JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to Prince.
New Audio: Aussie Indie Pop Artist Phebe Starr Shares Sultry and Yearning “Everything”
Aussie indie pop singer/songwriter Phebe Starr first emerged onto the Australian scene with her breakthrough 2013 single “Alone With You,” a track that grabbed the attention of the national music industry and received heavy rotation on Triple J. Since then, Starr has been extremely busy: her work has appeared on Spotify editorial playlists globally including New Music Friday, Fresh Finds, Young and Free, Indie Arrivals, Indie Pop, Women of Pop and thousands of fan generated playlists, which has resulted in millions of streams. Her work has appeared in ad campaigns for Sony, Samsung Galaxy — and in HBO’s Ballers.
She has written tracks for some of the world’s biggest and beloved artists and bands. And adding to a growing profile both nationally and internationally, Starr has shared stages with Of Monsters + Men, Cub Sport, and The Paper Kites among a list of others.
Starr’s long-awaited full-length debut Heavy Metal Flower Petal is slated for a March 11, 2022 release. The album reportedly reveals an artist, who is more in touch with herself than ever before. Arguably, some of her most liberating and honest work to date, the album’s material was written in the wake of divorcing a man she married as a 21-year-old. Featuring guest spots from Cloud Control‘s and VLOSSOM‘s Alister Wright, Xavier Dunn, and Japanese Wallpaper, the album sees Starr peeling back the layers and exploring new territory and depths within her, showing a contrast between the toughness (the “heavy metal”) and the softness (the flower petal) that exists within her life.
“The whole album is about my process of letting myself feel things that I was afraid to,” she says. “It’s about letting myself be tender and vulnerable, learning how to incorporate the feminine into my narrative,” Starr explains.
Heavy Metal Flower Petal‘s latest single “Everything” is a slinky bop centered around a a sinuous bass line, Starr’s sultry and plaintive vocals, finger snaps, strummed acoustic guitar and a soaring hook. Seemingly indebted to Stevie Nicks and Still Corners, “Everything” sees Starr examining the ways in which the quest and desire for love can often lead us to strange and unfamiliar terrain.
“A lot of my songs start from a visual place in my head,” says Starr, “with ‘Everything,’ I imagined myself walking through the dark matter of the universe as if getting lost in the gravitational pull of a black hole. That feeling was foreign and exhilarating to me, like the way you feel when falling in love.”
Anna Stubbs is a London-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, best known for being one-half of forward-thinking London-based nu jazz/broken beat act Brotherly. Stubbs steps out into the limelight as a solo artist with her solo recording Kinzoogianna.
Stubbs’ Kinzoogianna full-length debut Gold For The Hungry Souls is slated for an August release through Brotherly/Kudos Records. Featuring a backing band of Rob Mullarkey (bass) and Richard Spaven (drums), Gold For The Hungry Souls will be comprised of “an epic, nu-jazz, soul collection of nine, quirky and memorable songs with hooky, unexpected grooves and harmonies,” according to Stubbs.
“Cinnamon Bun,” Gold For The Hungry Souls‘ first single is a dazzling mix of Quiet Storm piano-led soul centered around Stubbs’ easy-going powerhouse vocals, twinkling synths within an expansive, mind-bending song structure held together with some razor sharp hooks. Lyrically and thematically, the song captures life’s small joys — getting up in the morning next to a lover, after a night of lovemaking, coffee and sticky, sweet cinnamon buns and so on with a loving specificity.
New Video: Los Bitchos Share a Delightfully Bizarre Video Game Inspired Visual for “The Link Is About To Die”
Rising London-based instrumental outfit Los Bitchos — Australian-born, London-based Serra Petale (guitar); Uruguayan-born, London-based Agustina Ruiz (keytar); Swedish-born, London-based Josefine Jonsson (bass) and London-born and-based Nic Crawshaw (drums) — can trace their origins to meeting at various late-night parties and through mutual friends. The rising British-based band also features individual members with different upbringings, who have developed a unique, retro-futuristic sound that blends elements of Peruvian chicha, Argentine cumbia, Turkish psych and surf rock, as well the music each individual member grew up with:
- The Uruguayan-born Ruiz had a Latin-American music collection that the members of the band fell in love with.
