Tag: music video

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Trenton’s Joy on Fire Shares Sardonic and Explosive Ripper “Selfies”

Currently based in Trenton, noise rock/no wave/experimental rock/art punk outfit Joy on Fire — founding members John Paul Carillo (guitar), Anna Meadors (saxophone), spoken word artist Dan Gutstein (vocals) and a drummer — can trace their origins to Baltimore‘s art scene, where the band’s founding members originally met and started writing material together.

“Baltimore is a city where musicians of different stripes come together quite readily.  With the art college (MICA) [Maryland Institute College of Art] up the road from The Peabody Conservatory, trained jazz / classical musicians come together, in the city’s Station North Arts District, with self-taught musicians who bring other artistic disciplines into their music, a Talking Heads vibe,” Joy on Fire’s John Paul Carillo writes in a statement about Baltimore and its influence on the band. “In my case, while Anna was at Peabody, I was at The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, getting a degree in fiction writing.  Anna and I met in a basement jam session, and the band began then.  We still play the first song we ever wrote together, ‘Red Wave,’ which finally appeared on 2021’s Unknown Cities.”

Meadors’ background as a classically trained saxophonist collided with Carillo’s love of experimental art rock and punk and creative sparks immediately few between the pair. “I knew pretty early on that a career in classical saxophone wasn’t for me; I met John during my sophomore year [at the Peabody Conservatory], and the world of weird rock music opened up for me,” Meadows writes. “I had been listening to this Terry Riley album for saxophone quartet and vocalist, Assassin Reverie, and fell in love with it, and John introduced me to the music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, as well as the bands Morphine and King Crimson. There is this saxophone solo on King Crimson’s ‘One More Red Nightmare‘ that changed my life, it is so visceral, and it starts with just a long trill that is so simple and so perfect for the part. When Joy on Fire started, I was able to use the techniques I learned from jazz improvisation over this big chordal electric bass sound that John has, and it was such a thrill.”

Since those early jam sessions between Carillo and Meadors, the band has expanded to a quartet with the addition of Gutstein and a drummer while being remarkably prolific, releasing five full-length albums: 2015’s full-length debut The Complete Book of Bonsai, 2017’s Fire with Fire, 2019’s Hymn, last year’s Unknown Cities and Another Adventure in Red, which landed at #7 on Concrete Islands’ Albums of the Year list for 2021.

The Trenton-based outfit has toured up and down the Eastern Seaboard to support their recorded outfit with stops at Burlington Discover Jazz Fest, Boston’s The Middle East Café, Baltimore’s Metro Gallery, Asheville’s Asheville Music Hall and Shapeshifter Lab.

Joy on Fire’s seventh album, the Carillo and Meadors-produced States of America is slated for a June 11, 2022 release through their longtime label home Procrastination Records. The album’s material can be traced to a joint writing session between the band’s Carillo and Gutstein, which quickly “grew into monsters” as the duo turned loose song structures, ideas and lyrics into fleshed out songs. Most of the album’s material was recored at Princeton University‘s Studio B, where Meadows is currently a Ph.D. student in Music Composition.

The album will feature previously released singles “Anger and Decency,” “Thunderdome,” which originally premiered on Bob Boilen’s All Songs Considered and “Uh Huh,” which has an accompanying video that’s an official selection at 14 film festivals across the world, including LA Rocks Film Festival, London Rocks Film Festival and was a winner at the Obskuur Ghent Film Festival.

States of America‘s latest single “Selfies” is a neurotic, New Wave-meets-No Wave-meets-art punk ripper centered around a menacing Stooges-like groove, thunderous drumming, Gutstein’s sardonic, spoken word lyrics about the emptiness and vapidity of social media narcissism paired with Meador’s saxophone skronk and wailing that initially creeps its way into the arrangement and builds up in intensity as then song ends with an explosive and chaotic coda. The song captures the relentless need to be liked, seen as cool, successful and popular that’s inspired by the social media age in a way that’s startlingly accurate yet wildly hilarious.

