Easy Sleeper couches “Dream Prison” in an energetically delicate melodies. The jangly/twee guitar sounds work together in a fascinating way in which the rhythm line of the guitar is intertwined with the lead in mutually supportive dynamics allowing the vocals to shine across the whole song while leaving the space in the last third of the song for the bass to accent the fiery and warping twin guitar solos. The interplay throughout the song is subtle but evocative and even though the lyrics seem like a gentle but serious declaration of personal liberation beginning with freeing one’s own psyche of the thoughts and internalized narratives that keep you from living as full a life as you can the structure and emotional coloring of the song makes that process seem easily attainable. The lead vocals are Andy Partridge-esque and the music reminiscent of Nonsuch period XTC while resonating with the style of current jangle shoegazers like Moodlighting, DIIV and Letting Up Despite Great Faults. Listen to “Dream Prison” on YouTube and follow Easy Sleeper at the links below.
ABANDONS is an experimental rock trio from Denver comprised of guitarist Brenton Dwyer, bassist Nate Colbert and drummer Sam Mowat. The group met through Craigslist ads and coalesced to start writing their first instrumental tracks in 2019 before looking to play shows. It was an odd time in the Denver underground scene with not as robust an infrastructure for bands not playing fairly established styles of music to perform for a potential audience as there had been in years past and then of course the 2020 pandemic hit. During the long period when no responsible person that wasn’t desperate wasn’t playing shows ABANDONS recorded a live EP at Mutiny Information Café on August 29, 2020. The recording is the group’s sole available release on Bandcamp and the entire performance was released on YouTube. ABANDONS hadn’t played many shows in general before 2022 due to the obvious restrictions but the band quickly found like-minded artists in the local post-rock and art rock community such as exists in the current phase of the Denver music scene. Projects like New Standards Men, Brother Saturn, Only Echoes, Moon Pussy and Almanac Man are some of the peers, none of which sound remotely alike, with whom ABANDONS has found some kinship. Its own mostly instrumental, music rooted in improvisation is cinematic, takes strands of post-rock structure, noise rock intensity and its own flavor or vibrantly emotional soundscape-y compositions.
Listen to our interview with ABANDONS on Bandcamp, check out the live video and the EP linked below and follow the project on Instagram and Facebook.
Lo Artiz’s “Softly Pt. 1” single sounds like something in a constant state of flux, breaking down, rebuilding, gently. Its lush arrangement of textural percussion and processed tones that sound like they’re lingering and melting off her strong yet whispery vocals. It all sounds like you’re getting to spend some time taking a casual walk through another person’s dreams as the mind processes streams of thought as motes of feeling and ideas swirl around and drift off to take on a life of their own for a bright, flickering moment before resolving into other shapes and notions and emotions. Her words come off like free verse existential poetry assembling thoughts to properly frame and consider while engaging with the will to take action on this constellation of interconnected thought patterns. It’s a gorgeous map of inner space the likes of which one doesn’t often hear. Listen to “Softly Pt. 1” on Spotify and follow Lo Artiz at the links provided.
“Salamander Song” sounds like a nature preserve in the beginning. But then Kris Cherry’s song introduces an acoustic guitar that carries a real percussive and expressive rhythm as the song goes on with spare percussion often only a shaker and with backing vocals augmenting Cherry’s luminous singing. The song is like a psych folk ballad about the “salamander man” who lived among the community but had webbed feet and scaly skin and was shunned by almost the rest of the society depicted in the song because people feared his appearance even though he was soft of voice and had a “heart of gold.” He tries to assimilate but is rejected and humiliated at every turn and when he tries to secure employment merely to survive he is denied even that and he has to resort to theft to simply eat and barely get by. In terms of the dreamlike quality of the song it’s reminiscent of the kind of thing Harry Nilsson was doing on the 1971 concept album The Point! But here the obvious inference one can make is that the tale of the “salamander man” is an allegory for racism and the way it imposes limitations on so many and others them so that they have no choice sometimes but choose to operate outside society’s established rules and often on its edges and beyond its boundaries to simply survive much less thrive. This them Cherry carries on to his remarkable new experimental folk album, the cosmically gorgeous Wonderworld out now where his use of field recordings and evocative atmospherics is entrancing. Listen to “Salamander Song” and the rest of Wonderworld on Spotify and follow Kris Cherry at the links below.
