Mall Girl - Dana Gavanski - Autumn Hollow

Mall Girl - Close My Eyes (Live at Studio Paradiso).

Norwegian math pop four-piece Mall Girl have released their debut album Superstar via Jansen Records. To mark the release, the band has shared a brand new live video for album track 'Close My Eyes', recorded at Studio Paradiso in Oslo where they recorded the album.

Superstar represents an exciting new chapter for the buzzed-about band. The release follows a string of successful singles, including album tracks ‘Bachtap’ & ‘Bubbly Cool Drink’, which introduced them as an act to watch in the alt-pop arena. Members Iver Armand Tandsether, Hannah Veslemøy Narvesen, Eskild Myrvoll and Bethany Forseth-Reichberg were forced to get creative when the pandemic hit, sidelining best-laid plans to flesh out some songs before heading into the studio together.

"Because of COVID regulations and the four of us living in two different cities, we changed the way we worked with the songs quite radically in the months leading up to the studio recording,” Narvesen says. "We’ve always been very oriented towards the live performance of the songs, including when we compose them together in our rehearsal space. That way of working has led to some challenges when recording, as you end up listening to the songs in a different manner and might figure out you should have done everything differently."

While others put their creative endeavors on hold, Mall Girl opted to try something different. Many of the songs on Superstar were tracks that the band regularly performed, but they wanted to seize the opportunity to evolve their sound even more.

 

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Dana Gavanski - Bend Away and Fall.

Conducting each note with a light gracefulness, Dana Gavanski's fingertips appear to dance whilst aiding their owner in expressing the stories behind each of her lighter-than-air tones. Stories which, on her brand new album When It Comes, may never have been heard if not for healing 'lost' vocal cords and a lesson in taking the rough with the smooth.

In many ways this record feels like it is my first. When I could use my voice, I had to focus so there is an urgency and greater emotional trajectory than before… it's very connected to vocal presence, which extended into an existential questioning of my connection to music. It felt like a battle at times, which I frequently lost. – Dana Gavanski

The record's focus track, "Bend Away & Fall," is about the constant zigzag of closing and opening up. Learning to give chances to new experiences and how to stick around when the going gets tough. The hegemony of old habits, fears and anxieties and the attempt to overthrow the deceitful draw to comfort in favour of flexibility and deep focus.

Dana Gavanski · Bend Away and Fall

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Autumn Hollow - Meantime/Between Time.

Autumn Hollow just announced the release of their single, “Meantime/Between Time.”  It’s off the Americana EP, Throw the House, due out June 17 through Oak Honest Records. A song to listen to amongst springtime wonders, “Meantime/Between Time” centers around the necessity to exist in the moment. A lilting melody draws the listener to the present moment while Murphy sings of finding happiness within even the deepest of burdens

The lived-in joy extends to the other songs on Throw the House, a sense of gratitude for the opportunity to build and rebuild no matter how much everyday life tears you down. Murphy’s hopes and struggles come across in songs like “Si Viene Si Va.” He says, “That was the first song that I wrote when I was able to write again. Si viene si va is an Italian phrase, that means ‘comes and it goes.’ That idea was really important during that time. 

I just needed to have more energy and more happiness. Even if you’re writing something that might seem sad or depressing or whatever, you still need those things.”  “Pick up my pills and pick up my kids and hope that one won’t react with the other,” Murphy sings on “Rooting for Laundry.” The sound is often centered around the acoustic guitar and Murphy’s earnest vocal delivery triangulated somewhere between Bruce Springsteen’s bedroom records and Fleet Foxes’ rootsy rock and roll.

Boston Americana rockers Autumn Hollow return with their first new recordings since 2013. The three-song EP features a reconstituted band led by singer/songwriter Brendan Murphy and a refreshed out look on writing and performing. The band has gone through a few lineup changes since its inception in 2007. It currently features Murphy (lead vocals, acoustic guitar), Mike Burke (lead guitar, background vocals), Chuck Vath (bass, background vocals), James DeFilippo (piano, organ, keys), and Nick Campbell (drums).

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Mall Girl - Neska Rose - Dot Allison - Owen FitzGerald

Mall Girl - For Hannah.

Superstar, the debut record from Norwegian art-pop outfit Mall Girl, represents an exciting new chapter for the buzzed-about band. The release follows a string of successful singles, including album tracks ‘Bachtap’ & ‘Bubbly Cool Drink’, which introduced them as an act to watch in the alt-pop arena. Their debut album is scheduled for release on April 29th via independent label Jansen Records.