“‘Selfies’ began with a riff I had hanging around for a while, a riff that has a bit of a Stooges vibe, especially with the reverse delay on it, and when lyricist / vocalist Dan Gutstein joined Joy on Fire, I arranged it for vocals,” Joy on Fire’s John Paul Carillo writes. “Dan has some great lines in it, displaying his edgy sense of humor: ‘Happiest,” goes the refrain, ‘we were happiest / Lying to each other.’  The piece is a critique of narcissistic culture, with ‘Love is like gazing everywhere / Catching an echo with your hands…Why not, why not, why not selfies!’  The impossibility, emptiness, and sadness of trying to catch an ‘echo with your hands’ is (not) relieved by taking selfies, would be one interpretation.  Often in Joy on Fire songs, saxophonist Anna Meadors begins the song or at least jumps in pretty quickly.  This time, she lays out for the body of the song, and then just kills it over a vamp that drives to the end of the tune, with Dan then sneaking back in, like the sax has driven him mad: ‘La-la-la-la-la Selfies!’  The wild saxophone is a further Stooges connection.  The acidy vibe that Iggy Pop asked for from Stooges saxophonist Steve Mackay — Anna certainly has it here, and then some.”
 

The accompanying video for “Selfies” continues in a similar vein as the video for “Anger and Decency,” with heavy amounts of visual distortion and manipulation atop footage of the band performing the song and fittingly cuts to a number of video selfies.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Aussie Artist Gray Days Shares a Trippy Visual for Glistening “Transcend”

Gray Days is the (mostly) solo recording project of a rather mysterious Aussie singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who writes and records all the parts of his music — with the exception of drums and tricky lead guitar parts. He makes his music in his garage and then takes it to a friend’s studio, where that friend engineers and mixes the material. 

Last week, I wrote about “Going Nowhere,” a song that sonically brought JOVM mainstay act Husky and Starsailor to mind, complete with an anthemic Brit Pop-like hook. But underneath all of that, “Going Nowhere” revealed a songwriter with a deliberate attention to craftsmanship and an uncanny knack for a big, catchy hook.

Released late last year, “Transcend” is a dreamy, 120 Minutes MTV-like track centered around shimmering and twangy guitars, a sinuous bass line, the Aussie artist’s plaintive delivery, a big hook and a wah wah pedaled solo, that sounds as though it were inspired by Starfish era The Church.

The accompanying visual features some trippy and fittingly psychedelic imagery.

Both “Going Nowhere” and “Transcend” will appear on Gray Days full-length debut, Drifting, which is slated for release tomorrow.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: A.M. Boys Share a Trippy Visual for Hypnotic “Traveler”

New York-based electronic duo A.M. Boys features two accomplished and grizzled scene vets:

  • John Blonde (synths, vocals), is an electronic musician and singer/songwriter, who was a principle member of JOVM mainstay act House of Blondes. As a solo artist, he releases material as Muscle Club.
  • Chris Moore, a producer, engineer, mixer, multi-instrumentalist, and electronic musician. As a producer and engineer, Moore has worked with David Bowie, TV on the Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Scarlett Johansson, Foals, and OSEES. As an electronic musician, Moore has released solo work as Light Vortex and through a variety of other aliases through the years.

Blonde and Moore can trace their collaboration together back to meeting at an Aphex Twin listening party they attended back in 2014. The duo struck up an instant chemistry that resulted in a batch of original songs in 2018 using analog synths, drum machines, space echo and voice that paired clean, post-punk minimalism with a contemporary approach to rhythm and arrangement.

They sent Suicide’s Martin Rev one of their earliest tracks “Distance Decay,” and by the next day, they were offered an opening slot with the post-punk legend. The duo have shared a stage with Deerhunter side project Moon Diagrams, and they’ve played one of the most memorable sets at local, experimental venue Spectrum. As DJs, they’ve spun sets at Jupiter Disco, Troost, Sundown Bar, Wythe Hotel and several other spots across town.

The New York-based duo’s full-length debut Distance Decay is slated for a June 3, 2022 release. Written and recorded by the duo, at their Brooklyn-based studio Glowmatic Sound with additional vocal recording by Jeff Berner at Studio G, the album’s title is derived from a term that describes the pattern of criminals committing fewer crimes, the further they travel from their homes. Sonically, the ten-song album sees the members of A.M. Boys focusing on an intimate and minimalist approach to instrumentation and composition through the juxtaposition of rippling rhythms with melodic synth lines and ethereal vocals.