- The Swedish-born Jonsson “brings a touch of out of control pop,” her bandmates often joke.
- Aussie-born Serra Petale is deeply inspired by her mother’s 70s Anatolian rock records.
- And the London-born Crawshaw played in a number of local punk bands before joining Los Bitchos.
“Coming from all these different places,” Los Bitchos’ Serra Petale says, “it means we’re not stuck in one genre and we can rip up the rulebook a bit when it comes to our influences.”
Now, if you’ve been frequenting this site over the past handful of months, you might recall that Los Bitchos’ highly anticipated Alex Kapranos-produced full-length debut, Let The Festivities Begin! officially dropped today. Recorded at Gallery Studios, Let The Festivities Begin! sees the London-based instrumental outfit further establishing their reputation for crafting maximalist and trippy, Technicolor, instrumental party starting jams — with a cinematic quality.
The album’s celebratory title is something you might say while toasting dear friends, families and even strangers at a gathering — and hopefully at the of this horrible period of despair and uncertainty, as a way to usher in a period of carefree debauchery. “It’s about being together and having a really good time,” Los Bitchos say in press notes.
In the lead-up to Let The Festivities Begin!‘s I’ve managed to write about three of the album’s singles:
- “Las Panteras” a funky, mind-bending jam featuring shimmering synths bongos, cowbell, cabasa and wiry post punk meets Nile Rodgers and surf rock-like guitars and a sinuous bass line.
- “Good to Go,” another mind-bending, genre-blurring composition that begins with a decidedly Western intro with shimmering and reverb-drenched guitar twang before quickly morphing into a a trippy yet chilled out Latin funk meets Turkish psych affair with glistening synths, handclaps and a blazing guitar solo.
- “Pista (Fresh Start),” a slick and trippy synthesis of chicha, cumbia and psych rock featuring looping guitars and dance floor friendly Latin rhythms.
To celebrate the release of their debut album, the rising British quartet shared Let The Festivities Begin!‘s fourth and latest single, “The Link Is About to Die,” which continues a run of trippy, party friendly grooves centered around glistening and looping guitar lines, twinkling synths and shuffling polyrhythm.
The recently released digitally animated, video game-inspired visual for “The Link Is About to Die” was completed over the course of a “4-day visual/video jam” between creators Adam Abdelkader Lenox, Julie Amouzegar Kim, Alexander Turovsky, Jan Rosenbauer, Pamier Hilal and Severin Most. The video features Animal Crossing-like video game avatars of the band getting sucked into a dark universe, where they have to battle a “sexy fish” creature. They celebrate their victory over the sexy fish, by drinking some mind-bending tequila and playing their instruments on the back of an enormous bird. The video is a hilariously bizarre and playful romp through space, time — and video game baddies.
Throwback: Black History Month: Janet Jackson
JOVM’s WIlliam Ruben Helms celebrates Black History — and pays tribute to Janet Jackson.
Throwback: Black History Month: Donna Summer
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to Donna Summer.
Throwback: Black History Month: Chuck Berry
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to the legendary Chuck Berry.
Seth Olinsky is a singer/songwriter, guitarist, composer, producer and studio owner best known as the co-founder and lead vocalist of acclaimed, underground, experimental noise folk outfit Akron/Family. He’s also known as the creative mastermind behind the equally acclaimed project Cy Dune, a project that has found Olinsky exploring the blues, 50s rock and 60s/70s photo-punk through his unique lens.
Olinsky’s various projects have displayed a post-genre approach in which he collages several different genres simultaneously to create multiple meanings while purposely juxtaposing authentic and pure songwriting sincerity with self aware meta-meaning and pranksterism.
His latest Cy Dune effort Against Face is slated for a March 3, 2022 release through Lightning Studios. Clocking in at a breakneck 18 minutes, the album is a meta-punk blast through 20th Century art school punk forms mashed together.
Last month, I wrote about album single and title track “Against Face” a buzzing and mischievous, mosh pit friendly mash-up of Bob Dylan and The Stooges self-titled album — in particular “No Fun.” Against Face‘s third and latest single “Disorientation (Cut Up)” is a dazzling and mind-bending synthesis of angular Wire-like post punk, house music, and New Order/Manchester sound centered around enormous, rousingly anthemic hooks paired with Olinsky delivering dance floor friendly cliches in a series of non-sequiturs before the song breaks sown and remixes itself.
