Tag: Cub Sport

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

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.”
 

singer/songwriters by William Ruben Helms

Lyric Video: Minor Poet’s Breezy “Tropic of Cancer”

Andrew Carter is a Richmond, VA-born and-based singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who has spent the past few years writing and recording music by himself in various bedrooms and basements with his solo recording project Minor Poet. His full-length debut, 2017’s And How combined Carter’s love of carefully crafted pop with a loose, fun, off-the-cuff production that eventually received press from American Songwriter, Magnet, The Wild Honey Pie, Impose and others, while helping Carter develop a small but devoted fanbase. Naturally, this has allowed Minor Poet to grow from a labor of love into a nationally touring band.

Carter’s sophomore Minor Poet album The Good News is slated for a May 17, 2019 release through Sub Pop Records, and the album, which was recorded over the course of four days at Montrose Recording, reportedly finds Carter expanding the boundaries of the project’s sound over the course of six songs. While previous Minor Poet releases featured Carter playing all the instruments and handling production duties, the material on The Good News was written with the understanding that the Richmond, VA-born and -based singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist had to reach outside himself to do justice to the songs. “I couldn’t capture the sounds I heard in my head,” Carter explains. “I wanted something that was vast and expansive but that at the same time could hit you immediately in the gut.”

Paying homage to the classic “wall of sound: techniques made famous by Brian Wilson and Phil Spector, Carter and co-producer, Adrian Olsen overdubbed layer after layer of Carter playing an array of guitars, pianos, organs, synths, and percussion, as well as Carter singing harmonies. The members of the touring band were brought in to perform the core rhythm section parts with handpicked local musicians stopping by to add crucial flourishes to the material. Interestingly, at the center of the album’s material is Carter’s vocals, singing lyrics that mix allusions to religion, mythology, art and philosophy, as each song’s narrator questions himself, his place in the world around him, what he owes to his relationships, and in turn, what he needs to ask others to stay healthy.

“Tropic of Cancer,” The Good News‘ infectious latest single is centered by layers of shimmering and tropicalia-inspired arpeggiated synth lines, shuffling guitar lines, a soaring hook and a lysergic-tinged guitar solo. And while the deliberate crafted track bears a subtle resemblance to Elvis Costello‘s early work, the song manages to be deceptively breezy as the song’s narrator describes a constant and repetitive struggle with depression, delivered with an unvarnished emotional honesty and a tongue-in-cheek awareness.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Introducing the Jangling and Anthemic Guitar Pop of Australia’s BATTS

Tanya Batt is a Melbourne, Australia-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and creative mastermind behind the recording project BATTS — and with release of last year’s 62 Moons EP, Batt quickly received attention across the blogosphere for a sound that has drawn comparisons to Angel Olsen, Courtney Barnett, Mazzy Star, Sharon Van Etten and others. Adding to a growing international profile, Batt received airplay from BBC Radio 1, KCRW and Triple J.

Building upon a growing profile, Batt toured her native Australia with Didirri, and she recently played her first UK shows with Cub Sport as part of the Communion Music tour; but more important, Batt’s newest single is a jangling bit of guitar pop that manages to nod at Fleetwood Mac-like AM radio rock, complete with an anthemic rock but underneath the easy-going and self-assured vibes of the song is an urgent desire to change things for the better — although in a lot of cases that’s impossible. After all, the human condition is to be endlessly disappointing. There’s also this desire to go off and colonize someplace else, and start over with different rules — that maybe it’d better on Mars, Jupiter or someplace else. 

Directed by Dyllan Corbett, the recently released video for “Shame” stars Tanya Batt, Olaf Scott, Daniel Moulds, Nkechi Anele, Melanie Scammell, Megan Kent and Alice Kent, and as Corbett explains of the video treatment “Thematically, we were after a sliding door effect of having two separate outlooks/moods and the outcome that each one has on your happiness.” 

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