Lynn Drury is a singer-songwriter based out of New Orleans whose own style of music she has dubbed “NOLA-Americana” reflects the rich melange of musical styles and traditions of the city. Drury hails from Yazoo City, Mississippi and earlier in her life she was a pole bending champ winning a 4-H competition at the age of five. Music didn’t become her life the way it is now until she picked up the guitar at 26 and immersed herself in the scenery and culture of New Orleans and cultivating her own voice and style that weaves together strands of country, folk, jazz, R&B and pop. Her new record High Tide finds the songwriter exploring themes of time, cycles of life, our patterns of living and reflecting on where we’ve been and where we’re going and appreciating the present. Musically Drury stretches out her sound palette even more without sacrificing the vividly homespun quality of the songwriting and the immediacy of her performances. Though the official release date for the album is as yet to be announced the album release party is scheduled for April 13, 2024 at Maple Leaf, NOLA.
Listen to our interview with Lynn Drury on Bandcamp and follow Drury at the links below.
Bex Marshall is a blues musician from the UK who started making a name for herself internationally with the release of her 2008 debut album Kitchen Table. But by then Bex was already a veteran having worked as a croupier at 18 and traveling around the world working gaming tables on cruise lines and illegal poker games in Amsterdam. She spent a good deal of time in Australia and often hitch hiking on cattle trains and otherwise added to her life experiences for her songwriting. Marshall started playing guitar at 11 and since then has honed her craft and her prowess as a blues musician is obvious from her records and her fiery live performances with a commanding voice that got her invited to serve as the “Janis” by Sam Andrews, the original guitarist of Big Brother and the Holding Company, on their 2014 European Tour. Marshall’s musicianship and songwriting while rooted in the blues transcends the category with the creativity of her craft and one of her main inspirations is the late, great, rock and R&B singer Tina Turner. Until now, Marshall’s most recent album was 2012’s The House of Mercy. A rigorous touring schedule, the 2017 loss of her husband and executive producer Barry Marshall-Everitt and of course the 2020 pandemic and its fallout stretched the timelines for many artists. But on March 1, 2024, Marshall will release her new record Fortuna via Dixie Frog. The new album is a showcase for Marshall’s passionate performances and masterful musicianship as well as her keen ear for imaginative arrangements in a musical style that can sometimes seem fairly narrowly traditional.
Listen to our interview with Bex Marshall on Bandcamp and follow her at the links below including the pre-save link for the new album.
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.
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.
This episode of Queen City Sounds Podcast is a kind of reverse interview or rather an interview Eddie Durkin of DIY Venues Incorporated conducted with me, Tom Murphy, about how I got into the DIY music world and ideas, issues, concepts around DIY as well as some of the most memorable shows I’ve seen at DIY spaces. My own involvement in DIY music and art as most people know it began when I was in my late 20s and going to see a bunch of bands I had gotten into after most of a lifetime of not going to see live music and when you’re not just into mainstream music that leads you at some point into seeing bands that are part of the real underground. And so in October 1998 I went to go see Sleater-Kinney for their first tour through Colorado and my first time seeing a show in Boulder at the Fox Theatre. Opening were two bands comprised of mostly or entirely of women. One was The Pauline Heresy (two members of which went on to be in the great post-punk/post-hardcore band Sin Desires Marie) and Rainbow Sugar, a hip-hop/alternative rock band who I would go on to see often for a few years leading me to my first experiences with DIY adjacent spaces, dive bars for shows and of course the first DIY space I would visit in Monkey Mania Vol. 2 located in the now more upscale Baker neighborhood. This interview goes into some detail about that story and others. Durkin is a member of the rock band Lazarus Horse and has a long running history with the DIY music and art world himself going back to his teenage years and he started the DIY Venues Incorporated blog to document the experiences of members of his community. Portions of this interview and a second part will appear at a later date on the DIY Venues Incorporated blog.
Listen to the interview on Bandcamp and follow DIY Venues Incorporated at the links below.
