Tag: New Single

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Hummingbird Shares Breezy and Anthemic “Home”

Hummingbird — Felix Lavallard · Vincent Verye · Geoffrey Margain · Timothée Borne — is an emerging yet somewhat mysterious, French indie outfit. Their latest single “Home” is an anthemic and breezy bop featuring strummed acoustic guitar, live drumming, a sinuous bass line, fluttering synths and a rousingly euphoric hook.

While “Home” sonically recalls a slick synthesis of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix-era Phoenix and 80s pop, the song is an optimistic yet kind of bittersweet one that suggests that life is ultimately one big, very long, very wild journey.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: H2S04 Returns with a Slickly Produced, Hook-Driven Bop

Formed in Kent back in the late 90s, British electro pop act H2S04 — Graham Cupples (keys, programming), Darren Till (keys, programming) and James Butler (vocals, bass) — features a collection of accomplished musicians: Cupples previously led techno acts Mortal and Code. Till played with Cupples in Code. Butler contributed bass and vocals in indie rock act Lobster, which was once known as Sulpher. 

Initially tracing their origins back to when they started experimenting with a series of remixes, the members of H2S04 began writing original material that blended electronica, rock and techno paired with a special attention to songwriting. Their debut single, 1998’s “Little Soul,” quickly became popular in their native England — and because of its extremely limited release, a collector’s item.

The trio’s 1999 full-length debut Machine Turned Blues featured the aforementioned “Little Soul,” as well as “I Need Feel,” “The Way I Want,” and “Imitation Leather Jacket,” a track that was a favorite among British DJs that also received radio play here in the States. They supported Machine Turned Blues by playing a series of festivals across the British festival circuit, including Glastonbury — and they played shows in Canada and Chicago.

2000’s Glamtronica saw the British trio further establishing their sound while adding a playful sense of satire to the mix. The act largely disappeared until 2015’s Under Control and 2021’s Love and Death. 

2022 has been a busy year for the British trio with the release of two singles:

H2S04’s latest single “Electroworld” is a sleek and slickly produced track that continues a run of material that’s club and lounge friendly. Featuring thumping beats, glistening and wobbling synth arpeggios and Butler’s insouciant yet sultry delivery, “Electroworld” is rooted in the trio’s unerring knack for crafting an infectious, razor sharp hook.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Lyric Video: Entrée Libre Shares a Wistful New Single

Formed back in 2019. Parisian indie electro pop duo Entrée Libre consists of two childhood friends, who derived the project’s name from the first letter of their first names. Sonically, the pair have developed joyful, spontaneous and hook driven pop, which for the band has served as an escape from our strange and uncertain moment.

Entrée Libre’s debut EP Avant-Premiére officially dropped yesterday. The EP features previously released singles “Dehors,” “Aller Simple,” a dance floor friendly track that’s one-part 80s New Order, one- part JOVM mainstays DBFC, one-part Daft Punk and “Corps à corps,” a hook-driven, LCD Soundsystem-like bop that’s perhaps even more danceable than its immediate predecessor.

Avant-Premiére‘s fourth and latest single “Pixel” is a breezy yet wistful bop centered around glistening synth arpeggios, a chugging motorik groove, skittering beats paired with plaintive harmonies. The end result is a song that, to my ears, recalls Trans Europe Express-era Kraftwerk and fellow countrymen DBFC and La Femme.

The accompanying lyric video features the duo in an empty theater changing seats while a maintenance person cleans up. 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Liz Lamere Returns with a Club Friendly Banger

Liz Lamere is a New York-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, who has had a lengthy career playing drums in several local punk bands — and famously for collaborating with her late partner, the legendary Alan Vega on his solo work for the better part of three decades. 

Lamere finally steps out into the spotlight as a solo artist with her solo debut Keep It Alive. Written and performed entirely by Lamere, Keep It Alive was recorded in the Lower Manhattan apartment she shared with Vega during pandemic-related lockdowns — in the same space where the Suicide frontman constructed his light sculptures. Keeping it a family affair, the album was engineered by Vega and Lamere’s son, Dante Vega Lamere. Keep It Alive was co-produced by Lamere and The Vacant Lots‘ Jared Artaud. 

