SubmitHub – Page 75 – Queen City Sounds and Art

The Boy Traveler’s “January 07 ft. Ryan Star” is a Broodingly Luminous Downtempo IDM Song That Highlights the Modern Resonance of the Reissue of His 2008 Self-Titled EP

The Boy Traveler, photo courtesy the artist

The Boy Traveler aka Daniel Jacob Sternbaum reissued his 2008 self-titled EP in July 2023 as it hadn’t been available for a decade. He’d just finished touring with Sonny Moore (aka Skrillex) during the travels for which they’d listened to numerous artists but Aphex Twin, Justice and Radiohead in particular sparked a creative direction for the four-song EP. Lead track “January 07” featured Ryan Star. The song features finely modulated beats and luminous, downtempo keyboard work and vocals that sound like someone singing while in a trance state. The lyrics are from a poem that Star had written with his vocal performance and its trailing tones serving as an unconventional framework for a song that is somewhere between an IDM track and a haunted trance composition. Sonically it has the hallmarks of a 90s and 2000s left field electronic song yet the mood and sound seem to fit in with the current era like trip-hop with more of the specter of dystopian disaster hanging over it lending it a proper tinge of desperate undertones. Listen to “January 07 ft. Ryan Star” on Spotify where you can listen to the rest of the EP and follow The Boy Traveler at the links below.

The Boy Traveler on Instagram

Teen Mortgage Takes Aim at Elite Power With Grunge Punk Song “Oligarchy”

Teen Mortgage, photo courtesy the artists

Teen Mortgage take an unorthodox approach toward the subject of class and income inequality on “Oligarchy.” There’s the fuzzy and crunchy guitar sound and the stark vocal approach that provide nice bit of caustic sonic quality appropriate for the song but then the percussion is both traditional drums but also electronics and in the guitar riff there are melodic flares that accent the rhythm so that the undeniable punk style and fury here has a wider than average range of sonic expression even at its one minute fifty-one seconds length. The lyrics outline the stark class differences and the gross hypocrisy baked into an economic and political system that was designed from the beginning of the nation to favor elite power with little concessions along the way to keep the lower classes from outright overthrowing and liquidating elite power. You hear a lot of nonsense about a two-tiered justice system when an ex-president commits multitudes of crimes including seditious conspiracy or oligarchs commit acts of war and undermining national interest with their own form of unilateral executive action but Teen Mortgage in singing “because corporate flaws they make all the laws” points out what a two-tiered justice system really looks like and which has been carried out from the founding of most if not all modern nations: one set of laws and consequences for the rich and another to keep the not-rich in line with a system of punishments to which the wealthy are rarely subjected. Teen Mortgage just packed a lot of actual history into its catchy and energetic punk song with poetic concision. We all live in a corporate controlled world and have to use the tools and currencies open to us but it’s our choice whether or not to buy into it, as it were, and identify with the interests of the elite. Listen to “Oligarchy” on Spotify and follow Teen Mortgage at the links below.

Teen Mortgage on TikTok

Teen Mortgage on Facebook

Teen Mortgage on Twitter

Teen Mortgage on Bandcamp

Teen Mortgage on Instagram

Teen Mortgage Website

Vinyl Williams Gently Reminds Us and Himself That We Don’t Need to Surrender to What We Believes is Inevitable on Psych Pop Single “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy”

Vinyl Williams sounds like he’s free associating a lo-fi, AM radio-esque sound with psychedelic garage rock, shimmery post-punk and intricate math rock pop on “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.” And in the process he drops in twists, turns and swirls like he’s live mixing analog tape and leaving in where there might be a warp and using that as a transition between stanzas of lyrics about how we psych ourselves into following a path we believe is inevitable but really there are a multitude of options open to us and we need not be committed to something that isn’t going to work for us or lead to undesirable ends. The line “We don’t have a single way to know” is the key to what Vinyl Williams is expressing here in his borderline whisper of a voice like he’s already let himself get locked into periods of tunnel vision and needs a reminder that it’s not required to keep going down that tunnel. Listen to “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy” on Spotify and follow Vinyl Williams at the links below. The latest Vinyl Williams album Aeterna emerged on August 4, 2023.