The album’s material as written during darkly lit, late night jam sessions influenced by post-punk and coldwave, along with their revered trinity of Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin and Prince — with one song being directly influenced by Throbbing Gristle. The recording sessions were deliberately pared down to allow the pair to recreate the songs live. For the duo, the minimal approach helped to yield material that develops a deeper emotional resonance with repeated listens. “We knew we didn’t want to layer too much, we felt that the songs sounded stronger with less. A lot of modern music can be fussy and cluttered, we wanted to present the music simply, gaining a transparent power,” Blonde explains.

During the height of the pandemic, Blonde and Moore holed up at their studio and recored an entire second album — and are currently working to incorporate some of that new material in their live sets. But in the meantime, Distance Decay‘s second single, “Traveler” is a mesmerizing and hypnotic track featuring skittering beats, glistening and oscillating synths paired with Blonde’s ethereal vocals and spacey feedback. While nodding at John Blonde’s previous work with House of Blondes and Kraftwerk, “Traveler” fittingly possesses a trippy cosmic air, the end result is a song that seems to be a perfect for late night space travel.

Directed and filmed by New York-based motion designer David-Lee Fiddler, the accompanying visual for “Traveler” was a deeply collaborative effort between Fiddler and the duo that incorporates live, in-studio footage shot by Doug Young, animated still photos taken by A.M. Boys’ John Blonde, which were used for the album’s cover art. The end result is a trippy and mesmerizing video that seems perfect for those with ASMR. The duo credit Fiddler with being an energetic director that “seemed capable of translating any idea we had into reality.” Blonde adds “The ‘Traveler’ video is what we think the electricity looks like inside our synthesizers.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Denver’s Graffiti Welfare Shares Trippy “Volume”

George Lattimore is a Denver-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and creative mastermind behind the emerging psych pop recording project Graffiti Welfare. Lattimore grew up in a music loving home, where he developed a voracious ear, listening to anything he could get his hands on.

Eventually, the Denver-based multi-instrumentalist discovered Animal Collective, Tame Impala, Radiohead, Brian Eno, Miles Davis and a few others. For Lattimore, listening to Tame Impala’s Lonerism was a life changing experience: The first time he heard the album, he bought a Roland Juno-G keyboard and started writing and recording his own material.

Lattimore used that Juno-G until the screen died; but that was fine because at that point, he was ready to grow musically and to become much more serious at pursuing a career in music.

He moved from Austin to Denver for grad school, then recorded and self-released an EP on Spotify that began to receive some positive attention. Buoyed by the positive attention from his debut, Lattimore felt that he was ready to make something much more serious, defined and complete — his full-length debut Revolving Shores.

Written, self-recorded and self-produced over the course of five years, Revolving Shores was mastered at Golden Colorado‘s The Wheelhouse Studio. Revolving Shores‘ first single “Volume” is centered around Lattimore’s laconic delivery, glistening synth arpeggios, reverb-drenched, blown out beats and a wobbling bass line. The end result is a somnambulant song that evokes a half-remembered yet very vivid dream.

The accompanying video for “Volume” features stock footage of Midtown Manhattan shot in the 50s and 60s, mass manufactured doodads, what appears to be Los Angeles in the 80s that’s slowly given trippy, mind-bending effects.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Emerging Aussie Artist Gray Days Shares a Heady Visual for Anthemic “Going Nowhere”

Gray Days is the (mostly) solo recording project of a rather mysterious Aussie singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who writes and recordings all the parts of his music — with the exception of drums and tricky lead guitar parts. He makes his music in his garage and then takes it to a friend’s studio, where that friend engineers and mixes the material.

Released a few weeks ago “Going Nowhere” sees the emerging Aussie artist pairing shimmering and reverb drenched guitars, a steady backbeat and a plaintive vocal delivery with an enormous, anthemic Brit Pop hook. And while sonically recalling Aussie JOVM mainstay act Husky and Starsailor, “Going Nowhere” not only reveals a deliberate attention to craftsmanship — but a songwriter with an uncanny knack for writing an infectious hook.

