Cradling an uncomplicated guitar, a man in trousers of artful proportion pours tender tales into your ear; my ear; the tubes-and-funnels ear of a retrofuturistc listening device. Plucking nylon strings as he sings of waitresses who gaze through checked café windows, weathered fishermen who cast lines under blue-grey skies, and beloved, untameable dogs who stretch their long legs too far from home, is the enigmatic Sweet Baboo: musician as mirage, great beautifier of the mundane; each of his songs an ode to the tragedy and the comedy and the magnificence of life’s minutiae, momentarily appreciated before the world goes spinning on.
Today Montreal duo Bibi Club is releasing a choir version of their song “Le matin,” in a new video directed by Yann-Manuel Hernandez. In a cozy living room, Helena Deland, Emilie Kahn, Estée Preda, Joséphine Rivard and several others lend their voices to harmonize with Adèle, while Gus Englehorn shares guitar duties with Nicolas Basque. “Le soleil et la mer,” Bibi Club’s critically acclaimed debut album, is now available via Secret City Records. The song “Le matin” has been added to the official playlist of France Inter, while the album just entered the Top 30 of the NACC 200 in the United States, a tour de force for an album mostly in French.
On record, she produces intricate and lush sonic environments in her own little corner of the heavy music scene. She describes her sound as "Heaven Metal," AKA emotional music about devastation: catharsis. Johnston writes primarily about grief, and the many faces it can inhabit.
To convey the almost 20-year career of the band is to take a deep dive into all forms of electronic music - from pop to house to disco to acid - along with nods to 1970s Germany, psychedelia, funk and art pop. And that’s exactly what Slight Variations does, while also capturing the duality of a band who can craft meticulously constructed studio music as seamlessly as they can lock into unpredictable yet infectious grooves on stage. Within the wide variation this record displays, "New Body Language" incorporates 1970s West African funk and high life around a house music template.
"It's a delight to hear that, over 20 years into Lewis and Best's partnership, they are pushing their recognizable but rarely formulaic sound into fresh territory." - AllMusic
"F&M hit peak funkiness on this fat-free blent of Krautrock pulses and pop melodies." **** 4 Stars - MOJO
"Slight Variations reaches back into the archive and out into the void in equal measure, splicing the best bits of the group's enviable catalogue of linear, krautrock driven grooves with just enough off-piste eccentricities to keep things fresh." - DJ Mag
In the infamous words of LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, Florida indie-pop band Driveaway have metaphorically “sold their turntables and bought guitars” on today’s release of “Wishing Well.” Stepping out from their typical synth-driven indie pop earworms, today’s single dials up the angst and let’s the guitar and drums take center stage. Lyrically, the song documents too many days bleeding together from putting on a front for others and where that breaking point lies – Stream.
Santino Gonzales, who records music under his nickname “Tino,” is an artist from Los Lunas, New Mexico. Moved by the landscape of his childhood, Tino uses ufology, adobe, & radio to investigate cultural attitudes around the fear of alienation & the desire for connection. Lately, Tino has been exploring how these interests relate to ideas about home.
Sonically, Tino uses improvisation and looping to create soundscapes inspired by times past. Fractured melodies weave in and out of one another, punctuated by radio static and home recordings. This sound collage, with instruments both old and new, situates Tino among contemporary sound artists and ambient musicians.
While inspiration comes from many places, Gonzales’ music could join a mixtape with the likes of Grouper, The Caretaker, Windy & Carl, or videogame soundtracks like Kentucky Route Zero.
“The 90s references work, but DOWNGIRL work harder. They make this one sizzle.” 4 / 5 (Dave Ruby Howe, Triple J) [About ‘Beauty Queen’]
“Massive riffs and destroy-everything vocals make for grungy goodness. I really like how this explodes after 2 min mark. Keen to hear more.” 4 / 5 (Ryan Egan, Triple J) [About ‘Beauty Queen’]
'Beauty Queen' music video played on MTV
“‘Twas the night before Mardi Gras and all through the house, not a creature was stirring… until the first notes of Downgirl, when every living thing within earshot woke the fuck up and wondered, reasonably, whether the world was ending. A fearsome set, where everything is inside out, an impossible puzzle of things that don’t make sense but just do. It’s like enjoying getting a hammer to back of the head. What utter fun.” (The Underground Stage)
“Downgirl tore it up like a wrecking machine made of the Runaways and Bikini Kill” (Brian Giffin - Loud Mag)
Lo-fi Hero is modern music made on analog gear: old and new, loop-based and performed, to create a new sonic landscape. Our project is based on taking live performances, then turning them into samples, and resampling the parts in inventive ways.
The track “No Appetite” was recorded, then exported to an MPC, then sampled back into the DAW. It should feel like longing, and a foreboding heartache.
People Take Pictures pokes fun at our obsession with capturing our lives instead of living them. We all do this, right? Bedouine and I are constantly catching each other in these moments, and we thought it'd be fun to cover a song that takes aim directly at them. This song was originally released in 1968 and it sure has snowballed in relevance since...
Axis Neptune is a project created by Josh Cotterill, a producer from Scarborough, UK. His music is heavily inspired by soul, jazz, indie, and synth pop, creating falsetto-driven songs with live instruments and deep grooves. He learnt to play guitar at the ago of 7, after becoming obsessed with Jimi Hendrix and John Frusciante.
"Rubblebucket is the inspired music of singer and saxophonist Kalmia Traver, trumpeter and singer Alex Toth and their wailing band of big-sounding fun."- NPR
“The indie rock Miami Sound Machine” - ROLLING STONE
“joyful, sparkly pop zest” - Paste
“A uniquely New York anxiety, erupting into a cacophony of sounds." - FADER
“The beautiful sounds of Rubblebucket” Kerrie Cosh - BBC Radio 1 - Future Artists
Live Dates 02/11/22: Brooklyn, NY @ Public Records [sold out] 30/11/22: Hamden, CT @ Space Ballroom 01/12/22: Portland, ME @ State Theatre 02/12/22: Burlington, VT @ Higher Ground 03/12/22: Woodstock, NY @ Bearsville Theater
“The Ember Glows is just such a time-shifting device powered by the spiraling lead lines reminiscent of the early Cult sound, woven of the same ornate intricacies as Echo and The Bunnymen, as anthemic as The Mission at their most bombastic best" ~ The Big Takeover
"At the intersection between post-punk intensity, the romanticism of new wave and trippiness of psychedelic rock... their sound is more akin to late 20th century northern England" ~ The Spill Magazine
"Moodily brooding to dynamically vibrant songs that are drenched in ruminative baritone vocals, darkly shining guitars, low-register bass lines, and pushing drum beats" ~ The Record Stache
Montreal-based indie rock / post-punk quartet THE EMBER GLOWS (formed of members of Montreal-based indie artists ROOM CONTROL, REPO, SCENE NOIR and CITYLAKE) will soon release their 'Where Spirits Play' EP, teasing this 4-track offering with the single 'The Mirror'. Frontman MARTIN SAINT says, "This song is about how most nations carry skeletons in their closets - even the so-called peaceful ones. Sooner or later, we must face the weight of history and the past hits us hard collectively... The lyrics are only a personal reflection that came about some two years ago after some of my work in association with APTN (Aboriginal Peoples Television Network), but prior to the ghastly Canadian Residential School mass grave revelations."
The album is the result of a highly collaborative effort & was co-produced by the band and their longtime engineer, Neil Wogensen (Valley Queen) and mixed by Jason Kingsland (Deerhunter, Belle & Sebastian). The band and Wogensen were living together when the pandemic struck and felt compelled to dive deep into their imaginations as a form of escape.
