ROCK/Review The Plastic Pals – Decisions

There are songs out there that just have a swing to them that you can’t help but get into. Decisions is a track of that sort. It’s immediately apparent when you start the track that there’s the groove in you, and it never leaves. It’s a song that will make you feel good without you realizing it. The track pulls […]

ROCK/Review Nils Lassen – Under Your Spell

There are songs that have no description but are very easy to feel. Under Your Spell is just such a song. It slowly wraps itself around you and by the time you realise what’s going on you are already lost in it. That’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing. This is a really satisfying instrumentation, breezy and layered. […]

Pop-Rock/Review Lana Karlay – For the Weak

Some songs simply make you want to turn up the volume. For the Weak is one of them. It comes in with a sense of urgency, a sense of restlessness, it’s alive, guitars crash in. No soft start here. It goes for it and that confidence is contagious. There’s something very immediate about the energy of the track. It doesn’t […]

ROCK/Review The Shrubs – Let Us In

There are some songs that take some time to show themselves. Let Us In by The Shrubs is one of these. It slowly fades in, like it’s sneaking up on you, and you’re all in before you know it. This gradual development is one of what makes it so effective. The drums established the mood from the get-go. This pulse […]

ROCK/Review Reetoxa – War Killer

Some songs are instant hits and I believe that War Killer does just that. From the beginning there is this kind of unrefined energy that is continually moving forward. It is loud and urgent, but not faux. There’s a reason for this. There are many songs that attempt to be meaningful, perhaps, but this one does feel like it’s from […]

ROCK/Review Filip Dahl – Flying High

It’s a beautiful piece of music, and Filip Dahl brings it back with a new instrumental, Flying High. Aside from the guitar playing, there are no vocals in here and that’s exactly what the song needs. Already on the first few notes you can hear there’s someone who understands how to let the guitar sing on its own and not […]

Pop-Rock/Review Sean MacLeod – I Know Not

I Know Not by Sean MacLeod is on the borderline of commercial pop forms and experimental sound decisions, which creates a unified whole and makes his own musical language. The chorus makes clear 1950s doo-wop allusions, and the aspects of the wall of sound approach of Phil Spector are present. Its melody is conspicuous and well developed in the structure […]

Pop/Review Victor Longato – Freaked

On Freaked, the vocal of Victor Longato is placed in that processed room – where it is not smoothed out but it is edited and has weight. It is pushed by the Jersey Club beat, the percussion that will not give in. Reminds me of what Kelela was doing some years ago but with a more pop-facing sound and less […]

ROCK/Review Stainvarp – Complete

Stainvarp have brought it with something that really matters with the complete. The new offering of the Swedish outfit does not conceal its subject–this is parental love in the distorted guitars and the high-flying tones, and it has the full value of its emotional load. The song begins with a lyrical closeness. Plucked guitar and voice, exposed and mesmeric. Then […]

ROCK/Review The Spitting Pips – Vicious Circles

The Spitting Pips have something maniacally decadent about their “Vicious Circles”–a song that does not merely recount disorder, but literally flings you down into its intense, swirling core. The Llandudno quintet have created something truly visceral, the type of rock that makes you feel a bit dizzy and uncertain of what exactly has happened. The opening screeches of the wah […]

Metal/Review Chaidura – Heaven

Something about Heaven by Chaidura is literally arresting, I do not mean that it requests your attention, it literally forces it with the sheer emotional power. The London artist has created something that does not seem to be a song but a confession over thunderous guitars and guttural screams. The first impression is the sonic mayhem. Heaven is based on […]

Pop/Review Intercontinen7al – Love is Everywhere

Being such a song of swansong, Love is Everywhere, seems to be very appropriate as a song to a group whose whole life is about bonding despite the hardly attainable geographical apartness. This Beatles-esque slice of the glory of INTERCONTINEN7AL, written and performed by Argentina’s Nereo Paulus on the final album of the group titled Volume 7 is a heartrending, […]

Pop/Review Michellar – Game of Love featuring Rad Datsun

Something about Michellar’s Game of Love is incredibly nostalgic and the song seems like a rediscovery of a forgotten summer so tattered it has faded and gone. With the assistance of Minneapolis songwriter Rad Datsun, the San Francisco-based artist has made something that is truly heartfelt to listen to – a duet that affectionately and intelligently examines the playful nature […]

Pop-Rock/Review Ava Valianti – Hot Mess

The manner in which Ava Valianti presents herself in Hot Mess is somehow quiet the part of the impressiveness. Being only sixteen, she does not sound like someone who is trying to figure things out but a person who already knows that the confusion is a part of the deal. The song is lightly self-conscious, playful, a bit cynical, but […]

ROCK/Review Sean MacLeod – Beautiful Star

It has something romantically old-fashioned about Beautiful Star–it seems almost like finding a gem that has been buried in another century but it sounds so very up to date. The former Cisco frontman, Sean T MacLeod (who has worked with the producer of U2, Paul Barrett) has produced a track that lies squarely between the pop ambition and the rock […]

Pop/Review Exzenya – Till I’m Drunk & Confused

Something tells you, silent like in Till I’m Drunk and Confused. Exzenya does not romanticise heartbreak or even anthropomorphise it, she leaves it floating, a bit erratic like the thoughts re-emerging long after the final word. The song seems to be based on that same sense of late-night dizziness, where the room is half light, you have lost your guard […]

ROCK/Review Mercy Kelly – Out in The Night

Mercy Kelly of Greater Manchester have come back with one, called Out in The Night and it is at once obvious that this four-piece band does not have nothing against doing things in half. Since they played Kendal Calling and Tramlines Festivals, and otherwise, have racked up more than 400 radio plays, created on the grassroots strength, they have created […]

ROCK/Review Andy Smythe – Emergency

Andy Smythe, a songwriter from London , has produced something that is truly endearing in his song, Emergency, a song that seems to have been discovered by chance in the untold history of the British pop. As the first single of his upcoming album Quiet Revolution, this song is an easy way to cross eras, combining the melodic narration of […]

ROCK/Review Highroad No. 28 – Thistroubledsoul

It brings with it a kind of silence that falls upon the moment when Thistroubledsoul starts. It doesn’t hit all at once. It is time consuming, getting in slowly like some emotions when you have been holding on to them all along. Listening to Highroad No. 28 after almost ten years of silence on the part of the band was […]

Electronic/Review The New Citizen Kane – PSYCHEDELIKA Pt.1

Psychedelika Pt. 1 is a comeback of The New Citizen Kane that is not really a comeback but rather a reopening of a door that has been closed a long time. The album was constructed over seventeen tracks and traverses the nightlife not as spectacle but as emotional landscape, and the dance floor is not a place where anxiety, desire, […]

Pop/Review San Sebastian – In My Dreams

In My Dreams has a quality of the soft ache in it, which comes in at the end of the night when the world has finally shut up, and your mind is left making more noise. San Sebastian (who plans to reclaim his birth name Sebastian Rydgren during the coming year) exploits that emotion with a breathtaking level of clarity […]