Tag: Paul Simon Graceland

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

The Bland is a rising Swedish indie pop/folk act that can trace its origins back to when its five members met serendipitously while traveling through New Zealand as teenagers. Feeling an instant musical simpatico, the members of the band promised to keep in touch and reunite when they returned home. Upon their return to Sweden, the band’s frontman Axel Öberg rented a big house, so that the members of the band could live and work together. That living space had an ad-hoc rehearsal space — the basement.

Although they didn’t initially have big career plans, they wrote a number of songs, which they returned in their home studio, Röda Paradise, a red wooden hut in Southern Stockholm — and for money, they tagged along with a friend’s band, selling milkshakes at music festivals. In between sets they played music to entertain themselves. But little did they know, their folk pop sound caught the attention of a small, local production company, a company that managed to run one of their homeland’s music festivals.

With the release of last year’s Beautiful Distance, the members of the Swedish folk pop project started to built up a growing international profile with captivating and critically applauded live shows across Scandinavia and Europe that included stops at Hamburg‘s Reeperbahn Festival and others across the international festival circuit. Building upon a profile, the members of The Bland are currently working on their forthcoming album, La Hata Vitoye, a concept album that tells a Romantic tale of an imaginary bar and town by the name of La Hata Vitoye. The band created a detailed historical background for the town that goes back to the 1300s, then created characters and situations and wrote detailed stories, which they then wrote accompanying music to them.

The album’s concept story begins at La Hata Vitoye, a tiny bar, located by the coast. As the band explains, the bar and its town, is the sort of place where caravans and traveling entertainers take refuge after long periods of touring and traveling. It’s the sort of place that returning travelings tell stories about — stories that seem way too good to exist in real life. But every character within this world brings something new to the story. As the world begins to hear more about the town, it starts to grow — and dramatic events occur to develop the town’s destiny. The album’s latest single, album title track “La Hata Vitoye” is an exuberant, breezy and mischievous track that draws equally from Tropicalia, Afro pop and Latin music, centered around a euphoric hook. While sonically recalling a deliriously upbeat Graceland-era Paul Simon, that exuberance is actually a bit deceptive in light of the pandemic. In many ways, the song evokes the chance encounters, the late nights in some sweaty and dark club, dancing to a band or a DJ that has the room rocking, the friends and regulars you’d encounter at your bar, your favorite club or what have you and so on.

.“When we were on tour in Germany last February, we heard about the first Corona cases,” The Bland’s frontman Axel Öberg explains. “Over the next few months, as a practicing doctor in Sweden, I saw how social isolation harmed people. With ‘La Hata Vitoye’ we want to try to look at life differently again, to come together and share a positive attitude towards life. This place called La Hata Vitoye, which we are talking about, will become a real actual place at our own festivals next summer. And we can’t wait to meet as many as possible there. If the situation permits.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Marfa, Texas’ Wilderman Releases Trippy, Random Generated Visuals for Polyrhythmic, Hook Driven New Single

Marfa, Texas is a small and extremely remote Western Texas town, a short distance from the American-Mexican border, and unsurprisingly the town is about as far as one can get  — both metaphorically and literally — from the costal tech capitals. Singer/songwriter Rob Gugnor and his partner Simone Rubi relocated to Marfa in 2013, where the y started a decidedly lo-fi cafe Do Your Thing, where the patient customer will reportedly be rewarded with some of the finest coffee in the Southwest; but perhaps more important to this site, Gugnor is known as the creative mastermind of the Marfa-based recording project Wilderman. 

Ironically, despite Gugnor’s  geographical and physical remove from the major tech capitals, his recently released Wilderman album Artifice deals with the increasing and confusing rift between lived experience and its digital approximation. As Gugnor explains at length in press notes:

“I started this record 5 years ago, seeking to explore the impact of technology on our psyche and the new human experience. Since beginning this process, I’ve found more value in the time away from screens, but I’m starting to view it as a luxury. Screen time is unavoidable now. Social media numbers are important. We can’t opt out of the game. In this time span, we’ve seen how information can be manipulated for our feeds. Digital perception has relativized everything to the point of insanity. Empathy is nearly impossible. K*vanaugh, Tr*mp, Milo Whatever His Name Was, digital bullying, flat-earthers. Life is now lived in the digital space. Identity and truth are shapeshifting and amorphous.

