The breezy guitar jangle of the opening of Easy Sleeper’s “Timekeeper” suggests the song may be about some nostalgic portrait of a poignant earlier time in life. But the guitar work is soon joined by vocals that seem a little strained and at points punctuating the chorus with shouted lines because the song is about the pressure time exerts on all our lives from the time we’re forced to be aware of it early in life to the way it regulates the existence of most of us, the conscious awareness and imposed adherence to time tables, from school, work, other obligations, social and otherwise, and in the last third of the song the guitar turns from beautiful and borderline pastoral to distorted and intense like the weight time weighs on us all. After all what could be more demented and destructive than imposing a time of your life at which you’re supposed to accomplish this or that or when you’re an artist the demand for inspiration and creative development as a product that can be reliably produced when so many of our actual timelines are idiosyncratic and not subject to the whims of a marketplace. The fact that the song goes from organic whimsy to anxiety-wracked angularity is a brilliant mirror of life from the childhood of most people to adulthood. There has to be a better way. Listen to “Timekeeper” on Spotify and follow Easy Sleeper at the links provided.
Tigercub is a rock band from Brighton, England that formed in 2011 by vocalist and guitarist Jamie Stephen Hall and drummer James Allix who met a university and joined by bassist Jimi Wheelright in 2012. From its earliest releases the trio has demonstrated a knack for crafting commanding hard rock with a cinematic sensibility that it has consistently evolved into a body of work that has expanded its range and variety of expression across now three albums including arguably its most fully realized work to date with 2023’s The Perfume of Decay. The group’s 2021 album As Blue as Indigo delved deep into themes of anxiety, depression, mortality and loss. The latest release found the band exploring the use of found tapes that Hall had been collecting from old Dictaphone machines found in thrift stores as a layer of atmosphere that served as almost a sonic canvass upon which its hard rocking sound could find a subtle context. It’s a subtle effect but for the keen listener there’s a certain something to the music on the record that lends it an emotional impact like a well chosen setting and time of year can add something unmistakable and compelling to a film.
For the new album some of the themes of the previous offering linger as emotional fallout and reflecting the kinds of experiences we all go through when we’ve been through a particularly traumatic period and have to return to going through the usual daily experiences with a different emotional lens having been changed by grief and existential turmoil. For the new record the group seems to have taken in the influence of early shoegaze and Can in terms of working out the underlying moods and atmospherics and challenging themselves to produce something another level of creative ambition with its arrangements. You can hear the impact of Queens of the Stone Age in its fluid use of heavy guitar and rhythms but in its perhaps not as obvious ear for the aesthetics of electronic music and in the structure of where the sounds sit in the mix one might compare Tigercub to Failure whose own fusion of hard rock, post-punk and the influence of cinematic sound design has yielded its own career of noteworthy records.
Tigercub is currently on tour with alternative rock legends Porno for Pyros for what is apparently it’s farewell shows and you can catch them at The Fillmore Auditorium in Denver, Colorado on Thursday, February 22, 2024, doors 7 p.m., show 8 p.m.. Listen to our interview with Jamie Stephen Hall on Bandcamp and follow Tigercub at the links below.
NYC-based singer and songwriter Vania teamed up with Spanish experimental electronic pop band Cravat for an utterly transporting and entrancing single “Only You.” The song is about a relationship that really isn’t so great for either person but in which there’s something to the bond even though it involves hurt feelings as the cost of staying together. Vania’s lilting vocals with a touch of processing sounds like a pop star from another world dancing in the unconventional rhythms crafted as tonal swells and drifts of percussive tone guided by a pulsing rhythm. It’s like a true fusion of chillwave, hyperpop and IDM and drawing on the sense of melancholic nostalgia of the first, the otherworldly structures of the second and the free association of aesthetics, sounds and technologies to craft beats borrowed from across decades baked into the third. Though the song is frank in its winking embrace of the elements of dysfunction that are part of many relationships that aren’t meant to last it celebrates the feelings that went into forming them. Listen to “Only You” on Spotify and follow Vania at the links provided.
“If Your Sky Should Fall” finds evrshde draping a measured, echoing beat in billowing tones and descending, gauzy tones. It’s a love song but invokes a more unconventional, nuanced and complicated understanding of what it means to actually relate to anyone who is sensitive and has struggled with the disappointments we all face, scarred a bit by emotional abuse and weary of potential mistreatment, guard up and hesitant to be involved—wary of needing to fulfill an idealized role that they can’t really consistently live up to. The pacing of the song is like a slow walk down a darkly foggy path with the music swelling up with incandescent flares of warmth and light periodically to light the way. And that’s the vibe of the song in general, gentle, unobtrusive but reassuring. Fans of HTRK and the more enigmatic and ambient end of Enya will appreciate the song’s soundscapes. Listen to “If Your Sky Should Fall” on Spotify and follow evrshde at the links below.
