Arguably (just by me) the best band indie-pop band to come out in the last decade, Annuals, release their first album in nearly 5 years.
Pick up their album "Time Stamp" on Bandcamp for a small fee of 8 bucks.
Of course, you can download it for free like every other music junky on the planet.
But be aware that the band went broke making this album.
How about we give them some money back for what they've given to us.
Just sayin', You will not be disappointed.
Sometimes the best music is the kind that floats above you..
The kind that you can't distinguish but you know still exists.
Alof Arnald's latest album, Sudden Elevation, is her most impressive work to date.
Drawing inspiration from her native Iceland; her melodies are expansive and bountiful while still remaining minimalistic.
I strongly recommend going to see her at any cost!
Drawing inspiration from the things immediately surrounding him,
Snævar Njáll Albertsson, writes about the relations closest to him.
Namely, his beautiful and creative daughter, who thought up the moniker Dad Rocks! (go figure)
His lyrics, are well-crafted and shed imagery with every new stanza.
'Nuff said.
The songs consists of twinkling pianos, bright acoustic finger plucking, and other various classical instruments that blend themselves into anthem-like arrangements.
Rendered into its own genre, consider Dad Rocks! as a brew of Indie-Folk music with a dash of Lo-Fi Pop
Practicing the sponge-approach, Dad Rocks! embodies anything it wants to.
Absorbing anything deemed creative to utilize and squeeze out all at once.
Which is actually fairly similar to what it's like to be a kid.
Never really knowing who you are, you helplessly scramble to try and figure it out.
You take pieces of everything as you get older.
Absorb anything that comes in contact with you.
Grab ahold of certain values and extremities but reject others.
Then, in a blended mess, you whisk them all together to form who you are.
Well that, in essence, is Dad Rocks!
It is the ability to uncover yourself over an elapsed period of time, through creativity and discovery.
Feel Flows~
"Mount Modern" is listed as a pay-what-you-want album on Bandcamp.
Any donations wold (obviously) be greatly appreciated by the band.
Ben Caplan's voice is the product of a smokers cough and a desire to be different. The album ranges anywhere from a crowded room to the sounds of a desolate hallway. Extensive and vast, Ben Caplan & The Casual Smokers sing rugged and romantic ballads about the peeling away of feeling and the wasted years spent in the wrong direction. But as each song comes to it's epic end, and as each instrument introduced in the beginning is re-infused in a blended mess of perfection, we find a sense of truth and understanding. Reminiscent of an early Tom Waits, Ben Caplan & the Casual Smokers may just be the next BIG thing. Feel Flows~
Let us take a moment to reflect on the perfection that is Little Sur
At first listen, you might mistake their ethereal vocals as an exposed sense of truth.
An effortless rendition of what it's like to float.
But as you spend more time with Little Sur, you'll soon realize they are much more spectacular than any being can explicate without getting frustrated enough to make you listen to each song individually.
The album itself, takes you on a journey that propels in and out like a restless tide.
Before you know it, the album is halfway through and you have already completely surrendered to the spiraling melodies and welcomed sense of desperation.
But if anything, that earnestness will only strengthen your love for the band.
It is quite evident that Little Sur is made up of family and friends (friends who call themselves family) who not only share one dream-- but also--share one grand idea.
That is, to introduce their listeners to a snapshot of what it's like be completely content with sharing comfortable silences.
The final track of the album, entitled "Zobeide (The Wake)" contains the albums most proficient and artistically meaningful vocal performances. It has Judy Butterfield (a new favorite female singer) softly untangling hopeful lyrics over an emotionally charged piano.
I have yet to go a whole day without listening to it.
However, "Continental Love Song" will most likely generate the highest fan satisfaction for its catchy melody and folky tendencies that alternate in speed between each track.
It doesn't matter where you start on the album,
as long as you start.
Its all gold, Jerry.
Pure,
solid,
gold.
I urge you to pick up the album for a small price
(even though the band was kind enough to upload it for free)
HERE>>>Bandcamp
*All proceeds go to the band.
LIYL: This Town Needs Guns, Maps & Atlases, and Rodrigo Y Gabriela
Hailing from the vast hills of Virginia, The John Barry Conception unleashes their latest and most impressive album to date. Extraordinarily arranged, the tracks would blemish and distort themselves if they weren't so luminously polished. At first listen, the album catapults the lavish fragrance of indolent suburbia directly at your face. But soon after it takes an even truer form, of which it exposes itself as an accurate display of carelessness. The record marks perfection when the mistakes don't quite sound like mistakes anymore. Instead, they form a sort of opulent tapestry that unravels as it progresses. Never fully understanding its true image until fully untwisted. The band uses that infinite energy to create bountiful melodies that march on longer than they could have ever dreamt.
Pick up their album for free on Bandcamp >>> HERE
;.
In 1975, Ted Lucas gave birth to one of the most influential albums that no one has ever heard of.
However, Lucas is constantly overlooked and dismissed as an artist.
He was just one of those musicians that fluttered right under everyones noses as they swooned over the rock gods of '75.
Does that make him unworthy of a listen? I think not.
Definitely going to be the best discovered album of 2013.
Sometimes,
music is like a coloring book.
its really easy to stay within the lines..
Almost formulaic in design.
Color this, this color, and it will look good.
Its only when you venture out of the box, do you find something worth drawing.
This is the case with "Branches"
...Yes, they have original songs,
but its the reincarnation of the classics that they are concerned about.
