Tag: Serena Maneesh

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Steve Wynn Shares Ruminative “Make It Right”

Steve Wynn is an acclaimed singer/songwriter and musician, solo artist and frontman of the revered alt-rock/indie rock outfit The Dream Syndicate and The Baseball Project.

2024 will be a very busy year for Wynn: Make It Right, the acclaimed singer/songwriter’s first solo album since 2010 is slated for an August 30, 2024 release through Fire Records. The album also coincides with the release of his new memoir I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True, which will be published by Jawbone Press.

I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True is a vivid and revealing memoir that tells a tale of writing songs and playing in bands as a conduit to a world its author could once have barely imagined — a world of major labels, luxury tour buses and sold out theaters across, but also one of alcohol, drugs and a a low-level rock ‘n’ roll Babylon. Ultimately, it’s a tale of redemption, with music as a vehicle for artistic and personal transformation and transcendence.

Make It Right was written and recorded in tandem with Wynn’s work on the memoir. “With each chapter, I would get ideas for songs inspired by the deep dive into my past and vice versa,” Wynn explains. “The reflections became intertwined after a while, a mutual commentary between literal and metaphorical ruminating.

“The songs here aren’t directly autobiographical although the album does start with ‘Santa Monica,’ the city and boulevard where I was born and concludes with ‘Roosevelt Avenue,’ the main thoroughfare of the Queens neighborhood in New York City that I call home today. You write what you know—even when you’re not aware it’s what you’re writing about at the time.

“If the book recounted a tale of trepidation and dread and questionable choices, then that tale would turn into a song of similar intent like ‘What Were You Expecting.’ A step back for perspective and positivity, in turn, found its way into a song like ‘You’re Halfway There.’

The cataclysmic ‘one big open drain’ of ‘Simpler Than the Rain’ was resolved by the resolute ‘I’m just trying to make it right’ on the title track. A gauzy and melancholy where-did-it-go-wrong Southern California flashback on the Long Beach inspired ‘Cherry Avenue’ would steer me towards a steelier determination and reset on ‘Making Good on My Promises.’

“It was a dialogue between the memoirist and the musician, a one-man Q&A, a gentle volley in the tennis court of my mind. 40-love, game, set and match.

As I’ve found the melodies and words to stir and simmer with the stories I told in the book, I’ve simultaneously brought friends and collaborators from my recent and distant past to help flesh them out on the record. The likes of Vicki Peterson, Mike Mills, Stephen McCarthy, Scott McCaughey, Jason Victor, Dennis Duck and Mark Walton and my wife Linda Pitmon are all in the book and—look! —there they are on the record as well!”

“And much like life itself, new faces and hit-and-run collaborators would pass my radar during the sessions and provide new light as well. Chris Schlarb from California dream pop ensemble Psychic Temple added his cinematic touch, Emil Nikolaisen of Norway psych-grunge combo Serena Maneesh chimed in with his trademark sonic anarchy and then Eric “Roscoe” Ambel used his studio savvy producer chops to tie it all together at the end.

It feels perfect and very appropriate that the book and record will both be coming out in the same final week of August 2024. Not that one is needed to understand the other. Hey, you can just put on ‘Make It Right’ and use it as the catalyst to create your own life story, dig into your own past. It belongs to you now. Let it tell your own tale while I tell mine. We’re all just trying to make it right.”

Make It Right‘s first single, album title track “Make It Right” is a slow-burning and ruminative ballad, written from the perspective of someone who’s lived a fully and very messy life of triumphs, foolish and selfish mistakes, regrets, heartbreak and bitter betrayals and with the deep, wizened empathy and understanding that people are flawed, occasionally myopic, stupid and selfish. But we’re all trying to make it right somehow, in a mad, desperate world.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Closing Eyes · You Can Have Everything

Oslo’s Closing Eyes — Eirik Asker Pettersen, Magnus Asker Pettersen, Emilie Lium Vordal, Anders Emil Rønning and Jørgen Bjella — are a rising indie act, who has developed a sound and approach that’s inspired by an eclectic array of influences including Yo La Tengo, Stereolab, Spiritualized, The Velvet Underground, The Electric Prunes, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Gilberto Gil, The Magnetic Fields, and The Soft Bulletin-era The Flaming Lips. 

With the release of 2014’s debut EP Melodies for the Contemporary Mind, which led to them opening for Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier — and their full-length debut, 2018’s Soft Years, the act started to receive quite a bit of attention from the Norwegian press. Adding to a growing profile, the act played several showcases in their native Norway and they opened for The Brian Jonestown Massacre. They ended a big 2018 with the the 12-inch effort Reworked, which featured remixes from Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas, Young Dreams and Serena Maneesh.

