Animator Julie Seaward brings to Pink Sky’s single “False Aralia” a real embodiment of the deep sense of isolation and loss one hears in the song. And as with the ethereal, dreamlike music and almost childlike hopefulness in the lyrics we see a a young woman who spends time walking alone in the rain and staring into clouds, yearning and hoping for the kind of reconciliation that can feel out of reach when you feel like you’ve lost someone because of some actual or perceived transgression and your mood spins off into a spiral of desolation that feels melodramatic later but because of the strength of the bond you felt seems so significant can feel so overwhelming. But there isn’t anger here, just echoes of melancholia. In the chous of “I am here don’t feed the fear I am here don’t feed the fear” we hear the reassurance needed to avert the hypnotic narrative into personal darkness. Watch the video for “False Aralia” on YouTube and follow Michigan-based dream pop duo Pink Sky at the links below. Its new album Total Devotion released February 17, 2023.
King Tuff is the creative moniker of Kyle Thomas who has established himself as an artist whose imaginative and eclectic songwriting has evolved over the course of several imaginative albums. His style might be traced to some roots in psychedelic and garage rock but what shines in his recorded output and performances is Thomas’ craft as a storyteller whose lyrics illuminate aspects of American life and culture through the lens of his own experiences and their grounding details. With his latest record Smalltown Stardust, Thomas reflects on the small town life hailing from Brattleboro, Vermont that shaped him and drawing on warm memories to inform a set of songs that sound like an affectionate exploration of how reconnecting with a past one left behind in pursuit of one’s life goals can enrich an appreciation of where you are now and where you’ve been. Beginning to end it’s an album of uncommonly well crafted pop melodies that feel grounding and comforting after a time of some of the greatest chaos and uncertainty for any musician hoping to share their music with a public in living memory. The record is also a celebration of the community and context of Thomas’ musical life and conceived and recorded while his housemantes Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) and Sasami Ashworth (Sasami) were putting together their own extraordinary records of the past couple of years (Fun House from 2021 and Squeeze from 2022 respectively). Some of that spirit creative spirit and good will seems to have intermingled into Smalltown Stardust as well.
Listen to our interview with King Tuff on Bandcamp and follow the artist at the links below. King Tuff performs at Globe Hall on Saturday, March 11, 2022 with Tchotchke and The Savage Blush, doors 8, show 9.
Elly Kace’s versatile voice is at the center of “Disappear.” The rhythmic deployment of guitar and bass early in the song, returning like a theme later on, frame Kace’s widely emotive vocals processed to enhance a sense of a centered focus and of introspective expansiveness. Vocals lines are layered upon one another in a gently cascading flow of melody like leaves falling from a tree and swirling slowly around, facets of emotion that express a tapestry of expressive complexity in a manner that feels organic even if planned and executed with an impressive display of skill in production and performance. And for a song that seems to be about the acceptance of the impermanence of life and the folly of clingy attachment it manifests the shedding layers of ego in the way the song goes from a clarity and jazz-like informal structure to a haze of elements dissolving into a tonal brightness. If it’s a pop song it’s more like something avant-garde electronic composer Laurel Halo or ambient folk auteur Julia Holter might do. Watch the video for “Disappear” on YouTube and follow Kace at the links provided.
David Libert has lead a storied life in his more than fifty years in rock and roll as a musician, songwriter, tour manager, booking agent, producer and, briefly, drug dealer on Sunset Strip. He recently collected many of his memories of that career in his recently released autobiography Rock and Roll Warrior (September 23, 2022, Sunset Blvd. Books). In his youth Libert was a member of The Happenings who scored hit records including “See You In September” and a cover of “I Got Rhythm” that spent several weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles charts peaking at number 3. While in that band Libert was the de facto guy that did all the unglamorous things in a band that a manager usually performs and that lead to his stint as the tour manager for Rare Earth before taking on that role with the band Alice Cooper from 1971-1975—arguably the group’s most productive creative period. After moving to Los Angeles following that run with Alice Cooper he came to represent George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic, Bootsy’s Rubber Band and The Runaways. Libert also represented Living Colour, Sheila E., Vanilla Fudge, Cactus and a bevy of other artists. Libert turned 80 on January 20, 2023 and his autobiography and his recollection of his life and career are extraordinarily lucid and entertaining. In the interview listen for Libert’s amusing and interesting story about Guns N’ Roses.