“There’s something very magical about creating music in the same environment where Alan created his visual art,” Liz Lamere says in press notes. “His energy is pervasive and is inevitably infused in the recordings.” She continues “ We were living through unprecedented times and Keep It Alive took adversity and uncertainty and turned it into a message of resilience and empowerment.”

The album’s material reportedly courses with the bold and defiant energy that motivated a young Lamere through her early double life as a Wall Street lawyer by day and a downtown New York musician, before she met and fell in love with Vega. Her relationship with Vega led to her becoming his manager, creative foil and keyboardist on his solo work including albums like Deuce Avenue, Power On To Zero Hour, New Raceion, Dugong Prang, 2007, Station and IT, as well as the posthumously released, lost album Mutator, which led to the Vega Vault, which she curates with Jared Artaud. 

After Vega’s death in July 2016, Lamere found it cathartic to write down thoughts and observations in notebooks. Simultaneously, she and Artaud had started working together on overseeing the mastering of IT and the production and mixing of Mutator. During this very busy period, the pair discussed working together on her own solo material. 

Keep It Alive is a homage to a song on her late husband’s New Raceion that has a deep and significant meaning for her. It was one of the key lines she would chant on stage, becoming a staple of their live performances together. The main theme and vision of the album is preserving your own inner fire. “Alan always encouraged me to make my own music, and I’ve waited until the time was right as I’ve been dedicated to preserving Alan’s vision and building his legacy,” Lamere says. 

Over the past month or so I’ve written about two of Keep It Alive‘s released singles:

  • “Lights Out,” a swaggering banger featuring tweeter and woofer rattling 808s, glistening and melodic synth washes paired with Lamere’s coolly delivered boxing and fighting metaphors. While centered around a gritty and familiar, in-your-face, New York aggression, “Lights Out” is an upbeat, life-affirming song that will give you the energy to keep on fighting the necessary and good fight. 
  • “Freedom’s Last Call” a brooding and cinematic track centered around thumping industrial beats, jagged and ominous synth arpeggios and a menacing bass line paired with Lamere’s icy delivery. Sonically, “Freedom’s Last Call” sounds as though it could have been part of the Blade Runner soundtrack — or the soundtrack of almost any John Carpenter film. 

“Sin” Keep It Alive‘s third and latest single is centered around glistening and oscillating synths, a sinuous bass line and tweeter and woofer rattling beats paired with Lamere’s sultry and plaintive delivery and her uncanny ability to craft an infectious, razor sharp hook. While, “Sin” sonically bears a resemblance to a slick synthesis of Depeche Mode and New Order, the song’s narrator has a unique, non-moralistic, non-Christian view of sin — one that seems to say that sin is just one part of the human experience.

“‘Sin’ is loosely inspired by Dante’s Inferno and the search for meaning in the journey of life,” Lamere explains. “The message is one of redemption, as sin is not always evil, but rather offers a glimpse into the dark side of the human condition. For me the song is more about not letting the judgment of others, of good and evil, hold you back from fully experiencing life.  Ultimately, I hope the listener will interpret the song and find meaning in their own way.”

Keep It Alive is slated for May 20, 2022 release through In The Red.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Medicine Singers Share a Mesmerizing Single

Medicine Singers is a collective that can trace its origins back to a chance encounter between the Eastern Medicine Singers, an Eastern Algonquin powwow group and Israeli-born, New York-based guitarist and producer Yonatan Gat, who invited the group to a spontaneous collaboration on stage at SXSW 2017 after seeing them play outside the venue, before he was about to play.

That meeting led to a five year collaboration that saw Gat and the Eastern Medicine Singers playing festival stages across the US, Canada and Europe — and in some cases, bringing powwow to audiences and places that had never heard it before.