The members of the rising Norwegian indie act spent last year writing and recording their recently released Emil Nikolaisen-produced sophomore album Eternal Fidelity.  The album highlights a band that has grown more confident while crafting material that’s nostalgic yet modern, centered around big chords and sentimental melodies.  “Sometimes I try very hard to hold on to something but it just feels like it’s slipping through my fingers. Ideals, dreams, identities or friendships are all things that live so strongly and easily when we’re young but often seem to lose footing as we grow older,” the band’s Eirik Asker Pettersen says of the album’s overall vibe and themes. “Convictions that seem so solid can suddenly dissolve and become unresolved issues. I don’t think we’re too good at dealing with that. Mostly, Eternal Fidelity is about those feelings. It’s about trying to hold on, let go and make sense of it all. It’s about clinging to what’s important even though it might not be easy all the time.”  

Eternal Fidelity‘s latest single is the woozy “You Can Have Everything.” Centered around shimming and arpeggiated blocks of keys, boom bap-like drums, fuzzy power chords and an rousingly anthemic hook, the song manages to a woozy and achingly nostalgic song that evokes the rapid passing of time, as well as the constantly changing priorities and responsibilities of adult life. Life changes you after all; it does that very well.

 

 

Video by William Ruben Helms

Live Footage: The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe Leads Pure Ensemble 6 at Space Fest 2016

Created by Nasiono Association, Space Fest is annual Gdansk, Poland-based festival of shoegaze, space-rock and alternative rock that features the prerequisite live music, but much like CMJ, Mondo.NYC, Northside Festival and others also features meet-and-greets with legendary and renowned artists, workshops for Polish and other internationally-based musicians, a battle of the bands-like competition for young, up-and-coming bands and more. As an annual celebration of all things psych rock and space rock-inspired, Space Fest in his almost seven year history has gradually become a scrappy yet internationally recognized festival with an increasingly diverse lineup of bands from across the European Union, Poland, the US, Canada and elsewhere. 

One of the festival’s standout highlights over the course of its history is the Pure Phase Ensemble, a collaborative collective that features one permanent member, Karol Schwarz (KSAS), who also manages Nasiono Records, and every year Schwartz is joined by a rotating cast of local musicians and at least one internationally recognized musician, who acts as a guest musical director, mentor and collaborator through a series of workshops and joint songwriting that culminates with the group performing their new material during the final night of the festival. 

Now, if you’ve been frequenting JOVM over the past couple of years, you may recall that during the course of the Festival’s history, they’ve invited the likes of  Spiritualized’s Ray Dickaty, Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier, Placebo’s Steve Hewitt, Marion’s Jamie Harding, Six by Seven’s Chris Olley, The Bad Seeds and The True Spirit’s Hugo Race and RIDE’s Mark Gardener. Last year, The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s legendary frontman and founding member Anton Newcombe led Pure Phase Ensemble 6 with Serena Maneesh’s Emil Nikolaisen, and the collective managed to impress festivalgoers with a live set that included “God Drugs” a menacing, droning, and murky dirge, consisting of layers fuzzy and distorted power chords, thundering drumming and an almost mosh pit-friendly hook over which Newcombe laconically delivers his lyrics. While forceful, the song manages a lysergic haze. 

Also, every year the organizers create a documentary of the festival and the documentary features brief interviews and live footage with festival organizers, Anton Newcombe, who says that his appearance at last year’s Space Fest was a way to convince and entice establish artists that it’s a serious and growing festival; the UK’s MDME SPKR, Italy’s Be Forest, Germany’s Camera, the Icelandic-German act The Third Sound, Poland’s Wild Books, Lonker See, The Fruitcakes, Rosa Vertov and The Czech Republic’s DIV I DED. Additionally, the video features impromptu interviews with thrilled festivalgoers and more. The documentary offers a glimpse of a rarely seen Gdansk, a city with a burgeoning music, arts and nightlife scene, full of hungry, young creatives  — a marked departure from the city’s long-held reputation as a grim Soviet satellite city. 

Interestingly, the videos serve as a teaser for this year’s Space Fest, which take place the weekend of December 1 – December 2 and will feature Maciej Cieslak of renowned Polish shoegazers Scianka, leading Pure Phase Ensemble 7, Italy’s New Candys, Portugal’s 10,000 Russos, Mugstar, Switzerland’s Blind Butcher, Germany’s Odd Couple, Mexico’s Tajak, the UK’s Dead Rabbits and up-and-coming local acts 30 kilo slonca, and Wilcze Jagondy.