Category: women who kick ass

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Los Angeles’ Bass Race Releases a Space-Age Take on Neo-Soul

Los Angeles-based indie pop act Bass Race — Steven Mertens and Laura Benack — features a highly accomplished duo: Mertens formed his first band Satan’s Rats when he was 13 with elementary school friends. That project led to two decades of tours and collaborations. After studying Studio Composition at SUNY Purchase, Mertens joined The Moldy Peaches in 2001 — and he eventually went on to direct videos for an eclectic array of artists including Regina Spektor, Lil Peep, Benee and Sheryl Crow. He has also collaborated with Blood Orange and Here We Go Magic. Benack, who started playing piano when she turned four comes from a deeply musical family: her grandfather was a bandleader, her mom is a vocalist and her father and brother are jazz musicians.

Mertens and Benack met in New York back in 2010. They started dating and immediately started a musical partnership, centered around their love of their craft — and of course, each other. With the help of friends and Benack’s brother on trumpet, they made a bunch of music videos, including for “Clowns Everywhere.” Determined to use every bit of their collective talents, they began combining their music with Mertens’ visual art in 2019 with Bass Race’s Instagram page, which fans have described as “magical” and “super amazing mega fantabulous.”

While the duo cites yacht rock, synth pop, jazz, funk and soul as influencing their sound and aesthetic, their latest single “Chasing the Sun” is a warm and easygoing retro-futuristic, neo-soul number featuring an infectious two-step inducing groove featuring twinkling Rhodes, shimming rhythm guitar, stuttering boom bap-like drumming, a sinuous bass line. Adding to the easy-going yet retro-futuristic vibes, Benack soulfully and suggestively sings lyrics full of playful space age double entendres and references.

“We were in Pittsburgh a couple years ago over Christmas to see my family and we visited our good friend Pete Mudge (Nice Rec) in his studio along with our friends Laura Herrmann and Blane Britt (GrandEar),” the duo recalls in press notes.”There was a snow storm, and it was freezing. Once we were inside, we started to warm up and Pete played us some beats he had been working on. When we heard the track that would soon become ‘Chasing the Sun,’ we all started smiling right away. The creativity started flowing and within a couple hours, I had recorded all the vocals and Steven laid down some guitars. The gray weather definitely inspired the song title, but the song lyrics detail the arduous process of overcoming writer’s block and chasing creative inspiration.”

The duo created a space-age visualizer that follows Benack and an amorphous, cosmic being traveling through space and time in a spaceship — and there’s the sense that our space traveling duo is grooving through the cosmos, as you might be while playing the song.

The duo’s latest album Tender Vittles is slated for a March 19, 2021 release.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Two from Acclaimed Belgian Post Punk Act Whispering Sons

Initially started in 2013 as a hobby for its then Leuven, Belgium-based founding members Kobe Linjen (guitar), Sander Hermans (synths), Lander Paesan (bass) and Sander Pelsmaekers (drums), the rising Brussels-based post punk act Whispering Sons have evolved a great deal. As the story goes, in search of a singer they recruited Fenne Kuppens, who at that point had been uploading covers of bands like Slowdive to Soundcloud. Already fostering deep ambition, she rigorously prepared. “I’d always wanted to sing in a band, but I never had friends who made music, they weren’t in my surroundings,” Kuppens recalls in press notes. “They were talking about this post-punk thing that I’d never heard of before, so I had to read into it. I could see myself in it, I felt the music.”

Leuven is a quiet, European university town and its mainstream-leaning music scene didn’t connect with Kuppens. But after a year studying abroad in Prague, where she immersed herself in the city’s DIY scene, Kuppens was galvanized — and inspired. “I made friends there who did things with their lives! There was a guy who had a DIY record label and who made music, all from his bedroom. I thought, if they can do this, why can’t we at least try?” Kuppens recalls. As soon as she returned, she relocated to Brussels. The remaining members of the band — Linjin, Hermans, Pelsmaekers and Paesan — later joined her. And immediately, the band quickly began honing their live show and sound.

Inspired by Xiu Xiu and Chinawoman, Kuppens distinctive, low register vocal style emerged early. “I started to feel more comfortable on stage, to express myself more rather than just singing a song,” she says. “I started feeling the music more, identifying more with the sounds and what I was doing.” Kuppens stage presence became known for being transfixing and trancelike, defined by compulsive and movements. “People have said it looks like I’m fighting my demons onstage, I guess there’s some truth in that,” she says.