The collective’s long-awaited — and highly-anticipated — self-titled debut is slated for a July 1, 2022 release through Yonatan Gat’s Stone Tapes, an imprint of Joyful Noise here in the States and through Mothland in Canada. The self-titled album sees the Medicine Singers expanding into a supergroup that includes Swans’ Thor Harris and Christopher Pravdica, ambient music pioneer Laraaji, former DNA drummer and no wave icon Ikue Mori and trumpeter Jaimie Branch, who’s a rising star in the world of improvised music.

Medicine Singers have created a spellbinding and mystical musical experience, cycling through a kaleidoscopic array of sounds including psychedelic punk, electronic music, spiritual jazz and others. But the genre-blurring, genre-smashing approach is firmly rooted in the intense, physical power of the powwow drum and the Eastern Medicine Singers’ connection to their ancestral music and traditions. The end result is a material that celebrates and honors tradition while boldly breaking from its restrictions — or in the words of Medicine Singers’ leader Daryl Black Eagle Jamieson: “These two cultures can work together, and blend together. We created something that needs to be out there in the world, to show people how we can work together and make something beautiful.”

The self-titled debut’s second and latest single is the mesmerizing “Sunset.” Centered around an expansive arrangement featuring a modal-like horn line, atmospheric and oscillating synths, the Medicine Singers’ gorgeous multi-part harmonies, the intense and forceful powwow drum and a Robby Krieger-like guitar solo that slowly builds up into a noisy psychedelic freak out. The end result is a song that’s lysergic yet deeply mystical journey rooted in traditions that seem older than time.

“We play the Sunset song at the end of the day, when the sun goes down. Not many people sing these songs anymore: ‘Sunrise’ and ‘Sunset.’ They were given to our drummer Artie Red Medicine Crippen by the great chief Bright Canoe years ago,” the Medicine Singers explain. “They are ancient vocal songs – a thousand years old perhaps – which have the name of the creator – Yahweh. You hear it throughout the song. It’s an ancient calling to the creator. ‘Sunset’ can open up almost anything. It’s a very special song – magical and powerful. It brings great joy to people when we play it.”

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Silver People Share a Mind-Bending Visual for “Dark Side of the Moon”-Like Single

Silver People is the solo recording project of singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Jake Reeves, who’s an attorney by day. And although his clients may occasionally have to wait a little bit longer to see their attorney, it was a small price for them to have paid to help him create music. (Reeves is quick to point out that none of his clients have ever complained about it.) “Once the day’s primary lawyering was done,” he explains, “I would close my office door and just get onto YouTube, taking these deep dives on all these amazing free tutorials that are out there,” he says of that period, as he started dabbling in music production on the side of his full-time job as a lawyer.

What initially began as YouTube deep dives and extended research has come to full fruition with Reeves’ full-length debut Gnome Country. Part singer-songwriter exploration, part production wizardry, Gnome Country is a loving homage to late 60s and early 70s psychedelia. “I started doing a little bit of that production stuff and started recording and got an idea to make a humble, acid-folk record,” Reeves says of the album’s inspiration. ““Also, I’m a big sci-fi fantasy nerd. I thought it would be really fun to do an album that had those touches, in a tongue-in-cheek way. There was this period from about 1969 through 1972 when all of these British musicians discovered and became fascinated with The Lord of the Rings. I wanted to do something with that influence, kind of an otherworldly, mystical kind of thing.”

“That was the original concept. As I got into it, I was learning how to produce, trying to make the stuff as professional as I could. And I was also mixing it as I went, trying to focus on the songcraft without becoming too overwrought.”

While you can hear the influences of Syd Barrett-era and Dark Side of the Moon-era Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Bert Jansch and others, Reeves’ innate originally keeps the music from sounding too indebted to any one particular source. “I didn’t want it to sound pastiche,” he explains. “I didn’t want it to be mimicry. I wanted it to be loving and influenced by those genres, but I didn’t want it to sound like a tribute band.”