“It is sort of a meta take on song form that folds the remix into the song itself.” notes Olinsky. “I was also inspired by how House music samples guitars, and wanted to build a punk song that not only had dance elements, but was inherently self sampling as well. This approach leant itself lyrically to the themes of modern, fragmented consciousness but in bite size, iconic statements more inspired by the glossy, abstracted surface simplicity of Ed Ruscha’s or John Baldersarri’s artwork than by any narrative.”
New Video: The Acharis Share a Trippy Video for Brooding “False Positive”
Oakland-based shoegazer outfit The Acharis — life partners Shaun Wagner and Mila Puccini — features Bay Area music scene vets, who have played in a number of different bands over the years. Back in 2015, Wagner and Puccini decided to create something together, that was entirely theirs.
2017’s full-length debut, Lost in the Vortex saw the pair sharing vocal and songwriting duties, as well as playing every instrument on the album. The duo’s John Fryer-produced sophomore album Blue Sky/Grey Heaven finds Wagner and Puccini collaborating with a newly recruited live band crafting a much darker sound with a studio polish that stylistically ranges from fragile noise pop to fuzzed out shoeaze. The album’s material also sees the band delivering a wider spectrum of moods.
“False Positive,” Blue Sky/Grey Heaven‘s first single is a brooding and decidedly 120 Minutes MTV era-like anthem centered around fuzzy power chords, thunderous drumming, ethereal boy-girl harmonies and an alternating quiet verse, loud chorus song structure. Sonically, “False Positive” seems to recall My Bloody Valentine, early Smashing Pumpkins and In Utereo era Nirvana — with a nasty, pissed off vibe.
“I came up with this riff when I was a teenager and it’s been bouncing around in my head ever since. The inspiration came from the huge sounding guitars on the first 2 Smashing Pumpkins albums. The original title was ‘Elephant’ as a nod to the Pumpkins track ‘Rhinoceros,'” the band explains in press notes. “When It came time to write the lyrics, I was walking around just being fucking bummed and wondering what I could possibly have to say to the world that would matter. I feel like often there is pressure to reveal some great truth or intelligent insight in a 3 minute rock song, which is just kind of ridiculous. I remember Kurt Cobain talking about how ‘Pennyroyal Tea‘ was about just being hopelessly depressed. So I took inspiration from that and just wrote about how I was feeling at the time. It has that kind of slacker 90’s vibe like yeah, everything is fucked, so what? It all comes full circle in the unintelligible screaming at the end of the song “There’s an elephant in the room. A rhinoceros. A hippopotamus. It’s true”
The accompanying video for “False Positive” sees the duo performing and wandering in a trippy Victorian house, where they encounter surreal and mind-bending decor and backdrops.
Throwback: Black History Month: SIster Rosetta Tharpe
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Throwback: Black History Month: Sylvester
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to disco legend Sylvester.
New Audio: ADULT. Return with Techno-influenced Banger “I Am Nothing”
Throughout their 25 year history, acclaimed Detroit-based multimedia and electronic music production and artist duo ADULT. — the husband and wife team of Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus — have a sprawling catalog of material released through Mute Records, Ghostly International, Thrill Jockey, Third Man Records and a list of other labels that has seen the duo obscure and blur lines between genres and styles in a cohesive fashion within the album format.
“but for this we wanted something that’s falling apart.” Becoming Undone, ADULT.’s ninth album reportedly sees the duo explicitly aiming for that goal, while simultaneously rejecting and reflecting the planetary discord that inspired and informed it. Written between November 2020 and April 2021, Miller and Kuperus kickstarted the creative process through additions to the rig: a vocal loop pedal for Kuperus and Roland percussion pads for Miller. They also reconnected with some of their earliest influences including Test Department and Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats, which helped spark a series of fruitful and frenetic sessions, centered on themes of impermanence and dissonance. “We weren’t interested in melody or harmony since we didn’t see the world having that,” ADULT.’s Miller bluntly reasons.