Recorded at Studio Paradiso in Oslo with long-time collaborator Marcus Forsgren, Superstar runs the gamut of emotions and moments of reflection on our fleeting experiences. On their new single, 'For Hannah', the band say:

"All the feelings and thoughts you hide from the other person in a relationship, where do they end up and what will they lead to? As life keeps on moving forward towards an uncertain future, you sit and wonder what your desires are in the midst of all the uncertainty. These questions are the story told in this song: “Who will catch me if I fall? Will you run if things get too tough? What are your true, inner desires?” And until you get your answers you’ll sit down, observe the world around you and try to find as much comfort in the future unfolding before your eyes."

Members Iver Armand Tandsether, Hannah Veslemøy Narvesen, Eskild Myrvoll and Bethany Forseth-Reichberg were forced to get creative when the pandemic hit, sidelining best-laid plans to flesh out some songs before heading into the studio together.

"Because of COVID regulations and the four of us living in two different cities, we changed the way we worked with the songs quite radically in the months leading up to the studio recording,” Narvesen says. "We’ve always been very oriented towards the live performance of the songs, including when we compose them together in our rehearsal space. That way of working has led to some challenges when recording, as you end up listening to the songs in a different manner and might figure out you should have done everything differently."

While others put their creative endeavours on hold, Mall Girl opted to try something different. Many of the songs on Superstar were tracks that the band regularly performed, but they wanted to seize the opportunity to evolve their sound even more.

Jansen Records · For Hannah

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Neska Rose - Pick Me.

Singer, songwriter, and actress Neska Rose has released a brand new single called “Pick Me”, an upbeat, guitar-driven pop song that shows off both her natural charisma as a performer and her knack for catchy and relatable songwriting. The song is accompanied by a music video starring Neska and her twin sister Libi Rose, who frequently collaborates with her sister on music and whose voice can be heard harmonizing with Neska on the song.

This new song follows her debut single “Done” from 2020 and an EP in 2021 titled The Repel Of A Young Girl, both of which Neska wrote and produced herself. In addition to her music, Neska is making waves as a comedic actress, featured as the recurring character Gertie on the Nickelodeon high school mockumentary Drama Club and will soon be appearing in a climate change anthology series “Extrapolations” from Apple TV alongside a star studded series cast that includes Meryl Streep, Matthew Rhys, Marion Cotillard, Eiza Gonzalez, Tobey Maguire, and more.

The song and music video are both centered around, as Neska puts it, the “need to feel like you’re being heard, that you want to be picked”, with the video literally taking place at a theatre audition as Libi plays three different characters who are all trying out for a part. As each one of these distinct characters played by Libi dances across the stage with Neska, you get a real sense of not only the strong performing chops these young women have already developed, but also the natural chemistry they have with each other as siblings.

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Dot Allison - Love Died in Our Arms (Lee Scratch Perry Remix).

Dot Allison follows the critically acclaimed Heart-Shaped Scars - her first solo album in a decade -with a remix of "Love Died in Our Arms" by the late Lee 'Scratch' Perry, the final project of the legendary producer's career. Perry’s remix serves as the first single for the upcoming Entangled Remix EP, a collection of reworkings of favorite tracks from the critically acclaimed album.

Along with Lee "Scratch" Perry's mix the EP features contributions from Saint Etienne, Anton Newcombe, Lomond Campbell and The Anchoress. Saint Etienne have always had close ties to Dot, thanks to their mutual ties to Heavenly and Andrew Weatherall. Anton Newcombe is a fellow singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist and has collaborated with her recently on their work for the soundtrack to the TV series “Annika.” Lomond Campbell, a BAFTA-winning songwriter and shortlister for the Scottish Album of the Year Award, combines his ambitious creative spirit with Dot’s poignant lyricism. And The Anchoress, who has performed and collaborated in the past with renowned acts such as Simple Minds and Manic Street Preachers, brings her wide range of experiences to reimagining a never-before-released song from Dot.

Dot says, “I titled this ‘Entangled Remix EP’ to tie with “Heart-Shaped Scars” but also in a way the slightly disparate influences on the EP spanning decades from when I was first influenced by dub music & did a remix for St. Etienne to Anton in Berlin & the Anchoress now.

Of all the tracks on the Entangled Remix EP, none hold a greater importance than Lee “Scratch” Perry’s remix of “Love Died In Our Arms,” the final work of his long and storied career. Perry works brilliantly as he always has within the framework of Dot’s original song, weaving his signature dub beats into the music without distracting from Dot’s moving singing and songwriting.

