It's all about the music…
Australian band Easy Street throw a Dylan-like urging vocal and some loose-limbed exuberance into the musical blender on this new track ‘Get On’. It’s one of those songs that feels purpose-built for the fast approaching warmer months.
Hailing from Sydney, the quintet have a great carefree and melodic, garage psychedelia going on in their sound. We’re looking forward to hearing more from the band.
You know when you hear something that sounds so familiar, the sum of their influences but you can’t nail them down to any degree of specificity? That was how felt on hearing this track from German band Mofer. It’s steeped in the history of post-punk, with the anguish-tinged, staring-at-the-horizon vocal, that Stephen Morris-like drumming and guitars that skate across the surface of the song. It has a great 90s melancholic indie guitar rock vibe to it too.
‘Sometimes’ comes from the band’s recently released EP Ghosts.
“A really nice, new English indie guitar tune” I thought to myself when I first heard ‘Heaven Moves’ by Dear Boy. I was wrong though! The band hail from Los Angeles and they’re starting to gain some attention with their mix of English jangly post-punk and pop-tinged melodies. They recently finished a run of dates with James and Psychedelic Furs which gives a further idea of the kind of sound they have. ‘Dear Boy’ reminds us of Ride and Boo Radleys with a dash of Prefab Sprout thrown into the mix. A really nice tune.
Dear Boy released The Strawberry EP earlier this year and this track is a bridge between that release and a full-length album.
Gothic guitar pop with a post-punk twist is the order of the day on this new track from Vanessa Van Ness, a Melbourne-based guitarist, singer, songwriter, and producer from Venice Beach, Los Angeles. There’s a roll call of influential women in the song, over a minimal backing of guitar and percussion. ‘True True Shot’ has a really nice mantra-like quality to the it. Slightly ominous yet meditative.
Music is about mood and the way it sonically hits the ears, heart and mind just as much as it’s about the stories and ideas conveyed by the lyrics. The appeal of Chastity Belt’s new self-titled album lies in both elements but it’s the overall sound and the warm dreaminess that billows out of the speakers that provides the strongest appeal and connection point.
All four band members share lead vocal duties and they’ve spoken of adding more dynamic harmonies and violin on this record. Those changes are key to the overlapping, drifting and lightly psychedelic sound across the ten songs. Structural experimentation, such as the drums taking a minute and a half to enter the fray on Elena, take the song structures away from standard rock shapes and closer to post-rock or a dream-pop version of Sonic Youth, bereft of their sharper edges. In a way the album sounds like lo-fi jangly guitar songs recorded in high fidelity, given the rich and lush treatment given to the recordings. The result is immersive and, once the listener lets go, quite immersive.
Many of the songs unfurl slowly, gently revealing their melodies on repeat listens as they seep in. A distant descending guitar riff on Rav-4, the counter playing on Half-Hearted that works like a beautifully disembodied version of Verlaine and Lloyd duelling in Television. Split is another gem, bathed in reverb and a tumbling verse that breaks through the clouds into a skyward chorus, it again shows the band quietly pulling at the threads of guitar pop – like The Smiths and some of the bands that emerged from the underground scene in ‘80s New Zealand.
The album never reaches the peak and immediacy of the single Different Now from 2017 but taken as a whole and listened to accordingly, there’s a beauty in the textural nuance and overall gentle hypnosis of the album.
Chris Familton
J.R. is the moniker of Ontario songwriter Julianna Riolino and her group that includes musicians who have worked with Daniel Romano. ‘PAL’ is a light and bouncy slice of indie country rock that wins due to her great melodies that she builds into the song’s two and half minutes. It reminded me a bit of Margaret Glaspy.
What at first sounds like a generic noisy indie rock song from New York psych-pop explorers Flaccid Ashbacks takes some really interesting twists and turns over its five minutes. From a Sunny Day Real Estate emotive outlay through to a mid section with sharper edges and into its contrasting country strum that sounds like Pavement. It adds up to a restless yet still captivating sound and comes from the Flaccid Ashbacks’ new album Come On Come On, a record that jumps all over the place, normally with constantly inventive and appealing results, like The Strokes and Mac DeMarco covering Arctic Monkeys songs through a hallucinogenic lens.
‘Pink Frost’ stands as one our favourite singles, certainly a contender for our favourite New Zealand song of all time. With that in mind we approached this cover by Mexican quartet Mercvrial with caution but they definitely pull it off. They retain that haunting, swirling melancholic mood, inject some electronic elements (sounding like mid-period Depeche Mode) but without sacrificing the sad heart of the song.
The cover comes from their new EP The Stars, Like Dust, out now.
