Kelsey Kerrigan - Radio Wolf - The Blue Hour - Gestures & Sounds

Kelsey Kerrigan - Good Times.

Background - "When I was 9, I used to sit in my closet in the pitch black with headphones on, listening to these meditational CDs. The music was really moody, with lots of production. I would get lost imagining all the different sounds, all the counter melodies, recalls the LA-based artist. I always loved production.

While in school, Kerrigan kept up a grueling schedule of nine to 10 hours a day of songwriting while earning her degree in in audio engineering and production at Los Angeles Recording School. She was enrolled in the two-year production program. Initially, her decision to pursue production was so that she could make better demo versions of her songs, but the art of production would become integral to her musicality. A producers job is to decorate time and space, she says.  

Immersed in the craft of production, and the art of songwriting, Kerrigan began to discover and refine her aesthetic. She became inspired by the lush textural instrumentation and clever arrangements of new wave and post punk artists such as The Smiths, The Cure, Wire, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Tears For Fears. These artists became signposts, and would also help her reference her distinct production treatment. 

Through a combination of good fortune, prodigious musical gifts, and hard work Kerrigan has made an uncompromising and masterful debut album. It entrances with clever emotiveness, blissful new wave atmospherics, smart hooks, and sweetly seductive vocals. This inaugural body of work was produced by Johnny T. Yerington (Ryan Adams, The Virgins) and Gus Oberg (The Strokes, Albert Hammond) at Electric Lady Studios. Website here, Facebook here.

We have some beautiful new material from Kelsey Kerrigan who we featured for the first time just over three weeks ago. 'Good Times' is another melodic and catchy track, where production & the musical arrangement are top quality and the vocals exquisitely matched in what is a superb indie pop song.

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Radio Wolf - Song On The Radio (feat. Marika Gauci).

Background - Canadian/British electro-rock outfit Radio Wolf have shared their highly anticipated debut single, "Song on the Radio." With an ethos somewhere between that of a John Hughes or David Lynch soundtrack, "Song on the Radio" feels as if it could be the end of the most recent episode of Twin Peaks.  Featuring Marika Gauci on vocals, the track is a pulsating anthem that harkens back to the simpler times when radio was the be-all end-all of music consumption.  

The roots of Radio Wolf started in Blair's original experimental electronic rock outfit, Kindle, where he transformed his music into a visual experience complete with cyberpunk burlesque dancers.  After building a name for himself, and performing at the legendary Notting Hill Arts Club, electro-pop band Client quickly signed him to their independent record label, Loser Friendly. His all- instrumental first album was then released, simply titled Kindle. Ever-restless to build upon his own sound and evolve as an artist, Oliver conceived his latest project: Radio Wolf.

As Radio Wolf, Oliver has written and produced original songs with guest vocalists, Marika Gauci (Hotel Motel), Sarah Blackwood (Client), Kelli Ali (Sneaker Pimps) and Holly Dodson (Parallels). The sound is a unique fusion of electronic music and rock ’n’ roll, with a distinct retro-futuristic edge. The songs are crafted with lyrical and melodic power, combining uncanny rock guitar hooks, lush electronics, and distinctive vocal delivery. 

Radio Wolf's debut EP, Rock 'n' Roll Forever will be available everywhere October 31st, 2017, Facebook here.

For some reason the opening chords reminded me of The Psychedelic Furs, after which all likeness simply vanished. 'Song On The Radio' is a fabulous electro rock song, the music is absolutely splendid and the vocals provide distinction and emotion.

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The Blue Hour - One More Mystery (plus The Cure cover for Kyoto Song).

Background - The Blue Hour presents their new single 'One More Mystery' ahead of the release of their new album 'Always'. This 11-track offering is replete with swoons whirling the listener into the ether, wisped along with sonic elements cherished by fans of Kate Bush, This Mortal Coil, Marissa Nadler, Dead Can Dance, and Chelsea Wolfe. This new release comes on the trail of their 'Kyoto Songs' single, featuring a beautiful rendition of The Cure classic 'Kyoto Song'.

Living near Seattle, Brian and Marselle Hodges have been inspired by their life amongst the moss and mud and the ferns and forests of the Pacific Northwest, their raw mix channeling the purely natural and the esoteric via The Blue Hour.

Blending traditional folk melodies with dream pop, ethereal wave and synthpop, the result is ethereal folk-noir that is unique to them, charged with haunting ambience and some classical structures. This potent cocktail creates an otherworldly and hypnotic effect, focusing on texture and rhythm and beautiful discord ... and most of all magic.