Brian Polk has been a fixture of Denver’s local music and literature scene since the 90s. From early punk bands to current projects like the politically-charged art punk bands Joy Subtraction and Elegant Everyone to the deeply personal and sharply humorous, long-running ‘zine The Yellow Rake, the defunct but culturally significant magazine Suspect Press and his fiction (including novels Turning Failure Into Ideology (2007) and Placement of Character (2017)) , Polk has brought a level of craft and intellect to the local scene that frankly we could stand to see more of around the Mile High City. In 2023 Polk released his latest book a bit of a memoir of his time going to see music and becoming involved in the punk subculture called A Lifetime of Ephemera: 25 Years in Punk Told Through Ticket Stubs, Flyers & Memorabilia. It’s an engaging document of Polk’s becoming immersed in punk as related through anecdotes about live show’s he has attended with ticket stubs as they were available, flyers and other memorabilia linking the shared memories to a physical link to the event itself. It was an inherently great idea for a memoir and Polk simply put the work in and present it in a highly accessible manner with insightful commentary about the significance of punk in his life even beyond the music and a subculture in which he could become involved at young age. Perhaps especially significant is Polk’s documentation of the local music scene and venues and the experience of being in a place like Denver and of a time that isn’t otherwise well covered in any other source in one place. In some ways it picks up where Bob Rob Medina’s important 2019 book Colorado Crew: Denvoid Part 2 – A Collection of Tales & Images from The Colorado Punk Scene 1988-1996, his sequel to the also crucial 2015 book Denvoid and the Cowtown Punks: A Collection of Stories From the ’80s Denver Punk Scene. Polk connects the line from that era of the local punk scene to the current era, filling in a critical gap in the narrative of Denver’s underground music scene in a form and style that’s accessible and illuminating.
Lunar Tunes is the the collaborative musical project from Felix Fast4ward (also Felix Ayodele) and Grant Blakeslee (MYTHirst and Skyfloor). The two musicians have been a staple of the local experimental music scene with music that blurs the boundaries between dance music, ambient, indie rock, folk and hip-hop. In both their individual projects and this collaboration, Felix and Grant utilize a spectrum of electronic instruments and those more analog for a hybrid style of performance and production that yielded a half dozen songs on the recent Pieces of Advice EP that are like the more playful and uplifting end of IDM. In moments songs hit like what chillwave might have evolved into had its primary songwriters been more steeped in jazz and avant-electronica. The songs are emotional expansive with even the hint of heaviness eased out of melodies and tonal choices that might be melancholic in the hands of other songwriters. The attention to percussion, rhythm and textural elements is impressive and reminiscent of more experimental hip-hop producers and IDM sound architects alike. Altogether it’s a testament to how the two musicians complement each other well with their individual sensibilities and musical skill sets. It’s an eclectic yet unified and coherent aesthetic of forward thinking, dance adjacent electronic music that is a hallmark to a monthly event Alphabeat Soup that Blakeslee helps curate the second Thursday of the month at The Black Box in Denver, Colorado.
Listen to our interview with Lunar Tunes on Bandcamp and follow the Felix Fast4ward and Grant Blakeslee at the links below. Also linked is the YouTube playlist for Pieces of Advice.
Fire Motel is the songwriting project of multi-instrumentalist and singer Ilya Litoshik. The latter was born in Belarus but his family moved to upstate New York in 1991 when he was a young child. During a stint in the music program at a college in Schenectady, New York his parents moved to Round Rock, Texas and Litoshik ended up dropping out of school but before then a friend that had moved to Denver told him that the city had an up and coming music scene. Spending some time in Round Rock and finding nothing to keep him there the fledgling songwriter with $400 to his name relocated to the Mile High City around 2008. And though he spent his earliest days in Denver crashing on couches and sleeping in basements, Litoshik also fell in with a group of creatives including an art collective called The WPA Collective where he met Bryon Parker and other musicians who were making the Denver underground vibrant at that time.
Over the next several years Litoshik became involved in various projects including Adam Adam with Parker and Corey English. But perhaps the most enduring and popular of Litoshik’s bands until recently was Turvy Organ which ran through much of the 2010s and perhaps prophetically released its final single “Cold Water” on March 13, 2020 as the pandemic lockdowns ended live music and in many cases bands during the course of the subsequent year and a half. In the core of that band’s songwriting you can hear the strains of what Litoshik would do with his next project Fire Motel. Fans of Modest Mouse, Deathcab For Cutie and The National might have found something to really dig into with the excellent Turvy Organ. Early Fire Motel felt more stripped down than that but of course with sophisticated songs and Litoshik’s earnest and unpretentious performance style. However, in the years leading up to the pandemic and certainly after venues started opening again something had changed drastically in Denver in ways that have made it challenging for bands and anyone related to the music industry to develop and thrive. Litoshik felt this deeply and painfully so thinking about places where he might be able to flourish more fully so he moved to New York City in the spring of 2023 to connect with the creative energy of that city where there is always something going on and where a creative community has found a place to grow and be supported by what NYC has to offer in terms of opportunities and cultural infrastructure for decades.