During the summer of 2015, the band went into the studio to record material. “Fenne was really pushing us saying ‘We have to go for it, not just make another demo,” Whispering Sons’ Kobe Linjen recalls in press notes. The result was their goth-inspired debut EP, 2015’s Endless Party EP. Just a few months after its initial release through Wool-E-Tapes, the Brussels-based post-punk act won Humo’s Rock Rally, one of Belgium’s most prestigious music competitions. With the increased attention and accolades came bigger shows, bigger tours across Europe and larger crowds. “People started to expect things from us. We had to adapt quickly,” Linjen adds.

With the demands of a growing profile, the band began setting new, more ambitions targets for themselves. While writing new material for the increasingly longer sets their increased status required, they began to grow tired of the limits of post-punk and eagerly sought ways to push past them as much as possible. “We wanted to evolve, we wanted to attract larger audiences and not just play in one scene,” Kobe continues.

The Belgian post-punk quintet released two 7 inches, 2016’s “Performance”/”Strange Identities” and 2017’s “White Noise” — while going through a lineup change: the band’s friend Tuur Vanderborne replaced Paesan on bass. The band’s Micha Volders and Bert Vliegen-produced 2018 full-length debut Image was released through Cleopatra Records here in the States and Smile Records throughout the rest of the world. Recorded over a ten day period at Waimes, Belgium’s GAM Studios, Image found the band crafting a dark, brooding blend of experimental and frenetic post-punk that expressed the alienation, loneliness and anxiety that each individual member felt when they relocated to Brussels, Belgium’s largest city.

Image garnered praise from music press across the globe — and it amassed millions of streams across digital service providers. Before pandemic-related quarantines, lockdowns and restrictions, the Brussels-based post punk quintet was establishing themselves for a ferocious, must-see live show while sharing stages with the likes of The Murder Capital, Patti Smith, The Soft Moon, Croatian Armor and Editors. “We were very happy with Image, and at that point it was the best thing we could have made,” Fenne Kuppens says. “But from the moment we finished it we started to look at it in a critical way. ‘This is something we should do again. This is something we don’t like.’ So very quickly we found the direction we wanted to go in for the next album.”

Last summer, the members of Whispering Sons retreated to the Ardennes to work on new material. And in those writing sessions, the band took what they believed were the strongest part of their earliest work and refined them even further, with a focus on their greatest strength — sheer, unpretentious intensity. “We tried to create an album that’s more direct and more dynamic. More in your face,” Kuppens says.

Interestingly, Kuppens can trace the origins of the lyrics for the band’s highly-anticipated sophomore album Several Others from one sentence she’d scribbled in a notebook “Always be someone else instead of yourself.” “It’s terrible advice,” Kuppens says in press notes. “But it resonated with me and my personal ambitions.” She stared writing about her uncompromising perfectionism that although was partly responsible for the band’s initial success, was becoming stifling and overwhelming. “I was at a stage where it was becoming unhealthy. You always think things have to be better, that you can always do more.”

Recently, the band released two companion singles “Satantango” and “Surgery” off the forthcoming single. Both tracks see the band ambitiously pushing the ferocious and dirvintensity that helped win them international attention to the limits — while somehow delicately balancing fragility and vulnerability. Centered around anxious and propulsive instrumentation, both songs evokes unease of someone hopelessly trapped in stasis, possibly of their own making — and the slow-burning, creeping unease of someone struggling with their own role with their misery. Hell is often other people; but hell can be your own mind, too.

Along with the record, which is slated for a June 18, 2021 release through [PIAS] Recordings, the band will be releasing each single with a corresponding live session to be compiled and released as a live film.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New VIdeo: Tia Gostelow Releases a Swooning and Heartfelt Ode to Love

With the release of 2018’s full-length debut album Thick Skin, Mackay, Australia-born, Brisbane-based singer/songwriter Tia Gostelow exploded into the national and international scenes. Thick Skin featured smash hit album single “Strangers,” which was certified Gold after amassing over 12 million Spotify streams. And as a result of “Strangers” commercial success, Gostelow’s full-length debut landed a Triple J album feature, a Queensland Music Award for Album Of The Year, opening slots for Ball Park Music, Frightened Rabbit, The Rubens and Gomez and sets at Falls Festival and SXSW. Thick Skin also landed a Triple J album feature, which may have led to her appearing on the station’s covers series Like A Version.

Gostelow went on her first national headlining tour back in 2019. which she followed up with tours across the States, the UK and European Union. While on tour, the rising Aussie artist started work on her sophomore album, last year’s Oscar Dawson-produced Chrysalis. Chrysalis is a bold and decided change in sonic direction that sees Gostelow moving away from the guitar-based indie rock and folk sound her breakthrough full-length debut and crafting 11 songs of lush, 80s inspired, danceable yet thoughtful synth-based pop.