I would like to say that I found some hope in digging deep into the digital, but I’ve actually become complacent, and I think we all have. I was hoping to be a whistleblower, but it will mostly fall on deaf ears. We are in a stadium full of people, screaming to be heard. And yet everyone has headphones on and screens up, filtering through the noise to only consume the content they curate for themselves. Art is content. Tragedy is content.

But I still dream that we can remember ourselves, empathy, the human touch – it’s in the songs.

I hope that this album will somehow lead the listener back to a version of themselves that’s in the here and now, without comparison to others, without self-judgment.

It’s a mirror that can also be a gateway to another reality, the one we used to live in.”

Gungor and a backing band featuring some of Marfa’s best musicians — Wye Oak’s Andy Stack, The Brilliance’s John Arndt, Gungor’s Grammy-nominated brother Michael, Midlake’s McKenzie Smith Jeremy Harris, and Andrew McGuire, along with engineer Hugo Nicholson, who has worked with Radiohead, Father John Misty and Primal Scream decamped to Sonic Ranch, a studio in the Chihuahuan Desert, just outside the border town of Tornillo, to start the jam sessions that would eventually turn into the material on Artifice. Chosen in part, because important records by Animal Collective, Beach House, The Mountain Goats, Swans and others were recorded on their premises, the album sonically is influenced by the work of David Byrne and Talking Heads, Brian Eno, Paul Simon’s Graceland and Donald Judd’s permanently installed works. Unsurprisingly, Remain in Light and Graceland were used as a blueprint with live improvised material being recorded with the idea that Gugnor would later recombine and rearrange these sounds into fleshed out songs. It’s a decided and radical change in sound and songwriting approach from his 2013 Wilderman debut Learn to Feel, which was recorded completely in an analog fashion.  

The album’s latest single “Cog” is a funky, polyrhythmic, sinuous hook-driven jam centered around a looped, shimmering guitar line, a buoyant bass line, shimmering and sharply arpeggiated synths — and while recalling Fear of Music and Remain in Light-era Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel 3, Security and So-era Peter Gabriel, the song is rooted in the current sociopolitical moment, suggesting that technology has caused us to lose our humanity to the point that we’re cogs in a larger, economically driven machine that will destroy us all. But throughout the song’s narrator is demanding that we resist it, that we remember and honor the individual moving to the beat of their own drum.

The accompanying visuals are the result of a new training methodology for generative adversarial networks — in this case, a random number generator came up with imaginary celebrities that look like real ones. What’s real and what’s digitally generated? Is it your memory or a distortion? It’s trippy and disconcerting. 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Fronted and founded by its Chicago, IL-born, Austin, TX-based primary songwriter Nathan Dixey, and currently featuring members of RF Shannon‘s backing band, The Dan Ryan’s sophomore album Guidance finds Dixey refining and softening the sound that the project developed on its debut album, reportedly leaning much more towards a trippy and hypnotic psychedelia as you’ll hear on the album’s latest single, album title track “Guidance,” as shimmering guitar chords, a persistent, heartbeat-like drum patter and in the background tribal-like harmonized chants which makes the song nod at both The Grateful Dead, a major influence on Dixey and company and Graceland-era Paul Simon; but with a slow-burning, easygoing, yet expansive feel that belies a careful and deliberation attention to craft.

As Dixey explains in press notes, “Unlike the first LP, I wanted to focus on writing more complete songs instead of grooves. Some of the grooves are still present, but having more of a narrative within the structure was important for me. Like the first record, accepting change is at the core of Guidance, whether that change be within society, oneself, or witnessing a transformation in a loved one or a relationship. I was listening to a lot of Damien Jurado/Richard Swift records while writing and recording this one, so it was especially wonderful to have Swift, a master of sonic texture (and song-craft in general), to add his touch on the songs.”

 

New Audio by William Ruben Helms

Art Feynman is a Californian-based singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist and from “Feeling Good About Feeling Good,” the first single off his full-length debut, Blast Off Through the Wicker, the Californian singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist specializes in a genre-defying sound that possesses elements of krautrock, Nigerian Highlife, Afrobeat, trippy psych rock fuzz and Graceland-era Paul Simon pop. And while recorded on four-track tape, Feynman maintained the track’s easy-going, motorik meets Afrobeat groove without he use of loops or drum machines, which points both to dexterous musicianship and careful attention to craft. But perhaps more important, this track may arguably be the funkiest and most unique songs I’ve come across this year.