Although Silver People is a mostly one-man operation with Reeves playing the instruments and on the decks, he does get help from some friends — most notably from Nicole Chillemi, who contributes vocals on a couple of tracks, including two of there out-of-left-field covers.

As eclectic as the album’s material is, it could have been even more so, if Reeves’ wife Kimberly hadn’t intervened. Reeves says, “My wife Kimberly said, ‘You’re going to have a 30-song album that’s going to be unwieldy in all different places. I think you need to get back to where you started.’ I pared things down and decided to get back to the original idea.”

Considering the sci-fi leanings on the record, it’s fitting whom Jake Reeves credits for his overriding philosophy on letting these tracks live in all their unkempt glory. “George Lucas said, ‘Art is never completed, it’s abandoned,’” Reeves explains. “So a guiding principle was to not tinker with this thing and turn it into something hyper-produced or obsessively polished. It just wasn’t going to be one of those records.”

Gnome Country‘s latest single “Torn Between the Wizards of My Past and the Demons of My Present” is a slow-burning, late night lounge take on psych centered around glistening and arpeggiated Rhodes and jazz-like percussion paired with Nicole Chillemi’s smoky vocals. The end result is a song that to my ears, at least resembles a synthesis of Dark Side of the Moon-era Pink Floyd and Dummy-era Portishead.

Fittingly, the accompanying video features trippy 70s CGI footage of people flying through the cosmos and the like — and in a way that would remind you of old sci fi books and TRON.

Gnome Country is slated for a July 1, 2022 release.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Originally founded in beautiful Amsterdam, the rising indie duo Donna Blue — romantic couple and muses, Danique van Kesteren and Bart van Dalen — quickly established a dreamy and cinematic sound seemingly influenced by Phil Spector, Wall of Sound-like pop, Pasty Cline, yè yè and David Lynch‘s Twin Peaks with the release of 2017’s self-titled debut, which featured “Sunset Blvd,” a track that received airplay on Elton John’s Apple Music radio show Rocket Hour.

Back in 2020, Dutch indie label, Snowstar Records, released the duo’s self-produced and self-recorded five-song EP Inbetween saw the duo continuing upon the sound that quickly won them attention nationally and internationally — while also drawing from Roy Orbison, Julee Cruise, Nancy Sinatra, Patsy Cline. The end result was an effort that evokes late nights wandering narrow European streets, daydreaming in smokey cafes, sitting in bars reflecting on your life while nursing a drink. Personally, the EP’s material immediately brings back very specific memories: walking through Amsterdam’s Centrum and Red Light Districts late at night, the prostitutes summoning men with a wink and a wry smile, and passing drunk revelers on the street; and walking through Frankfurt-am-Main’s Haupwatche and Romer Districts with the surreal and lonely ache of being a foreigner.

Donna Blue’s highly-anticipated full-lengths but Dark Roses is slated for a May 13, 2022 release through Snowstar Records. The album is reportedly features 11 dreamy and cinematic tracks that feel like a film score for a romantic, film noir. While playing with the feeling of being alive, yet in a carefully sculpted parallel world, the album’s material finds the duo taking on a decidedly twangy Western sound inspired by Ennio Morricone, Piero Piccioni and John Barry paired with dreamily sensual vocals.

Dark Roses‘ fourth and latest single “The Beginning” is a slow-burning, lush, and cinematic track centered around shimmering and twangy guitars, soaring keys, propulsive, hi-hat driven rhythms paired with van Kesteren’s aching vocal. Fittingly, “The Beginning” sounds as though it should be part of the opening credits of a gorgeously shot and surreal film set in the Amsterdam or Berlin suburbs that’s one part social commentary, one part Romantic mediation, one part love story and one part psychedelic freak out.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Mike Rogers is an Amsterdam-based indie dance trio featuring three of the country’s rising electronic music stars — Mike Mago, TWR72, and Kita Menari mastermind Micha de Jonge.