“Before the songs were even finished I knew I wanted Oscar Dawson to produce the record. He’s a gun and I was obsessed with all of the music coming out that he was producing,” Gostelow continues. “I met up with him in Brisbane and we instantly got along so well. Going into record this album I obviously knew a bit more than I did recording Thick Skin and I was a bit more inclined to have more involvement musically. I played bass, piano and synth on some songs which was really important to me and I’m so grateful that Oscar was so patient with me. He really pushed me to go to places vocally and musically that I probably wouldn’t have done without him which I am also super grateful for!”

“Two Lovers,” Chrysalis’ latest single is an anthemic, 80s synth pop-inspired, escapist confection centered around shimmering synth arpeggios reminiscent of Stevie Nicks’ “Stand Back,” an infectious and enormous hook, thumping beats, an atmospheric and dreamy bridge, scorching guitars and Gostelow’s ethereal yet plaintive vocals. Much like The Money War-written “Always,” “Two Lovers” is focused on affairs of the heart — and rooted in the sort of earnest songwriting that can only come from hard-fought and even harder-won personal experience: in the case of “Two Lovers,” the song’s archetypical central couple is desperately fighting to keep their relationship intact during a particularly difficult patch.

Directed by Dom Gould, the recently released, heartfelt video for “Two Lovers” follows a series of couples, who are different ages, different gender expressions and from vastly different walks of life and highlights the best moments of being with someone you love. And often it’s the most simple and banal moments that mean the most — and are the most memorable and importnat. “We wanted to show couples from all walks of life in different scenes, everyone’s story is so different and we wanted to highlight that,” Gostelow says. ” It felt really nice to showcase other stories within a music video instead of it being mostly about me, this song was meant to resonate with people going through things like long distance and being away from loved ones so it only felt right to showcase the best parts of being with the person you love.”

singer/songwriters by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Rising Brooklyn-based Artist Quelle Rox Releases a Slow-burning and Shimmering Single

Raquelle, a.k.a. Rocky is a rising Brooklyn-based Latinx singer/songwriter and producer. After graduating from my alma mater, NYU, the rising Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter, delved into production with her solo recording project Quelle Rox, which finds Raquelle striving to open doors for female Latinx producers, while specializing in a sound that she has dubbed “soundtracks catered to dreamy, nostalgic memories of the past with a bad bitch twist.”

Since the release of her debut single “Dream Daises” in 2018, the rising Brooklyn artist has had material featured across the blogosphere including Ladygunn, Earmilk, Notion, and HighClouds. Herr work has appeared on Spotify New Music Friday Latin, Spotify Fresh Finds, Spotify Discovery Weekly, Spotify Latinx IndieRising, H&M Global and a number of other playlists. Adding to a growing profile, Quelle Rox has opened for the likes of Homeshake — and she’s headlined at Baby’s All Right.

Continuing upon that momentum, Quelle Rox’s highly-anticipated debut EP Lilac Rush is slated for an April 23, 2021 release. The EP’s latest single “No Surprises” is a lush slow-burning Quiet Storm-inspired, lo-fi fever dream, fueled by a bittersweet mix of longing nostalgia, heartache, betrayal and anger that brings early Washed Out and Prince to mind: the track is all shimmering and reverb-drenched guitars, sinuous bass lines, skittering typewriter keyboard-like beats with Quelle Rox’s achingly plaintive vocals.

“I originally wrote this song a few years ago to a ‘type beat’ I found online that I was just playing around with for fun while in my feelings,” the rising Brooklyn-based artist recalls in press notes. “I came across the track randomly in my archive during quarantine and even years later, it still resonated with me and resembled the storyline within the whole EP – a longing for what could have been and also a fuck you. So then I hit up my producer and collaborator Identite Crisis and asked if he could take the demo and turn it into its own version, since I wanted to include it on the EP. Shortly after he sent me this fire new beat and I ended up just keeping the old vocals and boom, ‘No Surprises’ was born.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

Live Footage: L’Impèratice Performs the Slinky and Retro-Futuristic “Anamolie bleue”

L’Impératice — founder Charles de Boisseguin (keys), Hagni Gown (keys), David Gaugué (bass), Achille Trocellier (guitar), Tom Daveau (drums) and Flore Benguigui (vocals) — is a risingParis-based electro pop sextet that formed back in 2012. And since their formation, the French electro pop act has been extremely busy and prolific: within their first three years together, they released 2012’s self-titled debut EP., 2014’s Sonate Pacifique EP and 2015’s Odyssée EP.

