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 […]
ROCK/Review Cruel Ploy – X’s and Ohs
The Cruel Ploy from Hamilton have created something truly unheard with Xs and OHs, an debut album that transforms the alternative rock into a dystopian vision. As post-human machines find corrupted human music files, this idea of the conceptual model may have been gimmicky – instead, it is superbly performed, which makes the sound rebellion raw and abrasive and purely […]
Folk/Review Michellar – The Star
The sense of nostalgia in music is extremely specific, and Michellar of San Francisco manages to replicate it with The Star so easily. It is not much of an experience like listening to a song but rather an opening of an ancient photograph that you have forgotten, where the corners are warm and the memory is glowing. Produced on several […]
Pop/Review Rellyo Bambini – Cloned and Upgraded, Insert Soul Here
But what is authenticity anyway anymore, when all things in the world are duplicable, filtered, upgraded, endlessly recombinable? That is the question which, though faintly humming, is never absent in Cloned and Upgraded, Insert Soul Here by Rellyo Bambini. It is never given to the form of a thesis or a concept that you are expected to work out. Instead, […]
Metal/Review Baby and the Beats – The beat
There is something truly refreshing in the way Belgian trio, Baby and the Beats have created with The Beat; a song that is filled with the type of energised feeling that its title suggests. This is not a rhythmic piece of music, it is rhythm, it transfers me into the millions of natural and biological patterns that dictate our lives […]
Pop/Review Giuseppe Cucé – 21grammi
Not all albums play but breathe, and the 21grammi by Giuseppe Cuce sounds like it has been breathing, as the experience compressed and condensed into sound. Something made by Cuce of Catania sits in that indefinite, unstable place between confession and art, and it investigates the invisible burdens we all have to bear through loss and memory and the silent […]
ROCK/Review ENAVE – Skeletons
Some songs do not play, they explode, and ENAVEs Skeletons explodes like an orchestrated blast in the shut rooms of the soul. This is music to distract, not to ignore but to invite you to see all that you have closed behind closed doors and hope that silence would make them fade away. The song has a take hold of […]
ROCK/Review Ratlehole – Franz and Sissi: Back to Schönbrunn
What would become of the wonderful imperial couple of Austria when they appear in the modern Vienna and discover their palace full of tourists? Austrian project Ratlehole provides the answer to this question with the gloriously absurd theatrical metal, and the outcomes are as entertaining as they are surprising. The opening note of Franz and Sissi: Back to Schonbrunn are […]
ROCK/Review GLASS CABIN – emmylou
The Glass Cabin of Nashville have created something that is really substantial with emmylou, a third studio album that does not follow the route of easy consolation. This is Americana wrapped in black – bourbon-streaked, philosophical, and eager to crawl inside the moral gray areas that lurk beneath the disguise of romantic devastation. The voice of Jess Brown requires no […]
ROCK/Review Moon Construction Kit – Chemicals
At some time it becomes too much in itself, and the Chemicals, the last song of Moon Construction Kit that Lausanne-based artist Olivier Cornu created, appears to have reached that specific brink of breaking. It is not a song to listen when one is weak, rather, it is like being thrown into a room when all the feelings are screaming […]
ROCK/Review Filip Dahl – Learning to Breathe Again
The recovery process hardly comes with trumpets. It comes more frequently without noise, as air in lungs after a long submarine excursion – and Norwegian musician Filip Dahl knows it without need of explanation. Learning to Breath Again is wordless, and even the guitar has to be more articulate than the language that stutter in its attempt to convey things. […]
Pop/Review Jari Salmikivi – Chasing Stars
There are those songs where you get inspired seemingly within a second, as though you have just made a sudden leap into the air, and that is what “Chasing Stars” accomplishes at the very start. Jari Salmikivi has created something that is at the same time intimate and broad expansive as to look up at the night sky and realise […]
Pop/Review Michellar– Truth Over Lies featuring Frankie El
There are songs that come not as entertainment but like a conversation that we are so desperately in need to have but it is done on a channel of melody instead of verbal. Precisely the same is offered in Truth over Lies. The partnership between Michelle Bond, Michael Levine and Matthias Schmidt was the result of a creative retreat held […]
EDM/Review Allan Jamisen – Gotta Do
Some songs are phoenixes out of ashes and the fire that Allan Jamisen is burning in his song, Gotta Do, is the same fire. This song was written in a period of intense self-research, and it does not show signs of trauma – it exudes strength. It is what occurs when the darkness is fueled instead of hindrance. The intro […]
COUNTRY/Review Michellar – We both can fall featuring Gracie Lou
It has a courageous sincerity that runs through Michellar in her song, We Both Can Fall, and instantly identifies it. It is not a refined, idealised view of relationships, it is a crude, harsh view of the reality of struggling to keep love alive with life tugging you in opposite ways. The vulnerability of the vocals is the first thing […]
Pop/Review Eylsia Nicolas– Hot Hot Christmas
Why does Christmas have to have snow and jumpers? Eylsia Nicolas has brought the ideal antidote to the old-time fare with the yuletide season with a brilliantly paced song, Hot Hot Christmas, which redefines the holidays with palm trees and warm skies. This song is exuding contagious energy since the first bars. The energetic use of instruments evokes a cheerful […]