The Children… is a musical project from New York City comprising core trio Michael Wiener, Jim Coleman and Phil Puleo. In the most recent live shows, John Nowlin and Rock Savage have handled bass and drums respectively, and Kirsten McCord has provided somber phrasing on cello. The group has operated almost like an art rock jazz ensemble, with various other collaborators live and in recording sessions, including legendary avant-garde vocalist and performance artist Shelley Hirsch, former Swans guitarist Norman Westberg and clarinetist Johnny Gasper. Vocalist Michael Wiener is an actor, writer, curator and educator whose career in music, theater, film and beyond is richly diverse, and worth a deep exploration. Jim Coleman many may know from his time in influential industrial noise rock group Cop Shoot Cop, as well as the like-minded supergroup Human Impact. Phil Puleo is a composer and visual artist who also had an extended tenure in Cop Shoot Cop, and a long-running, still continuing stint in Swans. Quite the pedigree, which wouldn’t necessarily guarantee genuinely compelling and interesting music. But despite a name that resists discovery through a search engine online, once you’ve found the group’s music, you will be rewarded with some of the most densely orchestrated, ambitious and cinematic art rock being made in recent years.
The group’s forthcoming album, A Sudden Craving (due out on or around March 8, 2024 via Erototox Decodings), is like an industrial jazz, nightmarish exploration of generational trauma, and the ambient flow of those energies underlying the fractured and convulsed psyche of modern American culture. The imaginative arrangements and sonic intensity of the music are reminiscent of early 70s English art folk like Robert Wyatt and Soft Machine or John Martyn, but in a sort of jazz fusion manifestation more akin to the likes of Can and Japanese psychedelic rock of that same decade. It’s just difficult to know where it’s coming from, and yet there is an emotional immediacy that draws you into the music. It has a cinematic aspect in its storytelling that seems to tap into collective mythology, the way the more daring filmmakers of the 1970s mixed not just styles and themes with art concepts, but with music, in a fusion of aesthetics. One hears echoes of Eno’s 70s post-Roxy Music rock albums, and how alien yet accessible they were, or 80s Tom Waits, and his mutant blues and jazz pop storytelling that aims at more than then current popular styles of music. More contemporaneously, it should appeal to fans of the current spate of harrowing but transcendent Swans records, or those of Los Angeles-based post-punk art phenoms Sprain. It is a music that is out of time and timeless. The band calls its music “gothic blues ambient,” which is a succinct summary of what you’re in for when you listen to the album, and, one would hope, if you are fortunate enough to catch a manifestation of the songs live.
Listen to our interview with Michael Wiener and Jim Coleman on Bandcamp and follow the members of the band at the links below. Also linked is the Erototox Decodings label and the Bandcamp link to the album.
Mary Middlefield’s live performance video for “Heart’s Desire” lends a more grounded and human face to its dark story of a young woman and her interactions with an older man who abuses his position of relative authority. The intricate guitar work and orchestral arrangements and Middlefield’s vulnerable vocals for most of the song gives it a quality that one might expect out of a sort of indie folk inflected dream pop song but the lyrics reveal a lot about a warped interpersonal dynamic that doesn’t lead to healthy places. In the video Middlefield looks like she’s re-living some of these harrowing experiences without being explicit in the sordid details. It’s a conventionally beautiful song in its arrangements and lively rhythms and flow of melody. But there’s a surprise for everyone that watches to the end because the lyrics end in a different way than the studio version that’s readily available and Middlefield sings in the end, screaming with her entire being and arching backward with the force of emotion, “You grow old and I’ll watch you die” and repeating the line. But it’s not dark so much as cathartic for everyone who has been in a situation like the kind she outlines in the song and for far too many young women it isn’t uncommon. Watch the video for “Heart’s Desire” on YouTube and follow the Swedish singer-songwriter at the links below.
