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Dream Of Industry Sketches a Vivid Span of Late Night Introspection of Energetically Brooding Post-Punk Single “The Start”

Dream Of Industry, photo courtesy the artists

Dream Of Industry really traces the mood ahead with the intro to “The Start” with a driving rhythm and guitar notes hitting various corners of a melody that develops across the rest of the song. Like a Chameleons song the song reveals itself in dashes of mood and sketches of tone with the musicians giving up pieces of the song, hints of a theme. A melodic bassline pushes the song as guitars layer over its foundation with the drums and vocals haunt the song like a person walking along dark alleys in search of meaning through introspective couplets and coming up with more questions at the song’s all too soon conclusion. The Denver-based band recently went on indefinite hiatus as its core membership moved to other parts of the country but its Candidates EP from which the song is drawn offers some of the more refreshingly tonally rich post-punk in an environment when there’s too much sonically thin guitar work and cookie cutter songwriting. Dream of Industry not only learned from forebears like the aforementioned Chameleons and The Cure and Clan of Xymox but especially live had established itself as a band of uncommon musical presence. Listen to “The Start” on Spotify and follow Dream Of Industry on Bandcamp.

Lily Taylor Excavates the Strands of Human Connections on the Ambient Pop Single “Kepler Wells”

Lily Taylor seems to be floating in a technicolor otherworldly dimension in the video for “Kepler Wells.” The vertical hold is glitching and stretching the image and iterations of that image echo and overlap. Like a transmission from another time that has degraded in a way that’s visually creative and eerie. The slow beat and background melodic drone interspersed with bell tones and a spare keyboard melody while the vocals tell a story seemingly out of a journal examining failures of communication and how relationships evolve in ways we’ve never planned or predicted only to realize that they have outpaced our understanding of them and their utility to us. But memories remain to anchor us to moments in our lives and the people prominent at that time. The song feels very introspective and intimate and has to come from a vulnerable and personal place. And yet there is an air of a time traveler to the story who is able to step back from the contexts described like the narrator of a truly unusual Ray Bradbury short story and the air of mystery and timelessness those stories often conveyed about the human condition without receding into an abstraction of experience. Watch the video for “Kepler Wells” on YouTube and follow Lily Taylor at the links below. The song is from the latest album from Taylor called Amphora which released on July 21, 2023 via digital, vinyl and cassette formats.

Lily Taylor on TikTok

Lily Taylor on Facebook

Lily Taylor on Twitter

Lily Taylor on Bandcamp

Lily Taylor on Instagram

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Sloome Combines the Heady With the Introspective on the Shoegaze/Indiepop Single “Wonderful Nice”

Sloome begins the title track to it’s latest EP Wonderful Nice with a sweeping drive and jangly guitar. But the song goes off this course in unexpected ways with a slowdown and wind back up to full flight. Like the song is breaking down periodically and losing momentum. But inside these cracks in conventional structure give the song some room to breathe and to shift tone from the urgent to the reflective and in the end reconciling these impulses as the guitar tones soar and shimmer, warping like a structure getting misshapen in the heat of the headlong passages. The relatively lo-fi production lends the song the feel of something recorded in another era weaving together the delicacy of a C86 dream pop band and a more modern shoegaze/art pop band like Wombo or Blushing. At least fans of those things will appreciate the way Sloome seems to effortlessly incorporate strands of influence and creative impulse on this song and the rest of the EP. Listen to “Wonderful Nice” on Spotify and follow Sloome from Modesto, California on Instagram.

Sonny & the Sunsets Yearn to Be Whisked Away by a UFO From This Terrible Moment in Human History on the Charming Indiepop Single “Waiting”

Sonny and the Sunsets, photo by Sarah Moore

Sonny & the Sunsets has certainly written one of the most charming and spare pop anthems of the current period of human society with “Waiting.” Few frills, just a repeated jangle guitar melody, some hovering, very basic, classic keyboard tone that one might associate with garage rock but more like something The Kinks might have done if they were a twee pop band recording demos and emerged in the early 90s. More like the 90s indiepop bands the Davies brothers and company influenced out of the Elephant 6 collective and associated scenes. Sonny Smith sings about waiting for someone to come and sewing an outfit while in bed for the inevitable trip away from all this paradoxical chaos, stasis and peril of the pandemic era. He sings of having an outer space radio and waiting upon “my UFO” to take him away after the manner of the Calgon commercials of the 70s and 80s minus the consumerist angle. The song isn’t complicated, intricate, it is all but unadorned and that’s what makes it so effective and why it stays with you. Listen to “Waiting” on YouTube and follow Sonny & the Sunsets at the links provided. Look for the new album Self Awareness Through Macrame due out August 25.