In 2016, L’imperatrice released a re-edited, remixed and slowed down version of Odyssée, L’Empreruer, which was inspired by a fan mistakenly playing a vinyl copy of Odyssée at the wrong speed. L’Impératice followed that up with a version of Odysseé featuring arrangements centered around violin, cello and acoustic guitar. During the summer of 2017, the Parisian electro pop act signed to microqlima records, who released that year’s Séquences EP.

2018’s full-length debut Matahari featured “Erreur 404,” which they performed on the French TV show Quotidien. Since then, the Parisian electro pop act have released an English language version of Matahari — and they’ve been busy working on the highly anticipated Renaud Letang co-produced sophomore album Taku Tsubo. Slated for a March 26, 2021 release through their longtime label home, the album derives its name from the medical term for broken heart syndrome, takutsubo syndrome (蛸 壺, from Japanese “octopus trap”). The condition usually manifests itself as deformation of the heart’s left ventricle caused by severe emotional or physical stress — i.e., the death of a loved one, an intense argument with someone you care about, a breakup, a sudden illness or the like. So, in case you were a wondering: yes, an untreated broken heart can actually kill you.

Over the course of the past year, I’ve written about two of Taku Tsubo’s released singles:

“Voodoo?,” a slinky disco strut featuring a propulsive groove, layers of arpeggiated synths, Nile Rodgers-like funk guitar and Benguigui’s sultry, come-hither vocals. Interestingly, one of the few songs written and sung in English on the album, the track features a narrator, who attends a party and decides to leave early to read Torture Magazine instead.
“Peur des filles,” another slinky disco floor strut that’s a scathing and sarcastic ode to the differences between men and women that points out how shitty men are.

Album opener “Anomalie bleue” continues a remarkable run of infectious and slinky disco-tinged pop. Centered around an expansive song structure, featuring shimming and glistening synth arpeggios, skittering four-on-the-floor, a strutting wah-wah pedaled bass line, squiggling guitar lines and Benguigui’s come hither vocals, “Anonmalie bleue” is one part Giorgio Moroder-like disco, one part Kraftwerk-like retro-futurism, one part Shalamar-like funk within an expansive, mind-bending song structure. But just under the dance floor friendly grooves, the song’s narrator charmingly describes love-at-first site with a beautiful, blue wearing anomaly that suddenly appears in a lobby full of drab suited con-men, grifters and CEOs and bored business travelers.

Shot late last year as a part of a longer concert stream, this slick and intimately shot footage captures the Parisian sextet wearing Buck Rogers-like outfits while playing their funky grooves.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: People Museum Releases a Brooding Yet Club Friendly Banger

People Museum is a rising New Orleans-based art pop/dance pop act. Inspired by Afro-beat, hip-hop, choral, marching band music, the duo — Jeremy Phipps (trombone, production) and Claire Givens (vocals, keys) — can trace their origins back to 2016: Phipps and Givens were eager to start a music project that incorporated the feelings and vibes of their hometown. Founded with the expressed intention of bringing nature to the future, the New Orleans-based duo’s sound and aesthetic seamlessly meshes their hometown’s beloved and world famous brass band tradition with the Crescent City’s synth heavy, progressive underground scene.

Givens and Phipps’ latest effort I Could Only See The Night EP is slated for an April 9, 2021 release through Community Records and Strange Daisy Records. The EP features a mix of songs made during pandemic-related quarantines last year with songs the duo initially created during the first few months of the duo’s collaboration. Thematically, the EP is reportedly a contemplation on our past, how we are making sense of where we have ended — and as a result, learning how to be more malleable with our visions of what the future could and should be. The songs are an attempt to offer a bit of light in our very dark times while opening space for the listener to reflect, dance or feel joy.

“Forever,” I Could Only See The Night’s latest single is a Larry Levan-era house music influenced club banger that’s full of brooding, late night regret and trepidation centered around shimmering Giorgio Moroder-like synth arpeggios, skittering beats, Phipps’ mournful and melodic trombone played through reverb and delay pedal and Givens’ achingly plaintive vocals. You can literally feel the song’s narrator spiraling into indecision, regret and despair — although they’re desperately trying not to do so.

Directed by Riley Teahan, the recently released video is a brooding fever dream following a series of women trapped within their own thoughts, late at night. Teahan, the video’s director on the video:

“flashing light, thoughts that keep you up at night:
when I think about forever my head starts to spin.
caught in a cycle, the mind is a spiral staircase.
how long did you know it was time to go
before you decided to leave?