Tablefox begin “Give It All” with a delicate and contemplative plucking of guitar strings and hovering tones and vocals that sound like they’re coming through water. Then the song kicks into a slow-building momentum that swings into ever more epic circles like a pendulum that puts the energy of the song into higher levels of sonic energy with each dynamic shift at roughly one minute intervals until the end. The song’s lyrics seem to be a mantra self-affirming one’s inner voice to persevere acting in ways that undermine your goals and disappoint yourself and past the disappointments visited upon you by others. Two thirds of the way through the song the words suggest that you can hold back and settle for something lesser in whatever it is you believe in or you can do as the title of the song suggests and as seems like a natural instinct and to give it all. And that that choice is what shapes your actions. The fiery guitar lead over the flowing distorted rhythm in the final section of the song puts it over the top in expressing what the band has chosen. Fans of Swervedriver and Catherine Wheel will appreciate the drive and layered guitar work of this song. Watch the video for “Give It All” on YouTube and follow New Zealand’s Tablefox at the links below.
Springworks pairs well the song “Pulsar” with an unusual and imaginative music video. The song is reminiscent of some particularly ebullient pop tune from the 90s era of the Elephant 6 collective. A breezy pace, upbeat rhythms that sweep you along while a hypnotic shifting keyboard sequence running through the song keeps things colorful. The vocal harmonies are subtle and sweet while conveying a message of encouragement not to let your anxieties, perhaps it’s a message to the songwriters too, and momentary fears overwhelm your ability to look up and look forward. Because sometimes we really need someone, mostly ourselves, to nudge us over the hill of emotional resistance to doing the things we want to do but for some reason have lost the momentum to get going. The video includes what looks like old medical school or public programming footage of heart surgery, nothing too dire, just interesting, some 1950s travel documentary reels and all interspersed with images of the celestial objects per the song title illustrating where to keep your attention and of course a pular appears to pump light like a heart does blood making the visual metaphor more clever and obvious than one might expect. A particularly nice detail in the video is after the line about how one should “let the monkeys fly off your back” there is a bit of a film of a chimpanzee rapidly striking a xylophone. The song is like a regular chain of musical and visual Easter eggs for the attentive listener/viewer. Watch the video for “Pulsar” on YouTube and connect with Springworks at the links provided.
Taleen Kali took a fairly unorthodox path to being a performing musician. She grew up in Los Angeles and attended shows at DIY spots like The Smell and Pehrspace before moving to New York City for a few years where she lived near legendary DIY spaces like Death By Audio and 285 Kent and took in the one off house and the like. But she went to Chicago to attend art school and became immersed in the underground music scene there and regularly attended performances by the wide array of noise artists in and touring through the Windy City. Returning to Los Angeles in the early to mid-2010s Kali ended up forming her own band TÜLIPS which was a potent hybrid of punk and and shoegaze. But by summer 2017 Kali debuted her solo act. Across a handful of singles and EPs like 2018’s Soul Songs, Kali has revealed herself to be an imaginative songwriter and lyricist able to translate those concepts to a powerful live presentation with an undeniable mystique. The forthcoming, full-length debut album Flower of Life showcases the work of an artist capable of fusing styles to suit moods and to somehow be both ethereal and introspective and ferocious and gritty often within the same song. The style is very much her own and that of her collaborators but she has truly synthesized elements of garage rock, classic pop, punk, shoegaze and psychedelia to craft her own sound that suits well the heartfelt and heady subject matter of her lyrics.
Listen to our interview with Taleen Kali on Bandcamp where we discuss her roots in music and evolution as an artist. The aesthetics of her songwriting and her appreciation for the Jim Jarmusch film Only Lovers Left Alive, the title of one of the singles on Flower of Life. Connect with the artist at the links below and catch the band currently on tour in the US including at the Hi-Dive on Sunday, October 16, 2022 with Tuff Bluff, Galaxies and Princess Dewclaw.
