covers of Dylan, the Cure, and the Beatles (leaving all the pronouns intact because who needs the heteronormativity?), before steadily developing a repertoire of original compositions. Many of these early songs were collected on the LP A Small Affair, released in 2004 and recorded in a bedroom in Muscatine, IA in a single night fueled by a gifted bottle of Absolut Mandarin.

That year, having gone as far as she could in the QC music scene (and having fallen into a pattern of problematic drinking), Julie moved to Chicago. There, she found a community of like-minded artists at open mics at local watering holes such as Subterranean and the Gallery Cabaret, where she would eventually organize and emcee a series of multi-artist tribute nights. She has also lent her musical talent on guitar, banjo and pocket trumpet to such groups as ButterBean, Liz + the Baguettes, and the (now-defunct) Astrohillbillies. Her skills as a storyteller and raconteur have served her well on stage, and her banter game is second to none.

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Buster Baer - In His Image.

'In His Image' is taken from Buster Baer's brand new E.P 'Mock Twang' that is released this week. We featured another song 'Get Deeper' a little while back & the track we have chosen this time, further demonstrates Buster's impressive & pleasingly diverse musical compositions and arrangements.His ability to switch between emotions and the juxtaposition of serous and funny are at the very least fascinating.

Jovial yet intense, Buster Baer represents the nexus between many paradoxes. His demeanor, performance antics, and musical style balance on the tensions between opposites, often collapsing into clownlike comedy amidst deep grooves.

Born into a show business family that named him after Buster Keaton, the childhood Los Angeles influences of beach punk and low-rider doo-wop settle into eclectic blends, equal parts Beatles and Bob Dylan; Parliament-Funkadelic and Tom Waits; Black Flag and Otis Redding.

The songwriter’s new EP release Mock Twang, is a collection of four tracks all performed and recorded himself in a warehouse surrounded by three junkyards in Downtown LA. The songs are smooth yet raw, tender and flippant, easy and also deep.

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Allegra Krieger - Taking It In.

NY based singer-songwriter Allegra Krieger today announced her new album Precious Thing will be released March 4, 2022 via Northern Spy Records. On the wistful lead single/video “Taking It In,” Krieger grapples with losing something important to her after watching it fall apart, and she winds her soft vocals around a circular acoustic guitar melody. Strings swell as flashes of memories drift in and out, from laughing on a beach to driving in a fit of anger, yet Krieger’s voice remains comforting and ever so lovely.

In October 2020, Allegra drove across the country to record Precious Thing in Marin, CA with producer Luke Temple (Here We Go Magic, Art Feynman) and musicians Jeremy Harris, Kalia Vandever, Rob Taylor and Jacob Matheus who contributed organs, synths, bass and lap steel. Delightfully mellow but never bleak, Precious Thing is a soundtrack for the daily motions of our lives.

On Precious Thing, Allegra Kreiger tries to capture fleeting moments in a world that is sick from itself. With a voice that rings like a windchime signaling a storm coming, Allegra masterfully weaves together ephemeral moments as life barrels by her unforgivingly. From singing about sharing a gaze with a man on the train to Coney Island as the clock strikes 12 on New Years, to saying goodbye to a loved one, to processing the religious trauma of wine, Krieger portrays the particular pang of being a woman alive in a modern world.

At the heart of this album is a young, working woman asking “Do you see this right now? I can’t be the only one.” This is an album about looking, and Krieger fills up each lonely space she enters with her gaze. Krieger asks you to look, to really, really look, so that you can remember something, however small it is, when it’s all gone.  

 

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Tomato Flower - World To Come.

Tomato Flower Share "World To Come" Off Upcoming Debut EP 'Gold Arc', out 2/11/22 on Ramp Local. The lyrics in Tomato Flower's new single hint at nature's dominance, and hypothesizes humanities role within it. A poetic reflection on humanity's place in the world to come. "World To Come" is simultaneously an infectious psychedelic pop song and a dark glance at the future.

There’s a place for me
In the world to come
My garden cruel and beautiful
In the ways to come

In the hidden grove
There’s a riven bough
In hope forever at the sound
Of the ways to come

When the sun is so
That it burns the flesh
And holy tests our willingness
Of the world to come

About Gold Arc: How might a Utopia exist? If the goal is social harmony amidst free-thinking citizens, where do the moral sets and ideals come from? It might include existing peacefully and respectfully with the natural world—agriculture and industry on an equal playing field. Maybe, an earthly utopia might not be what we expect. It might not be constant, and it might only exist in minute moments. For the Baltimore quartet Tomato Flower, utopia exists in the compromise between escapism and intellectual inquiry, between conceptual philosophy and pop-rock bliss.

Their debut EP Gold Arc finds Tomato Flower at multiple crossroads. Their sonic curiosity plays with tension between sweetness and a destructive heaviness. Conceptually, Gold Arc hungers for an alternate reality. Sometimes that is a “sustainable paradise,” as drummer Mike Alfieri puts it. Or, on “Lovers Arc,” it’s a desire to be loved constantly. “It's not that all these songs are straightforwardly positive, though,” explains Austyn Wohlers. “I think all of the songs are about longing for a different world and a different future. But, they take various shapes,” she says. “The song ‘Truth Lounge,’ for example, has a lot of pain and longing for a different world. ‘World to Come,’ has maybe a cultish edge to it.”

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