Tag: Colleen Green

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Colleen Green’s Anthemic “It’s Nice to Be Nice”

Colleen Green is a Dunstable, MA-born, Los Angeles-based lo-fi rock/indie pop singer/songwriter and guitarist. Green’s career started in earnest with her full-length debut, 2011’s Milo Goes to Compton, an effort initially released as a cassette and later on vinyl through Art Fag Recordings.

The Dunstable-born, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter and guitarist’s debut caught the attention of Seattle-based indie label Hardly Art Records, who signed her and released her sophomore album, 2013’s Sock It To Me. Green’s third album, 20115’s I Want to Grow Up was released to critical acclaim with LA Weekly readers voting her that year’s Best Solo Artist. The album was also her most commercially successful album to date, perhaps as a result of album single “Wild One” being featured on the Netflix series Love.

Thematically, I Want To Grow Up found Green at a familiar yet profound existential crisis: Although almost always cool, she didn’t necessarily feel so at that point: Seemingly too young to be free of insecurities, she was old enough to be sick of them running — and ruining — her life.

Green’s forthcoming third album Cool is her first album in six years. Slated for a September 10, 2021 release through Hardly Art, the album’s material reportedly finds her figuring out what it means to be grown up — and realizing that being an adult, who has somehow managed to live and survive through a full and messy life is pretty damn cool. Co-produced by Gordon Raphael and Green and featuring beats by hip-hop producer Aqua and drumming from Brendan Eder, the album was recorded in several different Southern California-based studios including Glendale’s comp-ny, North Hollywood’s Tenement Yard and Los Angeles’ Cosmic Vinyl. Sonically, the album sees Green retaining the lo-fi aesthetic that has won her praise and fans globally while pushing her songs to a higher level: burnt out on bad feelings, Green wanted to have fun with melodies and beats while keeping her lo-fi aesthetic intact.

The album features “I Want to Be a Dog,” a single released to praise from the likes of The New York Times, The Fader, Stereogum, Under the Radar, DIY, BrooklynVegan, Spin, Our Culture, Closed Captioned and others. Cool’s and latest single “It’s Nice to Be Nice” is a breezy bit of power pop centered around chugging power chords, an athemic chorus and razor sharp hooks. But underneath the big choruses and power chords, the song thematically is a reminder — both to the songwriter and the listener — that in life, you often get what you give, so it’s important to be the best person you can be. And in a world that regularly seems on the verge of collapse, the song’s message seems rather pertinent.

y Renee Lusano, the recently released video was shot on a boat, just off the Los Angeles coast. We see Green making herself a simple dinner of spaghetti and meatballs and hanging out on the boat. But we see someone, who has finally gained comfort in her own skin and mind. As Green calls it, “a nice video for a nice song.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Los Angeles Indie Rock Acts Winter and Trabants Team Up on a Lush and Shimmering New Single

Currently comprised of founding member Brazilian-born,  Los Angeles, CA-based singer/songwriter Samira Winter (vocals) along with Justine Brown, Chelsea Brown, and Summer Twins’ Anders LaSource, the indie rock quartet Winter can trace their origins to when the band’s founding member and primary songwriter along with co-founder Nolan Ely started the band while in Boston. And after the release of the band’s debut EP Daydreaming, the band’s frrontwoman relocated to Los Angeles and recruited an entirely different lineup to flesh out the project’s sound. With the band’s second lineup, Winter and company went into the studio to write and record the material, which wound up comprising their 2015 full-length debut Supreme Blue Dream — an album that featured material written and sung in both English and Brazilian Portuguese, while thematically meant to connect the listener back to their inner child. Sonically speaking, the album found the band establishing themselves for a sound that drew influence from 4AD Records’ heyday. 

Now, if you were following this site last year, you may recall that last year, the band was working on what would be their sophomore effort Ethereality. And although album single “Dreaming” was originally written in 2013, the single further cemented the Los Angeles-based indie rock quartet’s growing reputation for crafting ethereal and shimmering, guitar-based dream pop. 

Recently, the members of Winter finished a tour opening for Los Angeles-based indie rock and blogosphere darlings Cherry Glazerr, a standalone show with Colleen Green and a set at the Desert Daze Festival earlier this month — but adding to a rather busy period, Winter collaborated with Los Angeles-based surf rock band Trabants, featuring founding member, guitarist and primary songwriter Eric Penna and a rotating cast of musicians and collaborators, including the members of Man Man, Mean Creek, Creaturos, The Shills, World Inferno Friendship Society, Beware the Dangers of a Ghost Scorpion, Young Hunting, So Many Wizards, Breakestra!, The Dazies, Bury Me Standing, Jaggery, Cracktorch, Riptides and tomemitsu for a standalone single “Just Stay,” is a gorgeous and wistful track that manages to sound inspired by The Smiths, Que Sera and others. 