Listen to our interview with Libert on Bandcamp and to order a signed copy of Rock and Roll Warrior please visit Sunset Blvd. Books.
Within the rush of granular haze of Project Icarus’ “WITHIN THE FLESH” one hears the faint metallic sounds of unidentifiable mechanical processes going on in the distance. It sounds like what it might like to be blindfolded and set to wandering in the back corners of a giant factory that manufactures hydraulic pipes or a smelting plant that has a wing that does industrial welding. But as the track outros the distorted sounds gives way to higher pitched metallic resonances that fade into silence like you’ve been carried free of the kind of kinetic presence of sound that can seep into your psyche after prolonged exposure and and create a vague emotional pressure that when gone feels like liberation. Listen to “WITHING THE FLESH” and take some moments to experience this passage into what it might be like to live near a factory in the mid-to-late twentieth century or more precisely what it might be like to work in one and feel the everyday weight of the industrial world on human consciousness and consider how we might improve the lives of people by giving them regular time away from that insistent, ambient presence and stimulus moving forward as a species that employs technology and allow it to make us aware of ways in which that subtle demand on our psyches are happening now that we accept as a condition of participating in civilization as we know it.
Whenever hip-hop artist Dax releases a song and video you know you’re probably in for something remarkable both musically and visually. His single “PTSD” begins with credits like a short film and the production on the song is like a street rap piece with trap style beat but of course Dax injects it with elements that elevates it beyond musical tropes and even the touch of auto tune elevates the sense of despair and desolation appropriate to what’s being presented. In the video we see Dax looking like his mind has been shattered by a shocking experience and then we a privy to the story of a young man being sexually assaulted by his priest. Before that narrative begins image of Dax stumbling forth in the present tense as the beat pulses seemingly causing the visual frame to pulse along in its low end wake as he repeats the refrain of “I was walking home on a Sunday,” which we later learn is an emotionally anchoring mantra of sorts to attempt to hold himself together. As the song progresses we hear a wave of emotion that captures the mixed and intense feelings of violation, rage, confusion, sadness, sorrow coupled with conflicted thinking that happens with victims of sexual abuse. That and the way memories of a traumatic experience can come crashing into your mind with an unexpected suddenness and painful clarity. And later in the video we witness a twist in the expected plot as Dax is in church when the victim of the priest comes in with a rifle to inflict retribution,on the priest. Dax makes eye contact with the killer when he kills himself after the vengeful rampage and in that moment it seems obvious Dax finds himself identifying with the victim while knowing the act of violence can never truly bring justice and in turn traumatizes others. The song outros with wind and Dax walking with the sunset at his back as he falls to the ground with the weight of what he has just seen, the sheer and inexplicable heaviness that leaves you changed forever. In the end there is a message about where victims of sexual abuse and/or those that care about them can get help. A devastating and beautifully executed treatment of an all too common experience that seems to touch the lives of us all. Watch the video for “PTSD” on YouTube and follow Dax at the links below.
“Get Your Mind Right” and its underlying hints of bass with drifty melodies floating over the top sound like something that might have been on the soundtrack of a 1980s thriller. When the vocals come in one can all but envision the Miami Vice-esque fashion coupled with a dusky mood, the song hitting the same thoughtful emotional resonance of a more brooding but equally epic mid-1980s Simple Minds. But the theme of the song about getting your head together and on the path of pursuing habits leading to positive outcomes after a period of maybe straying from the path you know is right for you because life has jostled your instinctive trajectories into survival mode for long enough that perhaps you adopted a new normal that having the time to mull these things over reveals was a diminished state of things you came to accept because it made sense for a time but now no longer serves you. The song is definitely a mood piece and despite its retro style it’s absolutely of the moment when we’ve all had to reassess and come to terms with what we’ve accepted to merely get by. Listen to “Get Your Mind Right” on YouTube and follow 100DAYS at the links below.
