Queen City Sounds and Art

Queen City Sounds Podcast S3E32: Reign LaFreniere of Bluphoria

Bluphoria is a band now based in Nashville, Tennessee that originally formed in 2019 when lead singer and lead guitarist Reign LaFreniere moved to Eugene, Oregon to study film. LaFreniere grew up in the East Bay and South Bay in California loving horror shorts and went to an arts high school that allowed students to rent/borrow video equipment and production software. Raised in a musical family, LaFreniere didn’t really start playing music until high school in his sophomore year after getting a guitar. On a trip on the John Muir trail a friend only had Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and some Simon and Garfunkel songs on a player and being in a setting where music wasn’t as readily accessible for long stretches gave him a deeper appreciation of its importance listening to that music. When he returned from that hiking trip he got into Jimi Hendrix as someone who looked like him playing music of that caliber with Hendrix’s singing style an inspiration for LaFreniere’s fledgling attempts as a vocalist. But his focus was on film until he got to Eugene, Oregon when he met like-minded students like Dakota Landrum (rhythm guitarist, backing vocals) and Rex Wolf (bass).

At one of the band’s house shows an EDGEOUT Records intern was in attendance and signed the group to EDGEOUT/UME/UMG in January 2021 around the time when drummer Dani Janae joined the group. A year later Bluphoria drove to Tennessee to record their self-titled debut full length album which released on May 5, 2023. Even a casual listen to the songs and even the band’s 2020 debut EP Alone reveals a knack for entrancing melodic hooks in a power pop style mixed with touches of psychedelic rock and what might be described as soulful garage punk. With LaFreniere’s commanding vocals providing some of the grit and emotional resonance fans of The Replacements and The Plimsouls will find a lot to like about what Bluphoria has to offer.

Listen to our interview with Reign LaFreniere on Bandcamp and follow the band at the links below. The group makes its Denver live premier at The Black Buzzard on Sunday, October 29, 2023 co-headlining with Noah Vonne and The Disasters and Sunstoney as support.

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Queen City Sounds Podcast S3E31: Courtney Whitehead of Bison Bone

Bison Bone recently released its new EP 40 Grit. As the name suggests the stories across the EP’s five tracks are tales of everyday endurance and honing the rough edges of life to where it more suits your existence in the moment and to get through more trying patches. Its warm melodies and Courtney Whitehead’s introspective yet direct vocal style engages thetpo listener and the elegantly orchestrated music pulls you into an intimate and vividly observed moments the highlight moments that aren’t the stuff of striving and grinding and performative positivity of a lot of pop and rock music. But they are the stuff of real life that anchor your memories and stay with you for a lifetime. Whitehead seems skilled in putting together his own experiences in contexts that can resonate with people who recognize the psychological and emotional truth in a well crafted narrative enmeshed in music. Bison Bone formed in the mid-2010s after Whitehead moved to Denver from Oklahoma via Texas and found a community in which he could share his songwriting and find collaborators who got his creative vision and style of working class stories that didn’t glorify the lifestyle so much as highlight the inherent dignity of experiences most of us have and which translate well to the style of music Bison Bone offers which is to say Americana and at times a touch of psychedelia and country but informed by the humanistic psychological insights and poetry of Bruce Springsteen and Uncle Tupelo.

Listen to our interview with Courtney Whitehead on Bandcamp and follow Bison Bone at the links below. Bison Bone is celebrating the release of 40 Grit with a show at The Skylark Lounge on Friday, October 27, 2023 with The Patti Fiasco at 8pm.

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Metro Riders’ “Aenigma,” Inspired by Lucio Fulci’s Film of the Same Name, Resonates With a Darkly Enigmatic Menace

Metro Riders’ “Aenigma” was inspired by Lucio Fulci’s 1988 horror film of the same name. And in the video we see a chain of gossip in a classroom at the boarding school where the film was set. Which fits track that has a clandestine feel, one might say it has a mood of late night contemplation and after dusk secret adventures. There is a slow oscillating melody over a pulsing low end drone and minimalist percussive tone holding an informal rhythm. But it maintains a deep sense of mystery and when the flourish of other keyboard sounds come in it feels like other secrets are unveiled even though we know nothing of the exact thoughts going into the track’s composition, it just imparts the emotional resonance of traveling further into an alluring mystery that might go tragically but not without a certain dark fascination with a tantalizing enigma. Watch the video for “Aenigma” on YouTube and follow Metro Riders at the links below. The new Metro Riders album Lost in Reality became available on September 29, 2023.

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Sonny & The Sunsets’ “Androids” is a Modest, Indie Garage Folk Protest Song Against Ritualized Conformity

Sonny & The Sunsets, photo by Sarah Moore

With the title “Androids” you may not be expecting the folk-inflected garage pop song Sonny & The Sunsets have given us from the Self Awareness Through Macrame album that released on September 1, 2023. The bright accents in the jangle give it a physicality that gives its circular riffing some real momentum and at times it’s reminiscent of some of New Order’s more garage-y moments like “The Village” or like later period Beat Happening. But Sonny Smith’s words about wanting to be able to honest and comfortable in his truth and genuine feelings with another person give context to “Androids” as a symbol for how we so often have to be politic in life and adopt a depersonalizing presentation to fit in with a technocratic view of humanity that seems in place in so much of public life. So this song is about a quiet resistance and rebellion for one’s humanity in the face of the pressure to conform and become a product to be tweaked like, yes, some android. The rest of the record has similar expressions of moments of focusing and thinking about presumed norms and things we take for granted without ever examining whether they’re really of value or whether its more dead weight conforming impulses and ritualized behavior. Listen to “Androids” on Spotify and follow Sonny & The Sunsets at the links below.