Molly Nilsson is a Swedish born electronic pop artist now based in Berlin. Since 2007 she has been creating a rich body of work including ten albums starting with These Things Take Time (2008) which yielded her first widely recognized single “Hey Moon” and covered by experimental electronic artist John Maus on his 2011 album We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves. The introspective sounds and luminous melodies with measured yet accented beats of Nilsson’s early work and her poetically illustrative lyrics brought to the songs a mystique that has endured throughout the songwriter’s career. Her embrace of a lo-fi aesthetic and organic noise in her songs also gives the music a sense of immediacy and intimacy that other artists at her level of accomplishment, development and influence might have chosen to edit out in pursuit of a kind of fictional purity. This core humanity to Nilsson’s work is one of its perhaps often unspoken appeal and it helps to ground some of the heady concepts she infuses into her lyrics. There is a political element in much of her music that explores concepts of power, our notions of identity and the foundation of what we aspire to achieve and do with our lives and how that is so often driven by the prevailing economic system controlled by the interests of elites until we learn to disentangle our dreams and psychology generally from the ongoing process of commodifying every aspect of our lives. This examination always seems to be carried out in a compassionate and imaginative way and never comes across in didactic fashion. Her 2022 album Extreme (out now on the artist’s own imprint Dark Skies Association) brings together Nilsson’s various impulses and instincts as a uniquely creative musician who imbues accessible pop songs with rich conceptual content that most directly yet not explicitly explores the place and role of power in the world and how it manifests in society and in our own consciousness and how we can challenge the less savory aspects of it in the world and in our own hearts. It’s a thematically deep record that works on the level of a poignant social critique and as pure pop songcraft. It is yet another chapter in Nilsson’s ever-evolving artistic journey and one worth taking in from beginning to end.
Listen to our interview with Molly Nilsson on Bandcamp, connect with the artist at the links below, check out a couple of the videos for songs from Extreme and perhaps see the artist live on our current US tour including the date in Denver, Colorado on Sunday, October 16, 2022 at Glob with Water on the Thirsty Ground and French Kettle Station.
Echosmith is a pop band that formed in 2009 in Chico, California. The former and current quartet are siblings Sydney, Noah, Graham and Jamie Sierota (Jamie having taken a break from the band from 2016-2022). Adopting the moniker when the group signed to Warner Bros. Records in 2012 (previously having performed under the name Ready Set Go!), Echosmith released its debut album Talking Dreams in 2013 which yielded the hit single “Cool Kids” about not really fitting in with the popular crowd but being comfortable with being different. Following the performance and touring cycle behind the debut album on a major label, Echosmith found itself saying yes to every opportunity to advance the band and listening to industry people in helping to further their career and that meant long term that there wasn’t enough time to write and develop new material aside from an occasional EP until the group took steps to do so in time to issue the sophomore album Lonely Generation in January 2020. With the onset of the pandemic and the enduring and continuing impacts on tour and thus supporting a new record Echosmith had time to reassess its priorities and reconnect with the ideas and inspirations that initially got the group off the ground into a serious project and during that process went with a more open approach to its songwriting as heard on new singles “Hang Around” and “Gelato” hinting at the new chapter of Echosmith’s creative development.
Recently “Cool Kids” garnered some renewed interest when it was used in TikTok videos by the likes of Demi Lovato, Drew Barrymore, Lindsay Lohan, Addison Rae and Hayley Kiyoko who felt the song expressed their own feelings about looking back and seeing how far they’ve come as people. The trend of utilizing the song has garnered more than six million views to date. Echosmith in response to that did a new version of the song with a new music video with “Cool Kids (our version)” (linked below).
Listen to our interview with Echosmith on Bandcamp, check out the videos for the new singles, connect with the group at the links provided and catch Echosmith live at The Marquis Theater in Denver on November 8, 2022. The national tour kicks off on October 14, 2022 in Atlanta at The Loft and the rest of the dates can be found on the Echosmith website linked below as well.
LDN Monos takes the sound of a ritualistic chant and places it in a swim of mechanistic beats and descending bell tones in the beginning of the single “Samsara.” And in the music video we see a swim team entering into their laps, plunging into the water and creating various circles individually and together with a fluid grace paralleled with the song itself which is structured in loops and a circular dynamic of its own. As the title suggests the Hindu/Buddhist concept of the cycle of death and rebirth as reflected in great works of art and music from that region and beyond can be heard in the music and in tandem with the visuals giving it a dimensional and conceptual meaning that into and expresses universal patterns of human behavior and cognition. LDN Monos obviously wouldn’t be the first person to harness this method of using music to convey layers of meaning, his own employment of sounds in crafting what might be considered a bit of an IDM track hits as playful and uplifting like an extended jingle with only benevolent intentions and root inspirations. Watch the video for “Samsara” on YouTube and connect with the UK-based producer LDN Monos on the LinkTree below.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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