Perhaps Earth Libraries is reissuing Captain Kudzu’s 2018 Arboretum or just the single “Drag On” by the Birmingham, Alabama based indie rock band. The song has a gentleness of spirit in its psychedelic flavors and the intricacy of its soundscapes in the bell tones and arpeggiated strings that lend an air of dreamlike introspection as the song wends toward a bright, uplifting passage to give an emotional palette cleanse in a song seemingly about a conflicted reconciliation that may or may not take because the conversation has already happened time and again with the same results. But in the song’s uptempo and ascending structure there is a hint that even if it doesn’t work out in the usual ways maybe there has been an internal shift that has moved beyond any hurt feelings in a meaningful sense. Listen to “Drag On” on Spotify and follow Captain Kudzu at the links provided.
David Holmes took hold of the title track of Don Letts’ forthcoming, debut solo album Outta Sync (due out in April 2023) and gave it a psychedelic edge. The vocals echo slightly and vibrate, the dub reverberation is narrowed and spun out a bit and it’s like a space rock AM radio hit and spoken word piece. Yet both versions highlight Letts’ uniquely commanding voice and his commentary on his own life and his keen awareness of world events and how when you’re coming up and aging into the age of a pensioner you might take on the old chestnut of how with age comes wisdom. But Letts seems to know that the world changes even if you’re caught up in old habits of living and mind and one’s ideas of “forever” quickly become obsolete when history seems to be accelerating around us. Yet it’s a song brimming with hopefulness and acceptance and this mix of the song sounds like a great fusion of an old Adrian Sherwood-inspired treatment and a modern bedroom dance pop hit. Listen to the David Holmes remix of “Outta Sync” on Spotify, watch the video of the original mix on YouTube where you can find links to pre-order the new record from one of the legends of the 70s and 80s punk, reggae and post-punk era when it drops next month.
The CBDs are a Power Folk Trio formed in the Boulder area in 2013 when the members of the band more or less met each other through their wives and via the world of CU Boulder. Burt Rashbaum (keyboards, vocals), Evan Cantor (acoustic guitar, harmonica, bass, vocals) and Roland LaForge (electric guitars, vocals) all grew up on the East Coast of America and were electrified by the counterculture of the 60s and 70s and all witnessed that great wave of music and art as it was happening before they separately found themselves moving to Colorado in the mid and late 70s. Rashbaum has a background in writing and has been a published author for decades, Roland LaForge was a geologist who spent times in volcanoes around the world gathering data for analysis among his other duties and Evan Cantor in addition to more mundane jobs was a part of Colorado’s avant-garde as a member of Walls of Genius with Little Fyodor (aka Dave Lichtenberg) who blurred the lines between punk, tape collage and noise and Cantor experienced the rich and great underground scene of 1980s Denver and Boulder including witnessing shows at The Packing House and The Junkyard including the legendary 1986 show with Einstürzende Neubauten the tickets for which were painted bones one had to purchase at Wax Trax. Cantor was also in various other left field punk and experimental rock bands over the years but upon befriending his current bandmates he reconnected with some of his own roots in that genuinely cool end up hippie subculture and its own musical leanings.
The CBDs have been playing shows along the front range for the past decade and are now finally releasing a double album conceived of as representing the kind of set list one would hear at one of the band’s performances. Two Sets is the kind of record that could have come out fifty years ago, a decade ago or now and its refreshing and spontaneous energy draws you in immediately into its stories of life, love, bemusement at some of the situations one finds oneself navigating through life. In moments it recalls the off the cuff brilliance of the Grateful Dead or The Band and in others of Frank Zappa in his mode of thoughtful storytelling. It’s a varied record that flows so well it’s like listening to the kind of movie one would hope someone would make of a Tom Robbins novel but one more rooted in instantly relatable and evergreen themes of human connection that bypass sectarian political and cultural divides. It’s a gentle yet potent reminder of an era of idealism and open humanity that never needed to get tarnished and one that seems accessible, practical and nurturing.
Listen to out interview with The CBDs on Bandcamp give a listen to Two Sets on Bandcamp as well (linked below) and witness the easy and creative connection of the band for yourself live. For more information on the band and their future exploits visit thecbds.com.
Upcoming Live Dates for The CBDs:
3/5/23: Very Nice Brewing Company, 4-6 pm, 20 Lakeview Dr., Nederland, CO 3/18/23: BOCO Cider, 6-8 pm, 1501 Lee Hill Dr., Boulder, CO 5/5/23: The Rock Garden, 6-9 pm, 338 W. Main St., Lyons, CO 6/6/23” The Local, 7-9 pm, 2731 Iris Ave., Boulder, CO
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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