“‘Forever’ is a song about cycles and liberation. I know well the feeling of spiraling, how easily you can lose yourself. I asked women to embody a complicated moment of escape, flee, freedom, run, don’t look back.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Hungarian Electro Pop Duo Paperdeer Teams Up With Böbe on a Sleek and Futuristic Single and Visual

Paperdeer is an emerging Budapest-based electronic music production and artist duo featuring Benjámin Kiss and Norbert Biró. The duo will be releasing a new album this year, an album that was written and recorded during pandemic-related restrictions and lockdowns. The forthcoming album’s latest single “Fortress,” which features longtime collaborator, Hungarian vocalist Böbe Szécsi is a sleek and slickly produced bit of electro pop featuring layered arpeggiated and twinkling synths, atmospheric electronics, skittering beats, Szécsi’s plaintive vocals and a soaring hook with an expansive song structure. Although the song is bracingly chilly, the song is rooted in the tense uncertainty of our moment, with a pent-up frustration and desperation for necessary change — right now.

“It has been an endeavor in distant music-making,” Paperdeer’s Benjámin Kiss says about their creative process in press notes. “Norbert sent me the initial beats a year ago, and I fell in love with it. So, ever since, we have been going back and forth with the ideas until the song came together. We approached the vocal from two directions and then really completed the tune when we worked out the lyrics.”

“The lyrics of ‘Fortress’ can be interpreted in many ways. In my opinion, it is a cry for help,” Böbe Szécsi says in press notes. “It is enough if you look around: climate change, COVID-19, and political tension are the things that we are faced with and also the burden of uncertainty that it suggests. In the middle of this chaos, I would just want to shout at the top of my lungs to make it stop and to seek meaningful changes otherwise, the consequences will be fatal.” Norbert Biró adds that the song described a feeling of drifting and helplessness which comes around when you are so lost and so little in a massive crowd. You have no other option but to follow because they allow no say in the directions. Böbe, the young woman in the music video, embodies just that.

Directed by Márton István Szabó, who also collaborated on the song’s lyrics, the recently released video features his own technique of reversed digital projection. “We took pictures with a black backdrop, and we made them half-transparent,” Szabó explains. “In this state, we layered them digitally with colors to enhance the character’s body and clothing. My technical approach tied in with the meaning of this song: we mixed drone and studio footages just as we mixed fiction with reality in the story while also portraying the exhaustion that comes from escapism.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Black History Month: Queen Latifah

Today is February 28, 2021. It’s the last day of February and of Black History Month. Throughout the past month, I’ve featured Black artists across a wide and eclectic array of greens and styles — with the hopes that this series will serve as a sort of primer on the Black experience and on Black music.

While we’re at it, let’s remember the following:

Black culture is American culture — and Black music is American music.
America’s greatest and beloved contributions to the world are Black music styles — the blues, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and hip-hop.
Black art matters.
Black lives matter — all of them, all of the time.

I have to show more love to the ladies. I immediately thought of the ridiculously talented, charismatic and beautiful Queen Latifah.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Black History Month: Big Mama Thornton

Today is February 27, 2021. It’s the 27th day of Black History Month. And as I’ve mentioned throughout this series, I’ve been featuring Black artists across a wide and eclectic array of genres and styles — with the hopes that it’ll be a bit of a primer on the Black experience and on Black music.

Of course, I hope that these posts will serve as a reminder of these very important facts:

Black culture is American culture — and Black music is American music.
America’s greatest and beloved contributions to the world are Black music styles — the blues, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and hip-hop.
Black art matters.
Black lives matter — all of them, all of the time.

It’s February 27, 2021. The 27th day of Black History Month, which is rapidly coming to a close. Of course, let’s not forget Big Mama Thornton. Without her, Elvis wouldn’t have one of his signature hits. And she just kicked ass and took names in her own brassy way.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Black History Month: Donna Summer

Today is February 26, 2021. It’s the 26th day of Black History Month. And as I’ve mentioned throughout this series, I’ve been featuring Black artists across a wide and eclectic array of genres and styles — with the hopes that it’ll be a bit of a primer on the Black experience and on Black music.

Of course, I hope that these posts will serve as a reminder of these very important facts:

Black culture is American culture — and Black music is American music.
America’s greatest and beloved contributions to the world are Black music styles — the blues, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and hip-hop.
Black art matters.
Black lives matter — all of them, all of the time.

As a small child, my dear mother played Donna Summer obsessively — to the point that I remember the songs forwards and backwards. But seriously, where would pop music and dance music be without the legendary Queen of Disco? Also, goodness that voice!