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 […]
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 […]