The accompanying visual for “Going Nowhere” is a heady mix of cinematic, live action footage of every day people — a young couple madly in love, a commuter train in the rain and of people seemingly starting anew in their lives with animation and other effects.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Blake Morgan Shares Euphoric Love Song

Blake Morgan is a New York-born and-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer and the founder and President of ECR Music Group. In his role as President of ECR Music Group, Morgan’s ideas, opinions and editorials on music and the music business have been regularly published by a number of major media outlets including The New York Times, Billboard Magazine, CNN, Newsweek, Variety, The Hill, NME, The Huffington Post, and The Guardian.

He also lectures frequently at The Georgetown University Law Center, California State University, Syracuse University,NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, American University and his alma mater, Berklee College of Music. His music advocacy has taken him to Capitol Hill numerous times where, as the founder of the #IRespectMusic movement, he continues to fight for musicians rights in the digital age. As a producer, Morgan has collaborated with a who’s who of contemporary music from Lenny Kravitz to Lesley Gore. 

Since the release of 2013’s Diamonds in the Dark, Morgan has been extremely busy: he has a remarkably six-year run of sold-out shows at Rockwood Music Hall that often feature guest spots from a number of Grammy and Tony Award-winning artists, who join him for unique, on-stage collaborations; 150,000 miles of touring and sold-out shows on both sides of the Atlantic; and production work on over 20 albums by some serious A-list artists. 

Late last year, the New York-born and-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer and music biz exec released “Down Below Or Up Above” to praise from the likes of The Aquarian, Post-Punk.com, Culture Catch and my dear friends at Glamglare. “Down Below Or Up Above” will appear on Morgan’s long-awaited fifth album Violent Delights, which is slated for a May 20, 2022 release through ECR Music Group.

Last month, I wrote about the rousingly anthemic “My Love Is Waiting” a defiant and brazenly hopeful love song that views love as the most important and necessary force of the world, meant to get people up from their seats to dance and and shout along with it. But underneath its anthemic hooks, the song, which at points nodded at The Police‘s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” Joe Jackson and JOVM mainstays Palace Winter revealed a penchant for old-timey pop craftsmanship paired with an uncanny knack for a well-placed, razor sharp hook.

Violent Delights‘ third and latest single “Baby I Would Want You” is swooning and euphoric guitar pop song that to my ears that sounds indebted to Elvis Costello, XTC‘s “Mayor of Simpleton.” While continuing a remarkable run of brazen and defiantly earnest love songs, “Baby I Would Want You” manages to be unintentionally fitting for our apocalyptic moment that simply says “welp, the ship is sinking and the end is nigh, but I got you and you got me.” r

It’s a rare sort of love, but the sort of love we all need in our desperate and uncertain time.

Continuing his ongoing collaboration with genre-defying filmmaker Alice Teeple, the accompanying video for “Baby I Would Want You” is shot in a cinematic black and white at Williamsburg’s Pete’s Candy Store and features Morgan and his backing band performing and hanging out at the venue. And much like the preceding visuals, it captures a very New York scene that’s near and dear to my heart.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: JOVM Mainstay Mackenzie Leighton Shares a Playful Visual for “Je ne suis pas poéte”

Mackenzie Leighton is a rising San Diego-born, Paris-based indie folk singer/songwriter musician and JOVM mainstay. When she was a child, Leighton’s family moved to a small, seaside town in Maine, where she grew up and spent her most other formative years. The JOVM mainstay can trace the origins of her music career to her youth: her father took her to classical piano lessons as a girl.

When Leighton turned 18, she attended my alma mater, New York University — and while in New York, she played in several jazz and folk inspired bands. Upon graduation, Leighton relocated to Paris. Leighton landed a day job as a florist and then launched a solo career with the release of 2017’s self-titled EP, a singer/songwriter folk effort that was released to praise and comparisons to Phoebe Bridgers and Julia Jacklin. 

Leighton’s sophomore EP, 2020’s Tourist(e) was a decided change in sonic direction that found the rising American-born, French-based artist working with French musicians and producers while pairing folk-inspired songwriting with lush yet contemporary instrumentation and production. Leighton has supported both of her recorded efforts with shows in and around Paris, as well as with tours in Italy, Belgium and here in the States. 