Co-written and performed by Brian and Marseille, the two also share vocal duties on the 'Always' album. Maria Grig also contributes strings on three tracks: 'One More Mystery', 'Block the Sound' and 'Lost Landmarks'. Written and recorded between December 2016 and June 2017 at the Piksie Nest and Rabbit Hole, this album was mastered by Wade Alin at Standard Mastering. 

While not making music Brian Hodges works as a lawyer, researcher, and non-fiction writer. His fiction has been published by New Lit Salon Press, the Bearded Scribe Press, and Liquid Imagination, with his work having received acclaim in niche literary circles. The Blue Hour will be released on October 27, but is already available for pre-order via the band's own Bandcamp here. Website here, Facebook here. 

As both 'One More Mystery' and 'Kyoto Song' are mentioned in the above promo piece I thought it would make sense to feature both. Doing so helps to demonstrate the musical expanse The Blue Hour can & do travel through, the beautifully tender One More Mystery contrasts so well with the potent cover version of Kyoto Song. As for the rest of the album, the watch word for each track is unique, and if you wan't a second one then, imaginative springs quickly to mind.


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Gestures & Sounds - To: Rivers, From: Chomp.

Background - LA-based folk-pop outfit and filmmakers, Gestures and Sounds are proud to release their next music video for single, "To: Rivers, From: Chomp".  Playing out like an indie-Tim Burton film, Gestures & Sounds create an innovative and mesmerizing world where our protagonist goes on a perilous journey to find his way back home.

Utilizing their filmmaking skills to complement their energetic, rollicking sound, Gestures & Sounds creates a unique blend of art for all the senses.  Silly and self-aware, the band's debut album Bill Nye Thinks We're a Band takes its inspiration from a speech they saw the famed scientist give on a college campus.  Almost highlighting their future goals, Gestures & Sounds hopes to one day be big enough to attract the attention of their childhood hero.

Debut Single "Ass Over Tea Kettle" and the accompanying video was extremely well-received. Gestures & Sounds release their debut full-length, Bill Nye Thinks We're a Band, worldwide on September 15th, 2017. Website here, Facebook here.

We featured 'Ass Over Tea Kettle' back at the beginning of July describing that song as "a feisty slice of modern folk pop" Now we have the new song 'To: Rivers, From: Chomp'a vibrant piece where folk pop might easily be replaced with folk rock as the base genre.


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Jupe Jupe - Kelsey Kerrigan - Wild Ones - Robots With Rayguns - Loyal Lobos

Jupe Jupe - Faith In What You Hear.

Background - Jupe Jupe creates dark and danceable pop music layered with crooning vocals, atmospheric synths, shivering guitars, and driving beats. 

The Seattle quartet offers a collection of melancholy, hook-laden textures in its latest release, Lonely Creatures—10 hauntingly striking songs about isolation, fate, internal struggle, and technology gone awry. Each tune draws inspiration from electropop, post-punk, and ghostly Americana.

The band spent over two years crafting each song on Lonely Creatures before joining producer Matt Bayles at Red Room Recording in Seattle, Washington. A former member of Minus the Bear, Bayles has produced and mixed a number of seminal albums by Botch, Mastodon, Murder City Devils, Minus the Bear, Russian Circles, These Arms are Snakes, The Blood Brothers, and many more.

Since forming in 2010, Jupe Jupe has released three original full-length albums: Invaders, Reduction in Drag, and Crooked Kisses. The group also teamed up with a variety of renowned artists/producers for the remix album, Cut Up Kisses (featuring Lusine, Mike Simonetti, Rick G. Nelson, Erik Blood, Head Like a Kite, and more).Website here, Facebook here.

The first of ten tracks on the 'Lonely Creatures album is 'Faith In What You Hear'. It typifies the bands core sound, however there is some more stripped back material alongside a couple of more intense and darker sounding pieces. Overall though, this is a pleasing and hook filled collection of songs, delivered with some very fine musicianship.

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Kelsey Kerrigan - Driving Around.

Background - At a very young age, singer-songwriter and producer Kerrigan would escape to a creative dimension to dissect recordings, and, later, write songs. Few outside her private sphere knew her promise as a songwriter, singer, and producer. It would take chance meetings with music icons Glyn Johns (The Eagles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Clash) and Ryan Adams for Kerrigan and her family to understand the depth of her gifts and vision. Now, Kerrigan emerges with a masterful debut of romantic post-punk. 

