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Lily Mae Harrington Channels the Righteous Angst of Her Inner Psychedelic Alanis Morrissette on the Spirited Single “Salty”

Lily Mae Harrington, photo courtesy the artist

Lily Mae Harrington leans into her “psychedelic Alanis Morrissette side” on “Salty.” The spirited, punk-y pop song relates a tale of an ex who conveniently has a new lover so soon after the breakup that he’s showing off on his Instagram account including photos with his family. She’s wearing Harrington’s shirt that he stole too. The lame indignities are a dozen and more with this guy. But Harrington gets graphic about how they met and how he’s up to the same moves with his new girlfriend that he did with Harrington because of course he is. Typical. Harrington’s line “And I’m mad that you’re happy” is delivered with such cathartic zeal even in the end when she near whispers it just owns the anger and outrage while letting it go at least a little. Many of us have been there and Harrington gives a righteous fury and infectious melody to those heated emotions. Watch the video for “Salty” on YouTube and follow Lily Mae Harrington at the links provided. Her 2023 EP The Sun is My Lover is out now.

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Moth Traps’ “Damaged Utensils” is a Warped Synth Pop Song For Fans of The Residents

“Damaged Utensils” begins with sounds like cars racing by on a nearby speedway. But Moth Traps has something much stranger in store for us as the soundscape transitions to what might be described as a synth pop song that mutates outside expected melodic shapes and rhythms. The vocals are mix of those that sound slightly slowed own and those that sound sped up like something one might hear on one of those strange albums The Residents were doing throughout the 90s and early 2000s. And the lyrics are also similarly surreal that make sense taken on their own logic. After all what is one to make of a chorus like “In this house we eat with damaged utensils/Always when we die now we use broken crockery”? That’s an interpretation best left to the individual listener given the rest of the lyrics but all arrows seem to point to a commentary on freeing oneself of the limits of preconceived notions of our cognitive framing of the world around us. It’s a bizarre song but one that is indisputably catchy and will strangely get stuck in your head. Listen to “Damaged Utensils” on Spotify and follow Moth Traps at the links below. The full album Atrophy Myths is out now on Exposed Code Records.

Moth Traps on TikTok

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Haley’s Transcendent Pop Single “Walk Among the Dead” Dives Into the Complex Nuances of a Deep Love

On “Walk Among the Dead” Haley sounds like she’s singing to us from a spot high on a hilltop at a sky full of stars reflecting on the highlights and not so peak moments of a relationship. The shuffling beat sets a tangible foundation for the song as ethereal drones cast tonal colors in the background and a spare piano melody adds another moody dimension to the song to buoy up the clear and commanding vocals. The song feels like somewhere between a dream pop track and cosmic country or folk with lyrics that cast the challenges of the relationship about which Haley is singing in terms of accepting its challenges and its beautiful aspects in an adult way that values the connection even when it feels like it might sometimes hurt too much to sustain. In that way Haley makes even doubts seem like an aspect of any romance with actual depth of feeling to it. Listen to “Walk Among the Dead” on Spotify and follow Haley at the links below.

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Garage Sale’s Shoegaze Single “Blank Again” Washes Away Emotional Overload With an Alternately Raw Delicacy and Sonic Catharsis

Garage Sale sets a mood of delicate introspection at the beginning of “Blank Again” with a guitar riff that lets all the details of the chord shine through. The lyrics seem to be written from the perspective of someone who has been through a period of great psychological duress and trauma and recovering from a period of emotional exhaustion when you feel like you have nothing left. The rhythm feels like a tentative taking of steps into an unfamiliar way of being but wanting to get back to a place of being able to trust your feelings again and how your brain works rather than the mode its’ been in for too long of tangling with too much and not enough the way maybe things felt for a lot of people during the early pandemic period. Later in the song the gorgeously warped, melodic maelstrom of guitar and syncopated percussion and bass washes over you like its flooding in and taking away some of the doubt and anxiety that simmers below the surface of the song’s more tranquil moments. It’s a new chapter of experimentation in songwriting for the band based in Melbourne, Australia, and it showcases the group’s ability to genre bend in favor of more widely expressive songwriting. Listen to “Blank Again” on Soundcloud and follow Garage Sale at the links below.