Prior to his move, Litoshik had been working on his next set of songs for release and finally completed the recording and production of The World an Opera for release on October 1, 2023. Litoshik wrote the album, recorded it in his New York residence, mixed the songs and did the other production with mastering by Carmine Francis. Contributing vocals on the album is Alli Walz. You can hear echos of Litoshik’s various influences in the music but the new record combines the more analog musicianship with a kind of sound design and electronic production element for a sound that is deeply evocative and firmly establishes the songwriter as an artist who knows how to articulate a sense of wonder and poetically express the source of our modern anxieties while offering insightful portraits of life that anyone that has been living in the USA in recent years would recognize.
Kissing Party is the self-styled “slop pop” band from Denver that formed during the heyday of the wave of indie rock that came to prominence in the mid-to-late 2000s. The band’s sound early on and even to the current moment might be considered in the realm of twee pop except the group has had two guitarists for years but whose interplay has meant lush and delicate melodies that compliment the gentle exuberance of the songwriting and passionate live shows. What is “Slop Pop”? According to the band’s bio it’s “a perfectly blended chaos of dream pop, shoegaze & beach goth. But fans of Belle & Sebastian, Sarah Records and C86 bands and Denver indiepop from the 90s will find Kissing Party’s earnest sentiments, refreshingly and completely lacking in irony, and exquisitely crafted melodies much to their liking.
Several releases over nearly two decades has proven Kissing Party adept at creating deceptively simple songs about love and life that offer genuine insight without coming off corny or insincere. Sure there is some humor on stage and you might catch a show that’s loose around the edges but the charm is in the humanity of the music and its presentation while taking care to give listeners accessible songs of substance. The latest album Graceless released on November 17 via the band’s own label BbyV Records and available for digital download and streaming. It is a particularly focused and emotionally wide-ranging record from the band yet still retains a freshness of spirit that has been a hallmark of its previous recorded output and sustained song to song with a sense that the whole album is an emotional journey rather than a collection of resonant pop songs. It feels like a creative next step for a group that has been consistent in quality throughout its career thus far. For those interested the band’s generous back catalog is still available and in a handful of cases on a physical format, each worth a listen and all of which has aged well because Kissing Party seems to tap into timeless themes and aesthetics.
Listen to our interview with band founder, primary songwriter, guitarist and vocalist Gregg Dolan on Bandcamp and follow Kissing Party at the links below along with a few music videos for the new album.
This isn’t a definitive list of the best music that came out in 2023 but just a selection of some of the best that seemed to stand out for Brian Tallman and myself (Tom Murphy). I already chimed in heavily on my Birdy column and will eventually publish my extended year end best albums list in the coming weeks. Tallman is someone I met when I would work out of coffee shops when I was still freelancing for Westword and getting Queen City Sounds and Art off the ground and he seemed very aware of newer music for someone close to my age and had seen plenty of shows going back to the 80s and worked at record store in NYC in the 90s and 2000s. We both went to college in Illinois around the same time, him at Northwestern in Chicago and me at Knox College in rural Galesburg and have a shared cultural background in underground and popular music. We began work on a podcast in 2022 that hasn’t yet seen the light of day discussing music scenes and albums and shows so I thought this year to ask him about a top list of albums and songs for 2023 and shows because he’s been living in other parts of the country and traveling to see shows across America and I’ve been only seeing shows in Colorado but as an active music journalist I’ve been able to see more than most people. Oh yeah, the Sex Swing record is a live album but its versions of previously released material is fantastic. Hopefully you find something of interest in our discussion and maybe discover artists you might not otherwise have known about or whose work you have heard of but have yet to explore. Listen to the discussion on Bandcamp and below I will include playlists for the albums, songs and music by artists at the shows covered.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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