Former Crooked Still singer Aoife O'Donovan steps out solo on her debut album Red & White & Blue & Gold this June and Aoife and the good folks at Noisetrade are offering up a free EP of live tracks and a pair of songs -- including "Glowing Heart" -- from the new album produced by Tucker Martine (Decemeberists, Tift Merritt). Download the EP here and read more about Red & White & Blue & Gold at DC here . [...]
Nashville-based performing songwriter Amy Speace may have some advice in her How to Sleep in a Stormy Boat (April 16), but these are revelations emerging from a particularly tumultuous period of her own life. The grief on the death of a parent, lost love and, most tellingly, the scare that came when she lost her voice to a case of acute laryngitis -- an event that brought panic and tears before her long road to recovery. As the second album following her move from New York to Nashville a few years back, [...]
Buffalo Tales is the new musical appellation of Australian singer/songwriter Wes Carr. The fact that he is also the 2008 winner of Australian Idol just may have entered into his decision to find a new handle despite the fact that his last album -- 2009's The Way the World Looks -- sold gold Down Under (peaking at #2). "I've got this Wes Carr thing hanging over my head that I have to kill off," he says. "I'm sick of that character. It is tainted." The hair and beard are a little longer and hirsutely impressive [...]
There's an interesting backstory to "Hero", the new video from L.A.'s Family of the Year that tells the real-life tale of a bull rider who made a miraculous recovery after a devastating, near-fatal injury. But we also think the song is pretty great all by itself. From their 2012 album Loma Vista .
DC REDUX UPDATE: British born 23-year-old Jamie N Commons soaked up some American-style blues and rock when he lived in Chicago for eight formative years, moving back to England at 16. Influenced by swampy southern gospel, the songs of Tom Waits and the dark bluster of Nick Cave, Commons serves up his own brand of down-home grit and spit with his debut U.S. EP Rumble and Sway (out now) , a sampler of new songs and tracks from his 2011 U.K. EP The [...]
It's been ten years since the release of his Juno-nominated album Now, More Than Ever , but Toronto based singer and songwriter -- and composer, it turns out -- Jim Guthrie has been busy. Creating film soundtracks and music for video games. Working his old Islands bandmate Nick Thorburn in the folk/pop duo Human Highway in 2008. But the aptly titled Takes Time (May 7), in the works on and off since 2007, brings Guthrie's own solo songwriting back into the spotlight with ten tracks of folk, pop and [...]
Three distinctive voices from the U.K. dominate our picks for album releases this week -- each one winning critical acclaim, each one coming from a dramatically different place musically. Jake Bugg 's high-octane, lo-fi rockabilly folk has taken England by storm this past year and is now breaking out in the U.S. with some well-received shows and key commercial placements. Villager 's Conor J. O'Brien delivers a convincing and bold sophomore album that has furthered his reputation as one of Ireland's best and most eclectic new writers. And "treading down the lonely, desolate introspective folk path" is [...]
One Ewert (pron: "evert") Sunja is both the namesake and frontman of Ewert and The Two Dragons , a folk/rock success story from Estonia (you know, north of Latvia, south of Finland) that also happened to win this year's "European Borders Breakers" award (2011's champs: Mumford & Sons). Following the continental buzz -- sold out shows, radio and TV exposure and acclaimed festival appearances -- the band's second album, the two-year-old Good Man Down has been picked up for digital U.S. release on June 25 via Sire with the syncopated title [...]
Lord Huron 's "Lonesome Dreams" gets an intriguing cinematic treatment in this new video created by L.A. filmmaker Evan "Arms Race" Weinerman. Lord Huron founder Ben Schneider and Weinerman extend the fictional literary device surrounding the "origins" of the Lonesome Dreams album -- said to be the musings of the fictional fiction writer "George Ranger Johnson" -- by creating images and plot for the video that mirror Johnson's adventure tales. Make sense? Anyway, Lonesome Dreams was easily one of our favorite albums of 2012 and any chance we get to [...]
It's oddly appropos that the British 70's psychedelic and prog/rock label Harvest -- home to the original Pink Floyd albums -- be revived in just in time for The Olms , the latest reincarnation of L.A. alt-rocker Pete Yorn with new musical partner and country/pop revivalist J.D. King. Yorn's been pretty much all over the map in the dozen or so years since his fine debut musicforthemorningafter in 2001 -- but chameleon- like musical persona has always had a healthy shot of SoCal pop potion nostalgia and the jangle-poppin', sock-hoppin', moog-droppin' "Wanna Feel [...]
David Fendrick and Jonny Hooker are founders of Fossil Collective , a rather dusty-sounding moniker for a band that is quickly and quietly emerging at the forefront of the burgeoning U.K. folk/rock movement. This is new acoustic songcraft reimagined for the indie world. As we noted in our DC RADAR feature , Fossil Collective's stunning debut Tell Where I Lie (April 8, Dirty Hit UK) takes understatement to a sublime new stratosphere, turning one gorgeously rendered line after another to create songs that sound simultaneously [...]