Beans is back with his bravura display of verbal mastery in “ZWAARD 1,” the opening salvo for his forthcoming album ZWAARD (out March 15, 2024 via his own imprint Tyger Rawwk Rcrds). This time out the rapper worked with Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti aka Vladislav Delay. The song is the first of fourteen tracks with the same title followed by the corresponding track number. Beans seems to be exploring the current state of hip-hop and his own struggles and coming to terms with his own mortality while still being caught up in pushing his art forward. The rapid-fire flow of poetry while hyperkinetic percussion and splashes of melodic keyboards looped set a nervy urgency pulls us along in the wake of Beans’ headlong pace as he makes observations about how things are and despite how the song has that irresistible forward momentum the rapper sounds like he’s taking it easy and provides a model for keeping an even keel even when you are operating in a world and an environment that seems in a hurry. He maintains an artful grace in the face of an accelerated culture. Listen to “ZWAARD 1” on YouTube and follow the former member of legendary hip-hop crew Antipop Consortium Beans at the links below.
The softly percussive atmospheric sounds at the beginning of “My Far Away Femme” by Sivan Levy is so hushed and ethereal it’s ghostly in its presence but seems to transform into vivid piano tones that ripple like droplets in a pool of water as the tipping off point for the singer’s vocals. At around the halfway point there is a string chord progression that turns as though processed through a phaser conveying a sense of desolation so complete so efficiently it’s gently heartbreaking. Washes of white noise in the distance like a ferocious coastal wind give the song a deeply haunted quality that truly enhances the lyrics that might be despairing words to a loved one or to oneself about how it’s easy to fall in love with the ideal of someone at a distance when that image isn’t reality and those feelings built on a foundation of nothing. “Your fantasy does not exist,” Levy sings to sum up the actual reality of the situation and sometimes the truth hurts even when surrounded with gossamer flows of sound and a soft delivery as Levy offers here. The song is a sort of art dream pop with an ear for layers of ambient soundscapes that feel like one is stripping away layers of wishful thinking. Listen to “My Far Away Femme” on Spotify and follow Sivan Levy at the links below. Levy’s latest EP side:w released on February 4, 2024.
Gabbarein is a project of Cecile Hafstad, a Norwegian vocalist and sound healer, and American composer-producer Christopher Bono. The duo recorded its self-titled debut album due out April 5, 2024 on a fjord within the Arctic Circle in northern Norway. Whether or not that adds an ineffable mystique or energy to the sounds captured for the songs the lead single “Ra Rising Sun” with the video produced and directed by Ragnarok Film (filmed near Trondheim, Norway at various sites including Trollkirka aka Troll Church) it looks and sounds like something from the Eddas. Hafstad sings and chants in a language that she’s “channeling” meaning they’re all sounds that made sense with the music and with the moods and meanings going into the music. We see a woman singing in a cave near a waterfall and a mother and child playing in a forest and enjoying the morning sun and the soft moss and other greenery. The aforementioned woman is presumably Hafstad with Bono playing what look like traditional drums and striking archaic looking instruments that one imagines are supposed to create the thrumming drone that runs through much of the song and the rest the organic percussion and kalimba that convey a sense of delicacy and mystery. In the video it looks like a trio of figures are performing a mystery ritual in the aforementioned forest in black robes and one figure wearing antlers, later all in white at dusk on the beach. Altogether between the visuals and the meditative music one gets a sense of getting a peak into ancestral memory of culture as it emerged from a time of the creation of myths. Watch the video for “Ra Rising Sun” on YouTube and connect with Gabbarein at the links provided.
Composer Tommy Simpson is releasing the song “Reassembling the Self” as a single under his experimental electronic moniker of Macro/micro. The track was originally written as part of the score to a forthcoming science fiction short film called R.A.E.R. BETA 0027 about, according to the film’s tagline, “a woman struggling to overcome a traumatic loss” who “seeks out help from a tech developer with a device that promises to accelerate the emotional healing process.” The beat-driven track works separate from that context as a song with a melancholic tonal echo of a melody that resonates in the near distance while a gentle industrial beat traces what feels like a process suggested by the title. Knowing some of the plot of the film only helps to hear in the song the kind of grace, patience and care one needs to exercise when you feel like you’ve come apart a little or more than a little and you want to get yourself on a better footing and often that takes some meticulous and steady effort without rushing yourself like you’re a mass manufactured product. Maybe some guided work can feel like you’re re-engineering your psyche some and that can help the process of coming back into yourself go more quickly. It’s a short song but it hits like a nuanced and extended emotional mantra that helps you to wrangle up some of the rough edges and put them back into place. Not a meditation so much as a set of sounds that keeps you on a track to center yourself as you ease yourself into a better place. Listen to “Reassembling the Self” on Spotify where you can hear the rest of Simpson’s deeply evocative score to the film and follow Micro/macro at the links below.
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