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Owen FitzGerald - Don't Give Me A Pet.

Themes of dissociation are some of the major conduits running through Owen FitzGerald’s work. Somewhere in the narratives and world-building vignettes the characters that inhabit the universe of A deep clean you can count on! start with or wander deliriously into a state of bewilderment with the relationship to their own bodies, the utterly de-centering experience of being head-over-heels in love, the secret language of animals and plants and the atomization that the grist-mill of modern life inflicts.

Blundering through existential crisis after crisis, FitzGerald’s gives us a few anchors that tie us back to the physical space: feeding the dog, the biomechanical synchronization of a lover’s breath, the office politics of forest animals and core memories of singing out loud with friends. Musically, FitzGerald invites us to follow the breadcrumbs in the labyrinth of his knotty, surrealistic and, often, very funny and very dismal brand of Country music.

Based out of Durham, North Carolina FitzGerald’s shift away from his moniker Jokes&Jokes&Jokes towards his Government name in 2020 feels more like a person getting to know themselves rather than a magician revealing the false bottom or other pair of legs. Musically FitzGerald shares a similar bent trajectory of expressing the existential and the ineffable through the hard-scrabble and unlucky characters that populate these nine songs. Glenn Campbell, Bill Callahan and the spectre of John Prine figure heavily. The trinity here seem to guide the album’s neat strummers into the Chamber-Folk and further into Free-Jazz inflected. Meanwhile FitzGerald’s incredibly strong songwriting cuts a broad swath of rich purple velvet connecting him to contemporary outsider-Country artists like Cass McCombs and Simon Joyner in their surrealistic poetry and punch-in-the-gut one-liners.

Of these songs, FitzGerald writes, “These nine songs are like school pictures. They are wallet-sized portraits taken between 2006 and 2016. The songs on “A deep clean you can count on!” are frightened, sad, confused, bewildered, dislocated, hopeful, and hopeless. They’re emotional snapshots. Sometimes I can’t recognize myself in the songs. Other times I’m so swept up that I’m carried back in time by strong, old feelings. I’m hungover and doomed. I’m an unfixable thing that hurts other people. Whenever you find an old picture of yourself in a yearbook or a sock drawer I hope you feel happy to be where you are. More than anything else, that’s how this record makes me feel.”

What was it about the past not being done with us or time being a flat circle? By opening up every drawer and dawning the elbow length rubber gloves and grabbing the Ajax, FitzGerald leaves no stone unturned in his psyche and no dark corner unexplored. Yet, everyday our dog tracks mud on our freshly cleaned floors and our dead skin cells sluff off on our sheets when we sleep. FitzGerald seems to be saying that maintenance, routine and the courage to stare yourself deep into the eyes and cry and laugh at all the dumb shit we did, is the deep clean we can count on.

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Mall Girl - I.You.She - Century Egg - Hannah Scott

Mall Girl - Bubbly Cool Drink.

‘Bubbly Cool Drink’, the new single from Norwegian art-pop outfit Mall Girl, represents an exciting new chapter for the buzzed-about band. A string of infectious singles released in 2020, including ‘My Sweet Mall Girl’ and the fierce ‘Bad Girl’, cemented the bands reputation as an act to watch in the alt-pop arena. Now they are gearing up to release their debut album in Spring 2022, via Norwegian label Jansen Records.

Members Iver Armand Tandsether, Hannah Veslemøy Narvesen, Eskild Myrvoll and Bethany Forseth-Reichberg were forced to get creative when the pandemic hit, side lining best-laid plans to flesh out some songs before heading into the studio together.

"Because of COVID regulations and the four of us living in two different cities, we changed the way we worked with the songs quite radically in the months leading up to the studio recording,” Narvesen says. "We’ve always been very oriented towards the live performance of the songs, including when we compose them together in our rehearsal space. That way of working has led to some challenges when recording, as you end up listening to the songs in a different manner and might figure out you should have done everything differently."

While some put their creative endeavours on hold, Mall Girl opted to try something different. “We actually ended up ‘remote composing’ big parts of the album, with everyone working from their own home studio and bouncing ideas back and forth,” Narvesen explains. "This was a very welcome change of workflow for us, and it led to us writing some songs which probably wouldn’t have turned out that way had we been together in the same room."

Jansen Records · Mall Girl - Bubbly Cool Drink

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I.You.She - Sink.