 

 

 

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: The Lush and Boldly Colored, Primal Visuals for Y La Bamba’s “Libre”

Over the course of the band’s three albums and several lineup changes of collaborators, friends and musicians, the band’s material has gone through a variety of changes — but it’s the the band’s forth full-length effort Ojos Del Sol that may be arguably be the most radical turn in sonic direction, while returning to familiar themes of searching and personal discovery — themes that have come up a number of times in Mendoza’s own life, whether as the daughter of Mexican immigrants connecting with her ancestry and searching for spiritual meaning that goes much further than organized religion. In fact, as Mendoza explains in press notes, the material on the album thematically is a “cerebration of family and community” — but a community of shared humanity.

Interestingly, the album’s first single “Libre” finds Mendoza and company at their most self-assured but in one of the breeziest and pop-leaning songs as they pair an infectious and anthemic hook with an arrangement that includes what sounds like xylophone, a mischievous and sinuous bass line, a steady backbeat, Mendoza’s gorgeous vocals along three part harmonies in English and Spanish, a rolling, African folk music-like guitar line in a song that evokes a sense of almost childlike wonder and joy, while making a connection both to Mendoza’s ancestral homeland and Africa in a way that subtly channels Paul Simon’s Graceland.

The recently released video accompanying the song is a lush, cinematically shot video using impossibly verdant greens, bright reds, and a seemingly primal and ecstatic dance routine in the fields just featuring women wearing ancient-inspired costumes, masks and the like. And while being swoon worthy, the video manages to make a vital connection between the primal and ancient and the modern, between celebrating spring and summer and fertility, and a celebrating a community of strong like-minded women simultaneously.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

If you’ve been frequenting JOVM for a while, you may remember that I’ve written about Norwegian electro pop duo, BLØSH. With the release of their breezy and infectious debut single “Can’t Afford to Lose You,” the duo comprised of of Madrid-born, Oslo, Norway-based cellist and vocalist Teresa Bernabé and guitarist Jørgen Berg Svela, an Oslo native, quickly found themselves with an expanding international profile as the duo saw praise and attention from JaJaJa Music, Indie Shuffle and airplay on Amazing Radio.

“Give It Away,” which I wrote about last November further cemented the duo’s burgeoning reputation for crafting infectious pop as the song paired an upbeat melody, punchy bass lines, a looping guitar line and a soaring, anthemic hook with with Bernabé’s breezy vocals  while sonically drawing from African music and African-inspired pop  — in particular Paul Simon‘s Graceland, the legendary Ali Farka Touré and Afrobeat. Now the Oslo, Norway-based duo is continuing to build on the buzz of “Can’t Afford to Lose You,” and “Give It Away” with the release of their latest single “When Love Is Alive.” Beginning with a steady bass line, the song pairs reverb-y guitars, propulsive drumming and Bernabé’s ethereal vocals in a slow-burning song that expresses an aching longing and yearning for giving and receiving the love that the narrator desperately wants and deserves — but with the sad realization that love is often short-lived. And as a result, the song possesses the same breeziness as their previous singles but with a subtle sense of mourning.

 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

 

With the release of their debut single “Can’t Afford to Lose You,” the Norwegian electro pop duo BLØSH, comprised of Madrid-born, Oslo, Norway-based cellist and vocalist Teresa Bernabé and guitarist Jørgen Berg Svela, an Oslo native, the duo quickly found themselves with an expanding international profile, thanks in part to a breezy and infectious pop-leaning sound. Already, the duo have seen praise and attention from JaJaJa Music, Indie Shuffle and airplay on Amazing Radio.

Building on the buzz that they’ve already received, the duo’s newest single “Give It Away” is “about not taking life — or the situations that life puts you in — too seriously,” as the duo explained in press notes. The song will likely cement the duo’s burgeoning reputation for crafting infectious pop as the song pairs an upbeat melody, punchy bass lines and a looping guitar line with Bernabé’s breezy vocals and soaringly anthemic hooks.  Sonically speaking, the song draws from African music and African music-inspired pop — in particular Paul Simon‘s Graceland, the legendary Ali Farka Touré, and to my ears Afrobeat as the song and its funky and playful melody is built around the looping and angular guitar line. Simply put, the song is crafted and pure pop confection.