Vinyl Wi lliams on Facebook

Vinyl Williams on Twitter

Vinyl Williams on Bandcamp

Vinyl Williams on Instagram

Consumer Culture’s Unhinged, Psychedelic Noise Rock Ripper “Knives” is a Caustic Fusion of Psychedelia and Straightedge

Consumer Culture packs a lot of vitriol and thrilling ill will into one minute, twelve seconds run time of “Knives.” The grinding, noisy sounds could just as well be a modern hardcore song but there’s something more frayed around the edges and unhinged and the spooky, spectral synth that haunts the last third of the song. It seethes and pulses with an insistence and the lyrics are so psychotically nihilistic it is borderline in the realm of a Brainbombs song if the latter was more into straightedge hardcore. This is a quality one hears across the concise mayhem of the rest of Consumer Culture’s latest album The Future is A Pile of Bodies (released on July 21, 2023 on The Ghost is Clear Records). It’s just too weird to be hardcore and too punk to be some experimental psychedelic rock band. Think something like Flipper sped up and edited to the bare essentials. Listen to “Knives” on Spotify and follow Consumer Culture from Baltimore at the links below.

Consumer Culture on Facebook

Consumer Culture on Instagram

Consumer Culture on Bandcamp

Springworks’ Psychedelic Folk Song “Rest Stop Painter” is an Exploration of the Sights and Sounds That Anchor Our Memories and Resonate Through Time

Springworks paired a collage of old educational videos with a song that sounds like it was written in another era in crafting “Rest Stop Painter.” The song is about images we might run into in passing in traveling in our youth or adulthood that resonate strongly with us for whatever reasons might anchor those visuals in our memory. Maybe it’s a bit of architecture, or a work of public art or merely a setting that in whatever alchemy of happenstance forms a picture that stays with you. It is these sorts of memories whether visual, in sound or through other senses that help to form our cognitive framework and the ways in which we respond to the world around us. These are the points of stimuli that are the anchors to the flow of information that makes up reality as we know it. The song itself is somewhere betwixt lo-fi psychedelic folk and outsider indiepop with minimal percussion, what sounds like melodica, synth, gently processed guitar and spare yet expressive vocals that clearly have a touch of production on them as well. And there is a quality to the song that sounds familiar and as mentioned before it has an aspect that is reminiscent of an earlier period in pop music development precisely because the lo-fi aesthetic is so well executed it draws across decades with stylistic touchstones much like the imagery in the video and the lyrics that anchor the song in the lived experience of being drawn to the points of memory that endure with us the most. Watch the video for “Rest Stop Painter” on YouTube and follow Springworks at the links provided.

Springworks on Facebook

Springworks on Twitter

Springworks on Instagram

springworks.com

Phosphone’s Dark Dream Pop Single “Black Sheep” is a Song About Shedding Bad Habits of Being

There is a delicate urgency that drives Phosphene’s “Black Sheep.” Guitar and percussion keep the melody and rhythm lean and spacious as Rachel Frankel sings in warm yet melancholic tones a story of almost folkloric dimensions of shame and oppression and in the end a memory of a moment of escaping from that dynamic or situation born of a legacy of familial and cultural indoctrination and/or resulting internalized behaviors. The song hits like folk-inflected, dark dream pop and its clear lines of melody shimmer in moments with the energy of shaking off a momentary chill or the echoes of bad habits coming to haunt your present. When the instrumentation of the song interact like weather phenomena across the song it brings a physicality to a song in a style that might otherwise feel as ethereal as it generates a lightly bracing mood. Watch the evocative black and white video for “Black Sheep” on YouTube and follow the Portland, Oregon-based band at the links below. Phosphene’s new album Transmute releases on September 15, 2023.

Phosphone on Facebook

Phosphone on Bandcamp

Phosphone on Instagram

BOWIE’s Synth Pop Single “Good All On My Own” is a Triumphant Examination of Self-Discovery

BOWIE’s video for “Good All On My Own” charts an inner narrative most people can relate to with all the stories and identities you’re conditioned and to which you’re socially rewarded to conform—at least as well as you can—and you do until you get to a place in life when you become comfortable with who you are and who you’ve wanted to be or who you’ve become aside from all the layers of adjustment that had nothing to do with living as a good person but more arbitrary standards of culture that develop and become the expected norm even if it doesn’t make sense for everyone. In the video we see BOWIE covered in green grime that gets “washed off” and she gets dressed up in a pink, “girly” outfit and sits there looking really unimpressed by the transformation. And at the climax of the song she gets back into the grey-green “filth” of one’s genuine self but is really the self one comes to recognize as perfectly acceptable and a rejection of imposed, superficial personality traits as signified by a standardized image that is intended to convey identity. It is a journey for self-discovery of the authentic self and throwing off what one has learned that don’t seem to suit you. The video is like an experimental film. But the song is a finely syncopated bit of uplifting synth pop driven by BOWIE’s wide-ranging vocals and heartfelt melodies and by the end of the song accompanied by a bombastic horn section and screaming guitar to drive the message of self-validation home. Watch the video for “Good All On My Own” on YouTube and follow BOWIE at the links provided. BOWIE’s The Right Way Up EP releases September 2023.