Sonny and the Sunsets on Facebook

Sonny and the Sunsets on Bandcamp

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Queen City Sounds Podcast S3E18: Shamarr Allen

Shamarr Allen has been a professional musician in his hometown of New Orleans since he was a teenage member of Rebirth Brass Band. Allen grew up playing trumpet in a musical family and steeped in the rich and diverse musical traditions and legacies of the city as reflected across his varied and active career. Allen has cited Willie Nelson as his favorite songwriter and Prince, Pharrell Williams, Stevie Wonder and Quincy Jones as influences. Allen calls his style “bridge music” because it brings together a variety of sounds and musical leanings. He has collaborated with Harry Connick, Patti LaBelle, Lenny Kravitz, Willie Nelson, Big Freedia and Galactic. In 2009 he released his debut solo album and performed the National Anthem for President Barack Obama in New Orleans which lead to an invitation to play at the Governor’s Ball at the White House and serving as a musical/cultural ambassador for the United States to Brazil, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Congo. In 2020 Allen established Trumpet Is My Weapon, a gun exchange program following the death of a nine-year-old and the wonding of two other children in a shooting in New Orleans. In 2023 Allen released his latest album True Orleans 2 (due August 18, 2023), a sonically inventive set of songs that is at times reminiscent of a great southern hip-hop album but one informed by pop songcraft, R&B, soul and jazz and long on wit and sharp social observation.

Listen to our interview with Allen on Bandcamp and follow the master musician at the links below. Shamarr Allen is currently on wide-ranging national tour with a stop to perform at Dazzle in Denver, Colorado on Wednesday, August 16, 2023.

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Shamarr Allen on Instagram

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Shamarr Allen on YouTube

Queen City Sounds Podcast S3E17: Everything Is Terrible!

Everything Is Terrible!, photo by Jim Newberry

Since 2007 Everything Is Terrible! has mined the detritus of media cultural artifacts from thrift stores, garage sales and the like in the form of VHS tapes and in more recent years some streaming video for content to recontextualize clips of the most absurd and awful videos into informative and hilariously disturbing new forms. EIT helped to propel trash media culture into the mainstream of meme-making with its now nine found footage documentaries that shine a light on what our culture has produced and often decided to forget the way it does the rest of disposable media that reveals often uncomfortable truths about the submerged aspirations and dreams of our collective, modern civilization. Since 2009 the artist collective has toured with screenings of its films and have incorporated a puppet variety show and music to add just that special little layer of the surreal and weird to enhance the viewing experience of the people that show up. Perhaps the collective’s most infamous project is its goal of collecting thousands of VHS copies of the 1996 film Jerry Maguire with the goal of building a pyramid from the tapes in the desert. As of May 2023, the collection has reached 40,000+ copies and counting. In 2022 EIT released perhaps its greatest and most coherent creation to date, Kidz Klub! The film draws on the sheer dreck of the most misguided and misconceived television and home video programming made for children designed to educate and in many cases indoctrinate the nation’s youth. Even a casual viewing of the movie reveals recurring themes that edited together seem to be a continuous narrative with a touch of hypnotic reputation. For this iteration of the collective’s creative output the soundtrack pulled both from the original source material and original composition establishes the perfect air of the hyper real and otherworldly at once. In the live setting the movie is split up into roughly 5-10 minute sections interspersed with the puppet show and dance and song routines giving it the air of a psychedelic variety show in real time. It’s the kind of thing no one was asking for but which we all needed as a dose of sanity in a world in which we are increasingly bombarded with random content disconnected from the endless stream that is life itself.

Listen to our interview with Commodore Gilgamesh on Bandcamp and for more information on Everything Is Terrible!, to purchase merch and copies of the videos, and for information on live performances, please visit everythingisterrible.com. EIT is currently on tour now with a stop at Meow Wolf Convergence Station in Denver on August 15, 2023 and for tickets click this link.

FiRES WERE SHOT Channel the Ghosts of Urban Decay Past on Ambient Drone Composition “Sleeping Land”

FiRES WERE SHOT, photo courtesy the artists

“Sleeping Land” by FiRES WERE SHOT begins with the faint sounds of children at play like an enigmatic reel-to-reel recording found on a machine acquired at a thrift store. No date, no identifying information, simple the raw audio and the question mark hanging there as to why someone would make such a recording with limited fidelity. But then the song drifts into a flowing drone of bright sound sitting in a fog bank of white noise. A faint pulse of the remains of a melody looped like another fragment tape of a recording from the dregs of a public emergency broadcast signal. The effect as the title suggests are like the dreams of a neglected phase of human occupied territory over which our current environs were built and the song is something like urban exploration through the ambient spirits of that place not so long ago rendered irrelevant by a superficial sense of progress and an unrelenting need to redevelop and transform every bit of earth into something of use to the current economic mode of operation where something not turning out a profit is considered a waste. The rest of the Siberia EP, which FiRES WERE SHOT released on June 23, 2023, has a similar vibe but different specific flavors of real time, sonic, urban archaeology. Listen to “Sleeping Land” and follow FiRES WERE SHOT at the links below.

