Tag: If Only

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Emerging French Artist ELKEEN Shares a Dance Floor Friendly Bop

Fanny Boyer is a young and emerging French singer/songwriter and pop artist, best known as ELKEEN, who began to write her own songs based on her own life — her desires, disappointments, good times, bad times, etc. — back in 2019. Along with collaborator and producer Denis Clavaizolle, the pair’s work draws heavily from 80s and 90s pop and New Wave.

In 2020, the young French pop artist released her 21-song, full-length debut Tender Enemy, which featured attention grabbing tracks like “It’s Time to Groove,” “Burning Bright,” and “The Beauty and the Beast.” Boyer’s sophomore album Love Life is slated for release this summer — but earlier this year, she released the album’s first single “If Only.” Centered around a propulsive, disco-influence bass line, some Nile Rodgers-like funk guitar, glistening retro-futuristic synth arpeggios, Boyer’s powerhouse vocals and a crowd pleasing hook, “If Only” is a nostalgia-inducing song on two different levels: if you’re a child of the 80s as I am, this one will bring fond memories of the 80s synth funk and pop you heard and loved growing up; but it’s also rooted in a familiar, age-old sentiment “if I had only known what I know now” and longing for someone, you probably can’t get back.

Directed by Boyer, the accompanying video for “If Only” employs a relatively simple concept: a black jumpsuit wearing Boyer performing the song in a cavernous, old wine cellar — with lasers exploding everywhere.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Over the past month, I’ve managed to write a bit about the Austin, TX-based trio Exhalants, and as you may recall the band which features Steve (guitar, vocals), Bill (bass) and Tommy (drums), a member of Body Pressure, can trace its origins to the breakup of Steve and Bill’s previous band  Carl Sagan’s Skate Shoes. With the inevitable downtime that happens when a band breaks up, Steve spent his free time further honing his guitar playing before recruiting his former CSSS bandmate and Tommy to complete the project’s lineup.

Exhalants’ selff-titled debut is slated for release next week, and the soon-to-be released album is largely inspired by Shellac, Unwound and Cherubs, while nodding at the work of contemporaries like Melkbelly, Kal Marks and A Dear A Horse — or in other words, the album’s material finds the band balancing pummeling heaviness with an infectious melodicism; however, the album’s third and latest single “If Only” is a slow-burning grunge-era inspired dirge, centered around pummeling drumming, distortion-fed power chords, howled vocals and an alternating quiet-loud-quiet song structure. Sonically, the new single seems to recall Melvins, Soundgarden, Nirvana and Alice in Chains while maintaining their uncanny sense of melody.  And from the album’s first three singles, Exhalants may be releasing one of the hardest hitting albums of the year.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

 

I’ll be pretty busy today, as I’ll be in Coney Island for an annual rite of summer here in New York City — The Mermaid Parade. I’m sure that there’ll be some Instagram posts until I actually get a chance to edit the photos — but in the meantime, let’s get to the business at hand, right? Now, over the past 18 months or so, I’ve written quite a bit about the Paris-born, London-based singer/songwriter Sophie Baudry, whose solo recording project Million Miles is the culmination of a life-long love affair with soul music.

After completing her studies at  Berklee College and a stint as a recording engineer and studio musician in New York, Baudry returned to London, where she felt an irresistible pull to write music inspired by Ray Charles and Bill Withers.  On an inspired whim, Baudry, took a trip to  Nashville, where she spent her first few days wandering, exploring and reaching out to strangers, as though she were saying “I ’m new here. I’m a songwriter and I’m looking for like-minded people to collaborate with.” As the story goes, Baudry wound up having chance meetings with local songwriters and producers Robin Eaton and Paul Eberson and within an hour or so of their meeting, they began writing material that eventually became the French-born, British-based singer/songwriter’s Million Miles debut EP, Berry Hill, which was recorded over the course of a year during multiple sessions at Robin Eaton’s Berry Hill home studio. And from EP singles “Can’t Get Around A Broken Heart” and “Love Like Yours,” Baudry quickly received attention across the blogosphere, as well as this site, for an easy-going yet deliberately crafted, Sunday afternoon, Soul Train-like soul that nodded equally at the aforementioned Bill Withers and Erykah Badu and Jill Scott.

Baudry’s latest single is the folksy and effortlessly soulful “If Only,” and while being a fitting vehicle for her equally effortless vocals, the hook-driven track is centered around a loose, jam-like arrangement of  funky, Bill Withers-ike strummed guitar, twinkling keys and gentle yet propulsive drumming and a funky bass line and while being an incredibly self-assured track that reveals an artist who is expanding upon her sound and approach, the song evokes the swooning pangs of meet-cute first love, but from the perspective of a narrator, who is over it and too busy to care — or so she tells herself. In some way, the song’s narrator takes on a tough veneer to protect herself from the inevitable. We’ve all been there at some point in our lives and as a result, the song manages to be warmly familiar sonically and thematically.