Loose and playful are hardly terms you'd normally throw around when describing the music of Justin Vernon, the Grammy-winning, falsetto-wielding critical darling who makes soulful, introspective modern folk music with his band Bon Iver. So we can be taken aback just a bit when taking in Grownass Man (April 16, , the amusingly-titled and surprisingly rambunctious and ramshackle new album from Vernon (minus the falsetto this time) and his buds Phil Cook and Brian Moen as The Shouting Matches . While there are touches of Vernon's earnest thoughtfulness throughout the project, Grownass [...]
For those who might find gauzy acoustic dream pop just a little too raucous, may we present the Brooklyn-based Belle Mare -- London transplant Amelia Bushell and Thomas Servidone -- a duo whose languid, nocturnal alt/folk takes the dark and dreamy to a whole new somnambulant realm. One of the first things you realize when you dip your head into their debut EP The Boat of the Fragile Mind (April 9) is that Belle Mare's music doesn't really sound much like anything else you've heard. The production is equally spacious and disconcerting in [...]
There's hardly a shortage of folk/popping female singer/songwriters in Nashville -- or just about anywhere -- these days but we figure the long list of hopefuls and the highly competitive environment in Music City makes those that break out of the pack already clearing the "listen-worthy" hurdle. Kree Woods confirms that theory with Talking Underwater (April 9, Zodlounge) an album of bright and hook-filled songs that compare nicely with the works of Ingrid Michaelson and Sara Barreilles. The LP's title track, a song about the difficulty of communication when a relationship is [...]
Kazyak is the musical brainchild of Peter Frey, a Minneapolis-based a guitarist, pianist and studio bandleader whose original music falls somewhere between traditional singer/songwriting and progressive-styled, instrumental composition. There's also a distinct sense of improvisation that runs through the elaborately laid out themes in the perfectly-titled See The Forest, See The Trees (May 14) that gives Kazyak a loose, adventurous streak that redefines, in a way, any preconceptions of what we might think of as chamber/pop. Songs ebb and flow, build and subside as melodies fade and then appear again, Frey's fret work, a combination [...]
Safe to say that Hem can accomplish more in less than two and a half minutes than most bands can over the course of an entire album. "Seven Angels" is from the new Departure and Farewell , an album, we observed, that combines " stately, beautifully rendered folk hymns with what the NY Times calls 'the kind of film music that evokes prairie sunsets'"...Says the band's Dan Messé: "Country-folk, chamber-folk, Americana, alt-folk—these are all terms that have been applied to us in the past. I suppose [...]
Ruth Moody 's solo debut album The Garden ended up as one of our favorite albums of 2010, a sublime mix of modern folk songwriting, Moody's enticing voice and acoustic backing that delved deep into traditional Americana while still sounding fresh and new. As one of three members of the brilliantly harmonious neo-folk trio The Wailin' Jennys, Moody knows a thing or two about singing and songwriting and new solo project The Wilder Things (April 23, Red House) is an accomplished and completely winning step forward. Once again produced by [...]
For fifteen years singer/songwriter Denison Witmer has lived just off the mainstream musical grid, creating a half-dozen albums of low-keyed folk/pop -- what he terms "quiet music" -- and touring and recording with friends like Sufjan Stephens and Rosie Thomas. So it's revealing that Witmer would now release his seventh simply titled Denison Witmer (April 30, Asthmatic Kitty), the successor to last year's fine The Ones Who Wait . At some point in a creative musician's career there's a "taking stock" of one's path or journey -- [...]
Raised in Georgia on a musical diet of soul, country, blues and folk, Kristina Train is now happily settled in London where she released her second album Dark Black last fall, an LP we described as "a sumptuous and seductive collection of vintage-sounding pop." Train's remarkable voice is what makes her own music so irresistible and when she turns to covers, the effect is even more stunning. You may have heard Jackson Browne's "These Days" before but hearing Train's version -- both crystalline and soulful -- is like [...]
Kind of a slim week for new releases on Tuesday particularly after the hefty lists we ran through over the past few weeks. But there are, as always, a few standouts that you don't want to miss as you look for something interesting to titillate your external auditory canal. Hem has regrouped for their first new album of original material in years with an album that with an odd title for a comeback: Goodbye and Farewell . The vocally harmonious Texas duo David Beck and Paul Cauthier are back with their second album as Sons of [...]
Direct Current
Old Photos of Football Fans from 1900–1940
R.F.T.W.E. pt.2
HAERTS: “All The Days”
Song Diary / The Dig – Without Your Love
CONTEST – Rachael Yamagata @ The Mod Club – June 4, 2013