Kerrigan’s path revealed itself after high school. When it came time for college, the debate at home came down to Kerrigan wanting to attend a two-year production program at Los Angeles Recording School, but her father preferring she be more cautious and enroll in a traditional college. The stalemate ended with a visit from legendary producers David Anderle (Frank Zappa, The Doors, Love) and Glyn Johns. Upon hearing Kerrigan’s music, they were flabbergasted and Glyn Johns gushed, “Don’t let anyone touch your music!” Kerrigan earned her right to attend to LARS. 

Her fate would shift even more when Johns invited her to the famed Sunset Sound Recorders. There she met Ryan Adams, who on the spot, asked Kerrigan to perform some of her music. She fumbled a bit, but he sensed her raw talent and would informally mentor her for the next two years. “He really believed in me,” Kerrigan says. “I would send him really rough recordings, and he took it seriously and told me to keep going. It inspired me to dive fully into songwriting.”

The opportunity to possibly record her album would come at an inopportune time. “One day, Ryan texted me while I was in class. He said: ‘My friend Johnny is here in the studio only for a few hours. You have to come now,’” she recalls. “I just got up and left class. When I got there, Ryan said: ‘If there is anybody who should produce you, it’s this guy,’ and then he got up and left.” 

Ryan was spot on. Johnny T. Yerington and Gus Oberg assembled a cadre of perfectly cast musicians, and all studio personnel studied Kerrigan’s playlists of new wave, post-punk, goth and punk.  The resulting album is a stunner. Thematically, the album has a dark humor and emotionality. “When I am inspired to write, it’s often about being interested in someone I can’t be with, fated love. There is torment there because I can’t be honest either because I don’t want to hurt somebody or I don’t want to get hurt,” she confides. “The songs are where I can always put my honesty.” 

The album is a lean, no-filler release brimming with an invigorating pop sensibility thoughtfully complemented by quick-wittedness and sincerity. The elementally elegant, “Good Times” recalls almost a Morrissey-esque quandary where the good times are heartbreaking, but still the good times never felt and sounded so good. The winsome beauty of “So What” grapples with a friend’s suicide. The piano ballad “A Good Reason” with simple stateliness frames Kerrigan’s singing, allowing the expressive dynamics of her voice to gloriously course through the song unencumbered. The shivery beauty of “Haunted House” vibes symphonic goth with layers of spidery counter melodies. Website here.

'Driving Around' is a fabulous song where the band are stunning and Kelsey Kerrigan's  melodic vocals beautifully matched. On the strength of this one very catchy track, the album is a must hear.

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Wild Ones - Paresthesia.

Background - Portland, OR band Wild Ones has announced their new album, Mirror Touch, out October 6th, 2017 via Topshelf Records. Vocalist Danielle Sullivan says of the first single, "Paresthesia refers to a time in my life when anxiety was ruling my mind. I was withdrawing from friends, wasn't leaving my house, and had stopped engaging with the world outside. The song explores strained love in the context of manifested fear."

Wild Ones delve into the bliss and burden that musicians are tasked with today: create work that captures your spirit, but do it without selling your soul. Self-produced and recorded, they walk the line of DIY oddity and polished pop sheen. Hailing from Portland, Oregon, the band combines the talents of lead vocalist Danielle Sullivan, keyboardist Thomas Himes, drummer Seve Sheldon, guitarist Nick Vicario and bassist Max Stein. Growing up on Cocteau Twins and En Vogue, their sound is a mash of R&B synths, muted guitar, and somber vocal melodies. After 7 years together, they've hit their stride in creating work that poses questions about art and authenticity.

Mirror Touch, the band’s latest record releasing in October 2017 via Topshelf Records, explores spaces of isolation, loneliness and how it feels when the line between self and other becomes blurred. The record title refers to the condition "Mirror Touch Synesthesia" and the physiological experience of empathy. How can you know yourself, when in public you become everyone else? The songs explore the quest to maintain artistic self-integrity in an industry that seeks to homogenize. Solitary in their process of collaboration, Himes and Vicario produce the music, while Sullivan crafts lyrics and melodies, their attempt at self-preservation against the ever-changing expectations of what music should or should not be. Combining their style of upbeat melodies with a backdrop of darker lyrical themes, an inquiry into their artistic process ultimately reflects a balance between earnest head nods to their favorite sounds with a fierce loyalty to their own sense of self. Website here, Facebook here.

Opening with a textured synth sound 'Paresthesia' quickly develops into a sprightly upbeat track. The vocals add the melody as they seemingly dance above the soundtrack, on this very engaging song.