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A Beacon School Coaxes Us Into Stepping Into Our Best Life With Effervescent Dream Pop Song “KITM”

A Beacon School, photo courtesy the artist

A Beacon School unfurls a swirling, kaleidoscopic melody to wash around the introspection expressed in “KITM” (which means keep it to myself). This finds entrancing form in the music video by Alex Beebe and Chase Wagner with illustrative colors, geometric shapes and spectral overlays and following some seemingly educational film footage about a variety of red flowers that grow on trees and bushes. But the colors are all otherworldly with the blues overwhelming the greens and the rose tones enhanced. We see an image of a boat coming into harbor in the night and hands placing tiles as colors switch and flash. It’s all very surreal yet oddly reassuring. The song is like if Animal Collective collaborated with Washed Out to make a tonally rich yet hushed shoegaze track. It teems with energy yet doesn’t overwhelm and because of that it invites an immediate re-listen. For a song that seems to urge you to stop procrastinating and take that next crucial step into a rewarding life it coaxes more than cajoles and that makes all the difference. The new A Beacon School album yoyo released on October 13, 2023. Watch the video for “KITM” on YouTube and follow A Beacon School at the links below.

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Shelf Lives’ Electro Post-Punk Song “Off The Rails” is a Short Course on Self-Deprogramming From Consumerist Psychosis

Shelf Lives start “Off The Rails” with a repetition of the line, “No fuckin’ way man” as the song careens into a glitchy, driving song that captures the headiness of the hypnosis in being caught up in a cycle of consumerism. Succinctly, Shelf Lives with the touches of distortion on the lead vocals and the frantic pace of the song and its urgent electronic melodies incisively outlines how consumerism can tap into basic human psychology and induce compulsive behaviors and manipulate the mind’s reward and punishment system at a basic level that’s provided and marketed to us as little things that we can buy as a seeming shortcut to fulfillment when it just isn’t. The chorus of “Can’t go off the rails now ’cause you’re none in a million” encapsulates how consumerism both controls and depersonalizes in equal measure with the corrosive nature of its inherent appeal as a tool of capitalism in a social and economic system that reinforces compliance on a nearly instinctive level. Shelf Lives in creatively delineating the dynamic point to how we can deprogram ourselves in first breaking the cycle of manufactured desire. Listen to “Off The Rails” by electro post-punk band Shelf Lives on Spotify and follow the group at the links below.

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&Tilly’s Video for New Age Dream Pop Single “In Circles” Transports Us to an Aquatic World of Tranquil Contemplation

&Tilly’s video for “In Circles” was shot entirely on iPhone but its color palette and textural detail looks like something that could be part of an A24 film set in parallel universe. We see a figure seeming to be floating on and in azure waters with visuals of luminous, aquatic invertebrates floating gracefully about and a shoreline of darkened trees. The music itself is elegant layers of processed piano, sublimely subtle guitar and ethereal percussive sounds and hushly melodious vocals. Perhaps even plucked violin to give it all an even more classical sensibility that lends the song a timeless aspect like something that could have come from a more pop 90s New Age alternative music realm for fans of Enya and Loreena McKennitt or newer artists like Cate Le Bon or Julia Holter. But &Tilly’s sound is also in the realm of dream pop but with more than usual mastery of sonic details masterfully orchestrated. Watch the video for “In Circles” on YouTube and follow &Tilly at the links provided.

Coworkers Exorcise the Inner Tension and Cognitive Dissonance of Striving to Thrive in Late Stage Capitalism on “Legwork”

The sense of building tension and being a the breaking point drives the first part of “Legwork” by New Orleans post-punk band Coworkers. Spiky guitar work and hypnotic repetition are the perfect framing for a song seemingly told from the perspective of a man who has tried so hard to fit in and to do what you’re supposed to do to earn acceptance by the powers that be, however low rent, and turning himself into what he thinks would garner him the recognition and rewards that in a more sane social and economic system he would have. But he knows it was all a waste of time and in the chorus there a touch of a desperate break and the emotions rage. The opening bass line and general tone of the song is reminiscent of The Fall’s “Bombast” but of course more manic and unhinged in a thrilling way. Most of us have had to go through the soulless motions of a job or social situation only to realize we’re not the special people who get all the rewards society has to offer and one of the only sane things to do is write a fun and emotionally explosive yet surreal humorous song about it. Listen to “Legwork” on Bandcamp and follow Coworkers at the links below.

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Laura Carbone’s “Horses” is a Pastoral Dream Pop Song About Connecting With Your Neglected Instincts For Personal Freedom and Dignity

Laura Carbone, photo by Thomas Von Der Heiden for Rockpalast in 2019

One imagines Laura Carbone doing slow turns in a desert landscape at sunset listening to “Horses.” Her more crisp vocals give way to ethereal, wordless singing like she’s matching the wind and contemplating the personal fortitude one must muster to stand up for oneself and envisioning how wild horses running free seem unconcerned with the unconcerned with arbitrary and internalized limits to their freedom. The melodies are pastoral and textural, unfurling slow and at their seeming leisure and yet they pull you into Carbone’s creative vision and ability to turn melancholic feelings into something more vivifying. Listen to “Horses” on Spotify and connect with Laura Carbone at the links provided. “Horses” will also be found on her forthcoming album The Cycle.

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