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Babel’s “Mirror” is an Elegantly Expressed Dream Pop Song About Heartbreak, Breakup and Reconciliation

Babel’s seemingly simple composition for “Mirrors” lets the song’s arc of heartbreak, breakup and reconciliation hit as more melancholic than painful. The subtlety of the tone of resignation in the early part of the song as it flows into acceptance and then evolves into hope is remarkable in showing how often our hearts and minds can so easily switch from one feeling to another once our situational comprehension shifts and how affection doesn’t need to go through a torturous and dramatic process. Not if you’re an adult who understands that no one and no situation is perfect or ideal and that one’s emotional state need not be black and white. The change from the more somber use of piano to ethereal guitar and synth at the end is also an effective touch to change up not just the mood but the quality of the energy of expression with a change of approach to parallel the one more psychological. Listen to “Mirrors” on YouTube and follow the Finnish dream pop band Babel at the links below.

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Orions Belte’s “When You’re Gone I’ll Be Gone” Fuses Classic Pop Melodicism and Noisy Psychedelia to Craft a Unique Soundtrack to Heartache

Orions Belte, photo courtesy the artists

Norwegian art pop group Orions Belte teamed up with Norway Grammy-nominated vocalist Louien aka Live Miranda Solberg for the delicate dream pop of “When You’re Gone I’ll Be Gone.” The track from the band’s new album Women (released October 6, 2023) is a bit of a departure for the trio well known for its amalgam of progressive rock, indie pop and psychedelia. Louien’s melodious vocals are like something out of an earlier decade of pop music backed by subtle low end and percussion accents. But later in the song Orions Belte comes in with the distorted and noisy psychedelia swimming in the keyboard melody sounding like it’s melting off the pristine, icicle tones and the song pulses in increasingly cacophonous glory before ending with a minimal tranquil riff on acoustic guitar. The song takes us through a gamut of emotional shifts befitting the song title and the lyrics delivered by Louien. Listen to “When You’re Gone I’ll Be Gone” on Spotify and follow Orions Belte at the links provided.

Orions Belte on Facebook

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jake minch Taps Deeply Into the Bittersweet Nostalgia of the Unstructured Time of the Summers of Our Youth on “strip mall”

During the late spring and summer of the early pandemic of 2020 it seemed like so much was up in the air and unless you were in a vital industry maybe you had plenty of time to indulge what it felt like to not have to be anywhere in particular at a particular time. Or if, like jake minch, you were in high school and it was a summer of talking with friends over video calls and bonding with friends in a way that involved a necessary physical distance but because you couldn’t necessarily make plans you could devote your time to these necessitated portals of communication and maybe that meant being more open and real and psychologically intimate than might have happened under normal circumstances resulting in a different kind of connection with your peers. For a brief period in our national history of recent years it seemed that most people recognized the fragility of their own existence and interdependence on other people they might have otherwise forgotten and that raw and vulnerable state of thing meant a bit more recognition of the value of other people in a way that wasn’t as obvious previously and an awareness that snapped back to business as usual soon enough. That extended liminal moment is what informs the emotional backdrop of minch’s song “strip mall.” With essentially just his delicate vocals and an acoustic guitar minch relates how memories of a t-shirt he saw an ex wear shopping at a strip mall when he returned home from college to visit and how that triggered an intense emotional resonance that brings him right back to the moments that helped define a significant moment in his life when he loved being younger and seeming to have all the time in the world to indulge in youthful exuberance and connections that seem like they’ll last forever in the context of one’s relative short life thus far but which wash past you quickly and maybe you hate that you’ll never be able to recapture that time in which you felt like you had so much freedom and endless possibilities even if there was a specter of a global pandemic in the case of minch and any other young person at that time. But many of us got to experience some of that energy again at a time in life when some adult concerns had of necessity to be put on hold for longer than we can consciously remember except in our youths. Maybe minch’s song is bittersweet and melancholy but it powerful conjures both those memories with the immediacy and accessibility of its emotional resonance in anchoring it to concrete imagery. Watch the video for “strip mall” on YouTube and follow jake minch on Instagram.