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Robots With Rayguns - Memories (feat Carl Gershon).

Background - Phoenix, AZ-based Synthwave impresario Lucas Patrick Smith, aka Robots with Rayguns, crafts the kind of sunbaked retro pop that perfectly suites West Coast 80’s iconography. Blending modern dance elements like EDM, breakbeat and house with tastefully chopped and pitched vocals, RWR has established a unique tongue-in-cheek electropop aesthetic that’s connected with both new music junkies and the retro revivalists who frequent arcade bars and yearn for classic 80’s vibes, cars and movies.

RWR was one of the first artists to leverage his music by crafting un-official remixes for marquee artists. His debut release, Electro Isn’t Dead, hit in 2010 and its infectious single “Sugarbaby” became popular in the hypem blogosphere with mentions from MTV and Indie Shuffle. The songs fate was sealed via an endorsement tweet from none other than Taylor Swift who also solicited one of RWR hot pink tees. Lucas followed up his debut with official remixes for other synthpop acts like Frankmusik and Color Theory, collaborations with upstarts such as TT The Artist (Diplo, Bauer) and unconventional distribution bundles with BitTorrent and Groupees.

As the time came to record a new album, Lucas felt a slight change in pace was in order… literally. His fifth full length LP, Slow Jams (due out September 2017), is entirely composed of slow to mid-tempo, blistering ballad tracks. A collection of sparkling, synth imbued, mellow vibes that manages to come across as both sexy and bittersweet. Slow Jams with be released digitally and on cassette – a format that Smith asserts “lends to the experience of popping it in and listening to it in its entirety.” Website here, Facebook here.

We are soon into a rich array of sweeping synth's on 'Memories' providing a perfect backdrop for some notable and compelling vocals. The song smoothly flows along, dropping a considerable number of hooks as it builds into a more powerful piece.

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Loyal Lobos - The Fall.

Background - Heartbreak breeds many things, few of which could be filed under the “good stuff” column- tears, Oreo addictions, questionable hookups, impulsive bangs. And yet, sometimes a heartbreak, and the relationship that preceeded it, can signify a shift, a pivot, some change in the fundamental direction of a life. Perhaps hearts don’t break after all; perhaps they just change directions.  

Such was the case with Loyal Lobos, the nom de musique of Bogotá native Andrea Silva. An entanglement with a Nashville man frayed, then snapped. Silva was left heartbroken, but in the midst of her sadness, inspiration struck. She set aside her previous musical projects and dove headfirst into guitar-driven folk music. In the ruins of a relationship, Loyal Lobos was born.

The seeds of Loyal Lobos were planted in Silva’s childhood in Colombia. Years spent steeped in her parents jazz records imparted a flair for melody. Growing up in a culture that prized machismo and conventional female beauty fostered a desire to empower women. A series of childhood performances gave her the confidence to perform. And finally, a the decision to attend music school in the US cemented it all.

Loyal Lobos’ music lives in the liminal space between folk, rock and country. Abandoning the synth-pop leanings of her earlier music for something more , Silva’s output as Loyal Lobos finds her stripping everything away. Armed with a guitar and a sinuous voice (and some occasional backup), Loyal Lobos presents delicately transcribed missives from Silva’s most internal worlds. She deliberately orients her songs, she tells me, in a place of sadness, of yearning, of emotional semi-darkness. “There’s such beauty in sadness,” she tells me. “People forget that. There has to be darkness for there to also be light.” Taking the confessional lyricism of singer-songwriters like Elliot Smith, and infusing it with her penchant for haunting melodies, Loyal Lobos sets out to create a synthesis of music and lyrics, and ultimately chart the unexplored recess of human feeling.

In September, Silva will release The Fall, a warm, intricate collection of melancholic folk songs, and her debut EP. The Fall focuses, naturally, on heartbreak, an experience Silva points out is both universal and deeply specific. The title track and debut single showcases both the vibrancy of Silva's voice and her capability for nuance. It's a song that makes loss seem like an appropriate object of nostalgia, that makes that heartbroken hair decision seem less awful and more like something to treasured. After all, as The Fall and Loyal Lobos remind us, heartbreaks aren't all bad. Sometimes they're pivot points- moments in which we change the course of what we're doing in search of something great, in which our destinies become malleable enough to change them. Facebook here.

'The Fall' is already proving popular, which is well deserved. This is a powerful and beautiful song where the rapid tempo works so well with Andrea Silva's appealing and dreamy vocals.

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