Boston-based indie pop wunderkind I.You.She, AKA Aayushi Kumar, is gearing up for the release of a buoyant new song “sink!.” The song, produced by respected local Seattle musician Jake Crocker (her hometown), integrates irrepressibly catchy hooks with lyrics that illustrate the despair of a young person caught up in a sense of disillusionment with her life and an eventual realization that everyone is in the same boat.   Kumar exhibits a remarkable mastery of melody and lyricism in only her second single as a solo musical artist—she’s currently a freshman at the Berklee College of Music.  “Sink!” will be released digitally October 29.

Says Kumar: “I don’t believe in perfectionism but I really believed in this song and wanted to give it my all. In general, this person feels like their life is a mess and they feel a sense of emptiness.  To me the song is really about how struggle in life is inevitable. If I had to have one tagline for the song it would be ‘The grass is greener on the other side, but what if we were underground?’  I don't think this song is a negative one even though it may come off that way on a surface level. I think it's realistic and shows how struggling is inevitable and ok. We always think we're sinking but sometimes don't realize that everyone else is as well.”

 I like to stay informed on the local artists from Seattle and Jake, the featured artist and producer of ‘sink!,’ was a Seattle-based musician who I really looked up to.  He was a dream collaborator, and after some email/phone exchanges we started the process of working on the current version of “sink!”. I’m a freshman at the Berklee College of Music, The journey has been a long one but I feel so proud of this song and am excited to introduce my sound to the world.

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Century Egg - Moving On.

Century Egg is a band of escape artists with a focus on playing visceral punk rock. Today the Halifax, Nova Scotia-based quartet are sharing their new single, "Moving On" which makes up the first half of a double A-side single release, the second of which will follow next month. The new track is released via Forward Music Group. 

Following previous spots opening for the likes of Lido Pimienta – a self-proclaimed fan of the band with Robert Drisdelle, guitarist in Century Egg producing a track on her Polaris Prize-winning album, La Papessa – Partner, Julie Doiron, and more, Century Egg will be performing at Toronto's Handlebar on November 14 and La Sala Rosa as part of M for Montreal (Mothland's stage) on November 19 to celebrate the release of these new tracks. This new single, "Moving On" further cements their inspirations taken from Asian pop and rock artists such as Faye Wong, Jun Togawa, Spitz, Cui Jain, Pu Shu, along with the driving post-punk rhythm section and blistering guitar work taken from The Stooges, Thin Lizzy, etc.

Speaking about the new single, Century Egg says: "This is a song about trying to detach yourself from your past and let go of the trauma that holds you back from finally feeling better."

Century Egg is made up of singer, Shane Song (she/her), bassist/backing vocalist, Matty Grace (she/her/they/them), guitarist, Robert Drisdelle (he/him) and drummer, Megumi Yoshida (she/her). Away from Century Egg, Song works as a visual artist/video game artist, Grace plays in numerous bands including Cluttered (tipped by Laura Jane Grace of Against Me!), Drisdelle plays and arranges with Lido Pimienta (amongst other projects) and Yoshida performs in Bad Vibrations, Dog Day, Not You and more.

forwardmusic · Century Egg - Moving On

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Hannah Scott - Drawn To Darkness (Album).

London-based independent artist Hannah Scott is fast cementing her place as one of the country’s most exciting new songwriters, with her emotive, personal songs and striking voice. Hot on the heels of her recent sync success which saw No Gravity open an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, she releases her Help Musicians-funded sophomore album, Drawn To Darkness.

Co-written and produced with long-standing creative partner Stefano Della Casa (Ultra Music Publishing), Drawn To Darkness expertly combines organic, live elements with electronic sounds. The two artists have struck a perfect balance between Hannah’s traditional songwriting craft and Stefano’s unique cinematic production.

Hannah draws much of the inspiration for her music from her affinity with Italy. A year living and working on an olive press in rural Tuscany in her late teens provided the backdrop to her early work and she has found her musical home with writer-producer and multi-instrumentalist Stefano, who she met in London but may well have met years earlier when passing through the train station in Italy he was working in!

Further highlights for the pair include opening for Madeleine Peyroux to an audience of 2000 at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre and travelling across Ireland with Paddy Casey to open shows for him in Dublin and in a tiny Irish speaking village near Galway! Their music has also been featured on BBC Radio 2 including a live session with Dermot O’Leary, BBC 6 Music, BBC Introducing, The Guardian, MOJO and Clash Magazine.

Hannah Scott · Drawn To Darkness

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