The idea that songs dont grow old,
they just get refurbished.
polished and spit shined.
Feel Flows~
*Cheers to Josh Weinberg for showing me this tune.
LIYL: The Lucksmiths, Bon Iver, Iron & Wine, and M Ward Its good to acknowledge music as an exponential factor for change. The more we change, the more our taste for music change. and so it goes. However, sometimes the music itself sits solidified within its perfect structure. Styles harden and become a musician's own. Chord progressions and time signatures begin to represent the artist, and the artist represents the chord progressions and time signatures. and so it goes. An endless cycle of cause and effect that builds the (respected) genre into what it is now. All though, some musicians- like Christopher Wright- never really adapt new ears for new music. These musicians don't change- they don't alter their ways for the satisfaction of higher selling albums. Instead, they do what they always do. Perfect what has already been perfected. and so it goes. Feel Flows~
LIYL: The Oh Hello's, Of Monsters and Men, Coldplay, and Beirut
Step outside the box youve trapped yourself in,
to a crowded hallway.
Change the steps you take to walk,
to a slow hop.
Change the broken home alternative rock,
to a vast landscape of indie folk.
and you have Racing Glaciers.
Their songs build, glow, build, and refract.
In that order.
There was a time where Sam Beam from Iron and Wine had too many songs.
As docile as the man is, he searched for help to complete the songs that had filled his books.
From cover to cover, he taught the young band Calexico,
all of his songs.
Calexico, however, saw things differently.
They saw things a little bigger than one acoustic and a soft rounded spotlight.
They saw the songs as an atonement of everything holy and pure.
They recorded the album and stashed it within their book cases.
Always to look back on for some subtle advice as to how to write an album.
Point on telling you this: Dont allow yourself to get stuck within a bubble of your own music.
Step entirely out of your own box to find opinion. Besides, the fans are who you want to please.
LIYL: The Head and the Heart, Dr. Dog, Bowerbirds, and Devendra Banhart
I remember marching through the lined layers of evergreen and maple..
They established my trail back to the campus..
--It was the summer of 2009-- I think.
I consumed the morning- in the forest- behind the baseball field..
All the other kids (with their pumped up kicks) were going down to the football field.
-I wasn't interested-
I don't even remember what I was doing.
Probably trying to hug the wind --if i know my adolescent self
I just remember settling into a comfortable pile of soil + stone,
and listening to Andy Cabic's (Vetiver) catalogue on my Ipod.
It was so innovative at the time.
So avant-garde (if you will)
I found myself embedded within the soil itself.
Enough so, that I didn't leave that very spot until every one of his tracks were carefully examined.
... We all have this sort of pull string in our head.
One that yanks at our emotions every time something triggers it..
It could be an old picture of the house you moved away from all those years ago.
It could be the post card you got from your grandfather just before he passed away.
It could even be the developing lines on your mothers face as time canyons in and out of dark and light.
It could be a lot of things.
But music is the best at doing that..
One note can send you spiraling down the rabbit hole and into a fresh wound.
...It can flood your veins with emotions you were certain you defeated.
...But we should be embracing that feeling.
Embracing the hardships
Embracing the misery and misfortune.
Embracing catastrophe.
"Dont be upset that the rose grew thorns...
be happy that the thorns grew a rose."
Home-Work Assignment:
In light of all the shit you have on your plate,
sit and listen to a song that brings you back to a better time..
Reflect on it.
Realize that time heals all.
Realize that you cant remember the stress you were under during the first time you heard that tune back in 2009, 8, 7, 6, whatever
This is because our consciousness doesnt allow us to dwell on the difficulties,
and because music -when you want it to- tends to buffer out the bad.
It shelters you from the universal truth that time is passing by.
...Now attempt to grasp the concept that your future holds- relative- but higher levels of stress.
And all the stress you tend to find yourself under now
is merely an obstacle in time that you must work through to forget.
Sit and listen to a song that brings you back to a better time,
because music is the only thing that can solidify itself enough for you to still recall the melody
even after years of neglect.
LIYL: Sufjan Stevens, Lost in the Trees, and Andrew Bird "Half Moon Run is a talented young trio from Ottawa, Ontario and Comox, British Columbia. It was in a practice studio situated in Montreal’s Mile-End district, through the hardships of time constraints and flatlined bank accounts, that the trio bonded and created their unique sound, fusing together the restless elements of indie, pop and folk with beautiful rhythmic harmonies, delicate guitar lines and a hint of warm electronica" -Band Website ~Flows Feel
LIYL: Bon Iver, Bright Eyes, Dodos, Beirut, and Phosphorescent.
Its hard describing the feeling I get when listening to the Bowerbirds.
Their sound takes me back to the woods that line my property at the house i grew up in.
It takes me back to watching the caterpillars fall (fly with style) from one leaf and on to another.
It takes me back to the solitude
-not the kind you hate-
but the kind you cherish.
Their inspirations are as follows:Nature, Earth, Mary Sullivan, and Magic Mushrooms.
...and thats not a bad thing...
In fact, it opens their eyes to issues that are bigger than what the average musician writes about.
They're music is a form of opposition.
A form of discontent.
A form of love through pure hatred of what destruction has occurred "to this wondrous earth"
The Bowerbirds are hypnotic and endlessly beautiful.
Everything is sung with a light coo, over a deep rooted acoustic and accordion.
Everything is dressed in black.
But underneath it, hides a cold steel armor.
In the end, it all bares bright colors.