BOWIE on TikTok

BOWIE on Facebook

BOWIE on Instagram

Lo Artiz Pokes Some Lighthearted Fun at Our Dysfunctional Ways of Coping With a World on the Brink With the Neo-Soul Single “the last of us”

Lo Artiz leans heavy into her neo-soul sound on “the last of us.” The nuanced accents on the beat give it a different feel than a lot of music in the realm of R&B these days in that they’re solid and anchor the song into a strong groove. The singer’s voice is playful and sultry in delivering words about ways many of us cope with this sense of impending doom that seems to hang over the world for anyone actually paying attention and sensitive to the forces that much of the power centers of our civilization have been able to ignore because wealth has shielded them from the worst consequences but now it’s just inescapable. So who can blame people for taking not the healthiest choices in offsetting the ambient despair through self-medication, not always the most ideal sexual experiences but something to take our minds off how real things have been and the various ways we plug ourselves into the lives of others whether they’re people we know or celebrities who may or may not deserve our attention. Lo Artiz pokes fun at these impulses in the song while acknowledging sometimes we humans don’t always know a better way of dealing with life unvarnished and without filters. Listen to “the last of us” on Spotify and follow Lo Artiz at the links below. Look out for her sophomore album out September 2023.

Lo Artiz on Instagram

loartiz.com

The Title Track to Sleepy Gonzalez’s Mercy Kill EP is Soulful Dream Pop Song About Letting Go

Sleepy Gonzalez, photo courtesy the artists

The title track to Sleepy Gonzalez’s Mercy Kill EP concludes that June 30, 2023 release on a note of closure. From the beginning of the song and its atmospheric, orchestral arrangements the male and female vocals in tandem seem to be bidding goodbye to a chapter in life, maybe a time of struggle that felt for a long time like something you had to do endure or get through to get where you thought you wanted to be. But when you get there it’s rarely what you’ve made it out to be in your head but at least it gave you a direction to go instead of being lost with nothing to strive toward. Whether that be a place in life, a point in one’s career or in one’s creative pursuits, a relationship or all of it and more. The whole EP has more than mere undercurrents of melancholic feeling but “Mercy Kill” itself seems to tie up the loose threads of one’s life in one particular passage of it in a way that makes it feel easy to let go of what no longer serves your life. Each song of the EP seems like an exploration of some facet of those themes but its outro song is like listening to the musical equivalent of watching the end credits of an existential indie film and Christian and Ally from the band have an emotive harmonization that is reminiscent in moments like what one hears between John Doe and Exene Cervenka of X, more readily apparent in earlier tracks of the EP, but here too when the shoegaze and dream pop instincts dissolve some and a touch of soulful jazz flavor sweeps through to give it an aspect of late not ponderings and because of that it hits a satisfying spot in the mind and of letting channels of anxiety and pain go in a way gentle and organic. Listen to “Mercy Kill” the song and the EP on Spotify and follow the Vancouver, British Columbia-based band at the links below.

Sleepy Gonzalez on Facebook

Sleepy Gonzalez on Bandcamp

Sleepy Gonzalez on Instagram

sleepyfuckinggonzalez.com

Qozy’s Deconstructed and Distended Lo-Fi Indiepop Song “Pieces” has the Sound of Acceptance of Uncertainty

Qozy sounds like he’s deconstructed and distended the elements of a lo-fi indiepop song on “Pieces.” There is a repeating guitar figure that sometimes echoes slightly in chords while a bass line that sounds like it’s on the verge of melting holds a kind of rhythm alongside the minimal percussion. The vocals sound like existential poetry written in a state of disorientation and unmoored from standard reality. Yet it also seems to be the description of a simple path out of that headspace. “Forgotten where to go/Take the way you best know/Losing form/Piece it all back up.” What does this mean? It matters less in the precision of literal meaning than the cadence of the words and how it all fits in with this beautifully unusual song.As the song progresses toward the end the tones and rhythms seem to unravel and go in their own directions like the tenuous grasp of form that seems to be the central struggle of the song has resolved in dissolution. Fans of vintage 2000s Siltbreeze bands or 90s lo-fi home recorded pop and its 2000s descendants will appreciate this song and the rest of Qozy’s 2023 EP Sleep Over which dropped June 17, 2023. Listen to “Pieces” on Spotify and follow Qozy at the links below.

Qozy on YouTube

Qozy on Bandcamp

Qozy on Instagram