A hidden gem from the frozen heart of Toronto, Canada, art school dropout and Sony Music Publishing artist La Faute released her debut album ‘Blue Girl Nice Day’ yesterday, along with the focus single ‘Sorry I Can’t Stay’ and coinciding music video. La Faute’s (AKA Peggy Messing) musical style falls under the indie dream-pop, alternative folk and singer/songwriter categories, allowing Messing to bend genres and formulate her own. Citing artists such as Mitski, Lana Del Rey, Chet Baker and Massive Attack as musical influences – to name a few – Messing’s debut album is a hypnotic embodiment of all of these styles and influences.
Messing describes her inspiration for the album and her creative process, “I think this album is partly about me marrying my two loves of music and visual art. I am really enjoying the videos I am making and how moving pictures and songs affect each other. I have almost zero budget for video, and I’m not going unmasked into indoor crowded places to shoot with other people, but I love constraints like that.”
Speaking of the focus single, which was co-written with French neo classical composer and performer Villemin, Messing said: “I wanted to honour my lost and current loved ones as best I could with this song, and make a sincere message to the living, imagining what those leaving would have wanted to say, what I would want to say when the time comes.” “I found [Villemin] randomly on Instagram and fell in love with her music, and slid into her DMs. Fortunately she was open to collaborating, and when she sent this over, the melody and lyrics came to me right away. I've never met her in real life, but during the pandemic we talked over WhatsApp and I felt a real connection with her, personally and musically. I hope everyone discovers her music, it is very unique, subtle and special.”
The music video for the single is informal and lighthearted, showing Messing blowing bubbles in nature. “This song always makes me cry so I had to focus on the bright side to get through it. All I do is try to blow bubbles in the sunshine, gigantic and small, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. They're beautiful and don't last long,” she explained. La Faute (the mistake, in French) is Messing’s dark, dreamy solo project. A visual artist, multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter originally from Winnipeg, Canada, she explores themes of surface vs. depth, longing, betrayal, mourning and desire. Using a 4 string tenor electric guitar and obsolete hardware samplers, she created her captivating live show and released her debut EP just before the pandemic.
She has dealt with some chronic health problems which have required her to get creative to find workarounds, but when the pandemic started she chose to pause performing live to protect her health. She focused on the creation, and solutions to the problem of isolation. She connected with fellow artists and producers in France, the UK, Canada and the US to create music, most recently with LA-based Topher Mohr, who produced her album.
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Caitlin Rose announces the deluxe version of CAZIMI will release digitally on June 23 via Missing Piece Records. Along with the announcement, Rose shares the new original single “Johnny Velvet.” The deluxe version also includes a cover of Jason Molina’s “Nashville Moon,” as well as alternate versions of CAZIMI originals “How Far Away,” “Blameless” and “Carried Away.” Next week, Rose joins fellow Nashville favorite Andrew Combs to kick off their co-headlining tour in Louisville, with additional stops in Chicago, Indianapolis, Cleveland, D.C., New York City and Philadelphia, among others.
“I wrote this song after a rather intense dissociative period,” explains Rose. “Alter egos can make for good imaginary friends when you feel like you don’t have any, but while helpful for coping, the long-term effects are less than desirable. Anyways, I found this design company’s swag koozie in a Lubbock bar and it just kind of rolled on from there. It hung around for a couple years until I scheduled a write with Linwood Regensburg. We didn’t get too far on a new song but ended up diving in on this. We tracked some guitar and a scratch vocal and a couple months later he sent me this. It’s definitely a testament to his abilities in working with minimal resources and I love how different of a tone it set for me in a time where I was desperately in need of change.”
Last fall, Rose made her long-awaited return with the release of CAZIMI, her first new album in nearly a decade. Taking its title from the astrological term for when a planet is in such close proximity to the sun that it’s considered to be in the heart of it, CAZIMI chronicles “the slow motion unraveling of somebody’s life” in the aftermath. Co-produced with Jordan Lehning (Andrew Combs, Caroline Spence, Rodney Crowell), the album earned widespread critical acclaim.
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Following the success of their late 2022 release 'Somebody Loves You' and their early 2023 collab with FEELDs on 'Was It Ever Really Anything?', Western Australian-based duo, The Money War, are stripping things back with their new single Ride, out yesterday Friday, May 26. The duo are also announcing the release of their EP 'I Don't Hear You Anymore', out June 23.
Inspired by the idea of living in the moment, 'Ride' captures the essence of happiness in simplicity. With minimal production, the single features only stripped back guitar and vocals, providing a liberating energy to sit and resonate with. Lead vocals from Dylan Ollivierre, backed up by Carmen Pepper, deliver a lulling, easy-going track that showcases the duo's emotive lyricism and raw talent.
Speaking on the unplugged essence of the track, Ollivierre states: "I wanted the song to feel like a ‘lost demo’, a bit rough around the edges and to feel like someone playing a song in their bedroom. The aim was to make the song feel emotive without all the production bells and whistles."
Pepper adds to what the song means to the two, "We’re currently at a point in our lives where things are pretty chaotic with raising a young family and trying to juggle a few different projects. I sometimes find myself wishing the time away and dreaming of a day when we can have a bit more freedom, so I have to remind myself that this is such an important time for us and we should enjoy it while we’re in it."
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