The project can trace their origins back to the early 2000s: Mago and TWR72 met while DJ’ing Dutch underground electro parties. That raw and energetic scene saw the pari playing a mixture of electro pop, French house, fidget and techno. As the years passed by, they individually developed their own unique sounds — but they realized that they had long held a similar dream: to start a live act inspired by the bands they grew up with, as well as the likes of Miike Snow, Foals, Editors, Van She, and Goose.

Mike Rogers was a way for the pair to challenge themselves creatively and professionally — and to further develop themselves as producers and DJs. The duo recruited Kita Menari’s Micha de Jonge to his big, plaintive vocals to their hook-driven, crowd-pleasing sound.

Their full-length debut, which is slated for an early 2023 release will see reportedly see the trio crafting material that’s a mix of analog, digital and retro sounds with a modern feel. But in the meantime . . . The Dutch trio’s latest single “Can’t Stop” is an anthemic bit of post punk/dance punk centered around angular guitar attack, de Jonge’s achingly plaintive vocals and a motorik-like groove paired with enormous, euphoric hooks. While to my ears recalling the likes of Radio 4, Interpol, and Editors, “Can’t Stop” as the trio explains is about a lonely man, who looks back at his life: As a young man, he tries to do everything right, but always feels as though he is failing since people don’t seem to understand him. Battling a personal struggle with his past, the lonely man protests against this feeling, with the hopes that he can get rid of those negative thoughts.

Written last year, the trio explain, “In our minds that year was a year where we had a lot of questions. Like, what is freedom, what should one fight for, how should one fight for something, how do we move forward as a society and also, how do we judge our past behaviour. We believe questions are the biggest inspirator. We’re trying to ask questions more than to send a message, although that’s also a bit of a vision we want to share.” 



Single Review by William Ruben Helms

German-Canadian indie rock outfit Pulse Park — Magnusson (vocals, guitar), Frank Hagen (bass) and Oliver Polastri (drums) — trace their origins to rather hilarious circumstances, according to the band: The trio first met while on an Arctic expedition in Qikiqtaaluk, Nunavut, Canada, where they learned how to play ukuleles that they traded dry fruits for with the Inuit.

After the successful introduction of a breeding program for bowhead whales, the band decided to return to Germany. But before they could return home, huskies stole their belongings. So the band had to make a living busking across Canada, singing songs about the Great White North.

Ridiculous, right? In any case, the band which was founded back in 2020 is influenced by the likes of Dinosaur, Jr., The Lemonheads, and Cloud Nothings. Their full-length debut Phonac Music was recorded last November and released last month through Brighton, UK-based Shore Dive Records.

Phonac Music‘s latest single “Sine Wave” is centered around fuzz pedaled power chords, thunderous drumming and dreamy vocals paired with big, mosh pit friendly hooks. Sonically, “Sine Wave” will bring back fond memories of 120 Minutes era MTV alt rock, delivered with an easygoing aplomb.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Single: Mysterious Act WORLD GOVERNMENT Shares a Brooding, New Single

WORLD GOVERNMENT is a mysterious post rock outfit that formed back in 2007. After several releases and numerous live shows, the members of WORLD GOVERNMENT focused on a writing and recording a full-length album.  As the story goes, while working on their album, they felt into the trap of perfectionism and as a result, the band wound up secluding themselves for a period of several years.

However, that period resulted in a batch of new material including “Rain, drops,” a slow-burning and meditative composition that evokes rainy Spring afternoons as I wrote earlier this year. The mysterious act’s latest single “Lucky” is part of a maxi-single EP that will feature variations of the same song — as though they came from parallel universes.

“Lucky” is a sparse and meditative song centered around looping guitar, buzzing bass synths, twinkling and arpeggiated melodic synths and skittering beats paired with plaintive vocals dripping with a bit of emotional ambiguity and irony. While managing to nod at Depeche Mode‘s “Enjoy the Silence,” the members of WORLD GOVERNMENT explain that he song is “a bit cautious, a bit sad, a bit sarcastic” and “is about being in the moment, feeling ‘now.’ We are finally out of our comfort zone. What’s next?”