Galeet Dardashti Melds Traditional Persian-Jewish Music With Jazzy Post-punk on the Electrifying “Melekh”

Persian-Jewish singer, composer and anthropologist Galeet Dardashti collaborated with the voice of her late grandfather the late, Iranian singer Younes Dardashti on her latest album Monajat (released September 9, 2023). Sampling from an audio artifact that her grandfather recorded in Iran, Galeet artistically interpreted the Persian-Jewish Selihot ritual and crafted a call and response dynamic like time and space traveling on a set of music recorded and produced in a modern mode with the backing of Middle Eastern and jazz musicians in New York. The single “Melekh” puts the elder Dardashti’s vocals front and center in impassioned performance, the newer musical recordings setting a deep mood like a mix of alternative jazz lounge and Middle Eastern devotional music. The blend makes both somehow more accessible, the more traditional with a hip modern flavor like a new form of jazz rooted post-punk. Its a vibrant hybrid sound that both Dardashti’s sustain across all of Monajat. Listen to “Melekh” on Spotify where the rest of the album can be found as well for your listening pleasure.

Chris Ianuzzi’s Video for “Edge of the Earth” is a Visually and Sonically Mind-Bending Foray Into a Parallel Universe of Conscious Machines of the Future

Chris Ianuzzi, photo courtesy the artist

Chris Ianuzzi and his creative team of Serkan and ilke have crafted the perfect visualization for his song “Edge of the Earth.” Utilizing Stable Diffusion and Deforum AI SD Animation Pipeline, the music video looks like something Dash Shaw might use for his next animated film. After seeming to take a portal into the world inside the box of a set of synthesizer rigs, we see a group of people seemingly attending a deeply psychedelic live musical event with glowing mushroom trees and glowing sky objects with an ever shifting landscape with planets rising on the horizon and flowing architecture and coastline and colors and settings rapidly manifesting and evolving. The music itself sounds a little like a synth pop song as written by Coil working with Edward Ka-Spel. The combination is like multimedia uncanny valley and both menacing and entrancing. Unsettling and calming. In its endless use of patterns and color alongside sonics both textural and tonal, distorted and smoothly melodic the song and the video stimulate your brain in ways that a song and visuals crafted another way might not. And in the end we leave that universe through the aforementioned array of synthesizers into a tranquil exit. At a time when a a lot of psychedelic music feels pretty safe and rote this is the opposite of that. Watch the video for “Edge of the Earth” on YouTube and follow Chris Ianuzzi at the links below.

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Kylie Monologue’s Ambient Drone Piece “Terry And Keith” is the Soundtrack to a Haunted Universe

Kylie Monologue started making music in 2022 at age 52 and as a self-taught musician who cites early Human League and Autechre as among her influences it’s difficult to know what to expect. But her drone track “Terry And Keith” slow swims in ethereal winds and a sense of haunted desolation. If there’s ever a remake of the 1985 science fiction disaster film The Quiet Earth or someone soundtracks an as yet uncreated science fiction universe where the mysterious ruins of a fallen galactic empire is explored for the causes of its dissolution this is the sound of a scene spent in spooked wonder at the sight of hitherto unknown architectural styles and thoroughly alien artwork. Listen to “Terry And Keith” on Soundcloud and follow Kylie Monologue at the links below.

Kylie Monologue on Bandcamp