Last year’s Fleuriste EP thematically saw Leighton focusing on the reality of life as an expatriate in Europe: being constantly torn between two different cultures and hemispheres. Sonically, the EP continues in a similar vein as its immediate predecessor: Leighton pairing folk-leaning songwriting with lush and modern production.

I had previously written about three of the EP’s singles last year:

In the buildup to the EP’s release, I managed to write about two of the EP’s singles:

  • “Un jour la vie,” a playful and infectious invitation to dream of an escape to Italy, to drink endless Aperol Spritzes and to dance the night away without a care in the world, centered around Leighton’s coquettish vocals, a sinuous yet propulsive bass line and shimmering guitars. 
  • “Flueriste,” a hook-driven pop confection that focuses on the plight of musicians unable to work because of the pandemic — but full of hopes of a bright future of live shows and all of the things we missed so much. 
  • “Mona by the Seaside,” another breezy, hook-driven pop confection that tells the story of the narrator’s friend Mona inviting her for a weekend at the beach. While detailing easy-going summer days and nights with friends — both old and new — the song is centered around the bittersweet and tacit acknowledgement that nothing is forever, and that the good times need to be cherished.

The EP’s latest single, EP closing track, the slow-burning and contemplative “Je ne suis poéte” was one of the first songs that Leighton wrote in French. Throughout the song, Leighton openly discusses how difficult it is to write in another language and how paradoxically, it forces a guileless and unvarnished sort of honesty: She winds up getting straight to the point and saying things frankly in a way that she couldn’t in her native English. But at its core, it’s a sweet and playful love song about the desire to write a song in French that a Francophone lover will love.

Directed by Coraline Benetti, the accompanying visual follows Leighton to a quirky book store — the sort that you’d only see in Europe or pre-Guilliani/pre-Bloomberg New York. And while in the bookstore, she winds up going on a series of endearingly awkward dates with a handful of famous French poets — François de Malherbe, Paul Verlaine and Jacques Prévert — but nothing seems to work.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Silk Skin Lovers Share a Dreamy and Atmospheric Ballad

Silk Skin Lovers — Félix Foucambert (vocals, guitar), Jean-Baptiste Halin (bass, bass synths), Lucas Lerbret (guitar, backing vocals) and London-born Callum Taylor (keys, backing vocals) — is a rising French indie rock outfit that emerged into French scene with a handful of singles inspired by and informed by nightlife and nightlife revelry.

Released last year, Silk Screen Lovers’ debut EP, Bloom saw the band crafting material that bounced between playful delight to late-night melancholy; the blurring of memories to the brink of sobering up a bit as you head home — or when you arrive home, whichever comes first. While the EP’s material is primarily based in magical surrealism, it also reveals a band concerned about serious issues, including racism and police brutality.

“The first seeds of Bloom were planted in the summer of 2020,” the members of Silk Skin Lovers explain. “As a young and developing band, we found ourselves growing in a context that was harsh and complicated, as opportunities for artists were scarce to non-existent for a period. The EP was a natural response to not only the artistic restraints we were faced with, but the frustration of being away from what we love to do, and further from our aspirations as musicians.”

Earlier this year, I wrote about the the uptempo, Smiths-like bop “Moon 1AM,” a track that revealed itself to be emotionally ambivalent: despite the upbeat tempo, the song was a bittersweet and dreamy rumination meant to make you dance away your sorrows — even if it’s only for a little bit.

The rising French act’s latest single, “Forever” is a slow-burning and dreamy ballad centered around atmospheric synths, shimmering, reverb-drenched guitars, gently padded drums and Foucambert’s achingly plaintive vocals. “Forever” manages to sonically recall Beach House while simultaneously evoking melancholy and euphoria.

Directed by Robinson Lebret, the accompanying video for “Forever” follows a young woman as she prepares for a night out — to catch Silk Skin Lovers at a local club while reminiscing about a presumed lost love. And as a result, the video is a fever dream in which past and present bump into each other uncomfortably, and where ghosts linger.