Reviews - SONGSCOPE

$\Pop-Rock/Review Sean MacLeod – I Know Not$

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 –...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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