FiRES WERE SHOT on YouTube

K.ZIA Sagely Applies the Principles of the Japanese Art of “Golden Repair” to the Human Psychology on Alternative R&B Pop Song “Kintsugi Heart”

When K.ZIA looks over a photo booth strip at pictures of a better time in a certain relationship in the video for “Kintsugi Heart” one might expect that a story of agonized heartbreak is ahead in dramatic musical fashion. But instead there are delicate string melodies, soulful vocals treated to warp in moments to sound like a memory transforming and passing out of active, conscious memory and a beat that is like a heartbeat combined with the kinds of rhythms you keep with your hands and feet in their organic and informal way though seemingly programmed. The lyrics take on a much more original metaphor for mending a broken heart with the image of “kintsugi” or “golden repair,” the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted/mixed with powdered precious metals like gold, silver or platinum. It is a practice that embraces imperfection and flaws and finding value in the new form. K.ZIA takes this concept and humanizes it and in the video shows her own methods and practices for reassembling her own heart and psychology in a way that honors her experience and resilience as a person who learns from her experiences rather than brushes them aside like even an unpleasant experience never touched her, rather folding those changes into her life in a way that enriches the story of her life. It is a quietly thoughtful, elegant and thoroughly effective expression of a different way of thinking and dealing with grief, loss and heartache and one that is more creative cast as a pop song that itself expands what pop songcraft can be. Watch the video for “Kintsugi Heart” on YouTube and follow the Belgian songwriter now based on Berlin at the links below.

K.ZIA on Facebook

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Queen City Sounds Podcast S3E16: BIG|BRAVE

BIG|BRAVE is an experimental music trio based in Montreal, Québec, Canada. Formed in 2012 the group has taken the approach of utilizing instruments on hand to craft sounds and explore musical expressions that suited a style of musical storytelling that is widely dynamic with a tranquil center. Its early forays into minimalist folk and ambient music transformed as the group of necessity adopted new equipment in the making of its sounds resulting in a blend of high and low volume that served its core of vulnerable minimalism. During the course of the band’s existence it has been embraced by a wider heavy music community and its songwriting often considered within the realm of doom when its performances and compositions don’t fit neatly into a specific genre even the large umbrella of post-rock though fans of both of those styles will find much to appreciate about BIG|BRAVE’s output. In 2021 the group released a collaborative album with The Body, a duo often associated as well with doom and extreme metal generally but whose own musical roots are broader as well, called Leaving None But Small Birds, an eclectic work of experimental folk music that probably no one outside of the bands would have expected coming out of a collective work. In 2023 BIG|BRAVE released nature morte, a collection of six songs that seem to have the quality of folkloric tales about the perilous and precarious state of the world around us, “the consequences of trauma” and interconnected themes of “the subjugation of femininity in all its pluralities.” It is a challenging record but not one without an element of catharsis and the beauty of stark truths manifested in creative expression.

Listen to our interview with Robin Wattie and Matthieu Ball of BIG|BRAVE on Bandcamp and go see the trio at Ghost Canyon Fest in Denver at the Hi-Dive on Sunday, August 13, 2023. Ball also performs a solo set the afternoon prior on August 12 at Mutiny Information Café for the matinee section of the festival. For more information on BIG|BRAVE please visit bigbrave.ca.

Queen City Sounds Podcast S3E15: Many Blessings

Many Blessings in 2021, photo by Tom Murphy

Many Blessings is the long-running, solo noise project of Ethan McCarthy. The latter is perhaps best known to the world outside of Denver as the vocalist and guitarist of extreme metal band Primitive Man. But McCarthy has long been one of the pivotal figures in Denver underground going back a couple of decades. He first came to prominence as a member of grindcore outfit Clinging to the Trees of a Forest Fire and he ran the DIY space that was the downtown location of Monkey Mania that transitioned into Kingdom of Doom under his stewardship. McCarthy has always exerted a benevolent influence in the Denver scene as someone who hosts shows, books events and as an ambassador within and beyond the Mile High City who not only ran Kingdom of Doom but spaces like Funhouse and Aqualung’s Community Music Space in addition to booking shows at Blast-O-Mat before it turned into Seventh Circle Music Collective. His musical output has bridged the worlds of metal, noise and experimental music of various kinds including one-off noise projects, death doom bands Vermin Womb, Death of Self and Keep. Many Blessings represents an evolution of McCarthy’s exploration of a more harsh noise end of that musical leaning with processed vocals and electronic components that allow him an outlet of self-expression not dependent on anyone else’s input or timeline or availability. It is also his most prolific musical endeavor to date with dozens of releases. In contrast to his more ambient solo noise concern Spiritual Poison, Many Blessings has gritty texture and a darkly cathartic reflection of the brutal and ugly aspects of our civilization. McCarthy has also made a bit of a name for himself as a visual artist and these days releasing that work through his Hell Simulation moniker with his evocative creations gracing flyers, album art, tour posters and more.

Listen to our interview with Ethan McCarthy of Many Blessings on Bandcamp and catch him live at Ghost Canyon Fest this weekend at the matinee show at Mutiny Information Café on Saturday, August 12, 2023. Many Blessings also tours internationally so there’s a good chance you’ll be able to catch a performance sometime down the line if you’re not able to make it to Denver for the fest. For more information on McCarthy and his visual art and other projects the best portal of contact is likely via hellsimulation.com.