Speaking of wistful nostalgia, the recently released Lorena Alvarado-produced video features Super 8-based home videos of a family on vacation in a lush and gorgeously verdant summer paradise, capturing a time and way of life that can’t possibly happen ever again. 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Featuring members of JEFF The Brotherhood and  Diarrhea Planet, Breast Massage is a Nashville, TN-based All-Star side project that specializes in a bruising, sludgy, power chord-based rock that has had the act headlining Third Man Records‘ Devil’s Night and playing with the likes of A Place to Bury Strangers, Colleen Green and others. “Bathing The Dog,” the first single off their soon-to-be released Cruisin’ For Filth, part of Infinity Cat Records‘ limited release cassette series, is a slow-burning, dirge-like power chord heavy song with thundering, heavy metal-liked drumming that sounds indebted to the Melvins and 90s alt rock.

 

 

 
Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Currently based in New Orleans, Kate Fagan is a ska, punk and new wave musician, who first emerged to local and regional attention as the founding member and frontwoman of Chicago-based ska act Heavy Manners, an act that once opened for the The Clash and The English Beat; but interestingly enough before that Fagan released a cult-favorited New Wave single “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool” through local imprint Disturbing Records that was immediately embraced by local club DJs, radio stations and taste-making record stores like Chicago’s Wax Trax, where it became the best-selling release by a local artist ever.  The B-side single “Waiting for the Crisis” also received attention for its politically charged, Reagan-era lyrics, which manage to still resonate today.

 

As the story goes, Fagan wrote the title track after moving from New York to Chicago in the late 70s. “I pretty much came to visit Chicago and fell in love with the scene and never left,” Fagan recalled in press notes. “At the time I’d been working at New York magazine and was getting dismayed watching the CBGB scene give way to the whole Studio 54/velvet rope thing. So I spontaneously moved to Chicago, which was much more inclusive and everyone wasn’t standing around peering at each other from behind their shades. But eventually I saw that same kind of divisive hipster culture start to creep in. ‘Too Cool’ was my reaction to that.” Along with “Too Cool,” Fagan wrote many of her earliest songs as a solo artist and with Heavy Manners in an intuitive fashion, recording them at Chicago’s Acme Studios, where she’d meet the fellow artists with whom she’d form Disturbing Records.

Although the “Too Cool” single was a cult favorite back in the early 80s, sadly it was thought to be long lost, as the second printing of the album was lost in a house fire that destroyed almost everything Fagan had owned at the time — that is until Manufactured Recordings stumbled upon the original single, along with two unreleased bonus tracks that Fagan recorded with members of My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult and Scarlet Architect. Interestingly, when you listen to the four tracks off the re-issued 7 inch, the songs manage to sound both of its time and incredibly contemporary — in some way you can imagine acts like Colleen Green, Courtney Barnett, Karen O. and several others citing Fagan as an influence, as Fagan’s lyrics possess a wry irony at at their core, as you’ll hear on the aforementioned “Too Cool,” a song that’s reminiscent of both The B52s and Go-Gos. “Waiting for the Crisis” sounds as though it were influenced by Sandinista! and Combat Rock-era The Clash. However, “Master of Passion” and “Come Over” are the most dance floor-friendly, New Order-like songs of the re-issue, featuring shimmering undulating synths, propulsive drum programming paired with Fagan’s sultry and coquettish delivery.

Of course, each track reveals a songwriter, who had an uncanny knack at writing an infectiously catchy hook that you could imagine kids bouncing up and down to in a sweaty club — and does so with a cool, swaggering self-assuredness.

 

New Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Seapony’s Jangling, New Single “Couldn’t Be”

The Olympia, WA–based band Seapony received both national and international attention with the release of their first two full-length albums, Go With Me and Falling, and as a result the band wound up taking their sound based around the simple catchy […]

Uncategorized by William Ruben Helms

Sandra Vu has played drums for the likes of the Raveonettes, Boredoms, Dirty Beaches and the Dum Dum Girls but with her side project, SISU, Vu steps out from the drum set to be a […]

Uncategorized by William Ruben Helms

The California-by-way of Boston-based Colleen Green’s forthcoming album Sock It To Me will see a March 19th release through Seattle’s Hardly Art Records. “Heavy Shit” is the latest single from the album and personally, it reminds me […]

Uncategorized by William Ruben Helms

“Time In The World” is the first single off Colleen Green’s forthcoming album, Sock It To Me, which Hardly Art Records will release on March 19th. With vintage synth, multi-layered vocals, and spare drum beats, the […]