While there are still plenty of the dance floor bangers the duo is known for, Becoming Undone is also informed by deep, personal loss: Kuperus’ father died during the height of the pandemic, just before the duo were about to start working on the album. As his hospice caretakers, she and Miller faced the banality of finality, surrounded by objects drained of meaning — “the joy of having a body, but also the drudgery of having one,” they say.
The end result is an album that crackles with revulsion and dissent, and it seemingly equal parts exorcism and denunciation, centered around a breadth of vocal effects: Kuperus at times sounds alternately indignant and possessed, decrying the crimes, fears, and failings of a deluded, broken world. “Humans have always been pretty terrible,” Kuperus explains. “But every year the compromises of culture just accelerate.”
Late last year, I wrote about Becoming Undone single “Fools (We Are . . .)“, a glitchy and uneasy banger centered around stuttering beats, dense layers of arpeggiated synths paired with an unhinged and desperate vocal performance by Kuperus, who sings lyrics describing the sensation of being hopelessly stuck in a seemingly endless and foolish loop of the same ol’ banal, things while everything else around them collapses.
“I Am Nothing,” Becoming Undone‘s second and latest single is an abrasive yet accessible industrial techno banger, centered around arpeggiated synths, tweeter and woofer rattling thump, metallic clang and clatter paired with Kuperus’ desperate howls inspired by Detroit techno between 1992-1995, Suicide‘s Alan Vega, Swans‘ Micheal Gira and Malaria!‘s Gudrun Gut.
“The meaning of ‘nothing’ in the context of this song is not in regards to worthlessness, but of being lodged into something we can not understand and yet somehow accept it / or not accept it,” the acclaimed Detroit-based duo explain. “We are collectively living in liminality. And personally, we are more content currently to be in a state of nothingness.”
New Audio: Lyon, France’s Ashinoa Shares Slow-Burning and Trippy “Feu De Joie”
Lyon, France-based experimental synth act Ashinoa quickly exploded into the national and international scene with the release of their full-length debut, 2019’s Sinie Sinie, an effort that saw the Lyon-based act establishing a minimalist krautrock approach.
Ashinoa supported Sinie Sinie with tours across France opening for JOVM mainstays METZ and Flamingods,Warrmduscher, Bo Ningen, Kikagaku Moyo and others. The rising French act’s sophomore album L’Orée is slated for a March 25, 2022 release through Fuzz Club, and the album reportedly sees the band building upon the minimalist karutrock of their debut while taking the listener on a journey through the wilderness through shape-shifting, psychedelic electronics.
While primarily centered around a largely synthesizer-driven soundscape, L’Orée‘s material sees the members of Ashinoa exploring a much more natural, organic sound than their previously released work, a sound that at times is percussive and dance floor friendly and other times hypnotic and expansive — and largely inspired by the environment it was written and recorded in. Recorded in a house, tucked away in the French countryside, which bordered on a surrounding forest, the band recalls that the album sessions were spent soaking up their immediate surroundings with a number of collaborators coming in and out to play on the record:
“The house we recorded the album in was kind of in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by Douglas Pine trees. From this proximity to the forest, we wanted to take our soundscapes to a place we’ve never been before,” the members of the French-based experimental act explain. “Before we were surrounded by concrete, and then far from it. We were looking for a new listening place, to discover new intriguing sounds. We had laid down the basis of the album and then musician friends that would visit us at the time were invited to participate in the making of the album, each one of them bringing a touch of their own.”
Late month, I wrote about “Disguised by Orbit,” a L’eclair and Mildlife-like bop centered around cosmic grooves, old school boom bap and Brit Pop swagger. “Feu De Joie,” L’Orée‘s second and latest single, derives its name for the French term for bonfire. Interestingly, “Feu De Joie” is centered around some scorching psych rock riffage, twinkling synths paired with an oscillating beat — and may arguably be the most jazz fusion meets psych rock leaning track on the album.
“The main theme was inspired by the Hispanic composer Manuel de Falla and his ‘El amor Brujo’ work. This track condenses the idea that we had for the album. It signals a change between universes.”
Throwback: Black History Month: Aretha Franklin
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to the legendary Aretha Franklin.
Throwback: Black History Month: Rick James
JOVM’s WIlliam Ruben Helms celebrates Black History — and pays tribute to Rick James.