Tag: Single Review: Waves

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Plaster Cast Shares a Mournful Yet Dance Floor Friendly Bop

Plaster Cast, which currently features members split across the country, can trace their origins back to when producer Alex Esk started the project with vocalist Cameron Wilson back in 2011 — while both were studying video art at UC San Diego. Wilson’s sister Michaela Lustig joined the project as a second vocalist. Then producer/engineer Brah1m, who Esk met when they both worked for The Real Housewives joined.

And with that lineup, the members of Plaster Cast wrote and recorded their debut EP, 2016’s Permanence, which received critical praise from Gorilla vs. Bear, The Fader, Vice, and BBC Radio. Adding to a breakthrough year for the outfit, EP single “Sunless,” a melancholic, downtempo pop song centered around Wilson and Lustig’s uncanny harmonizing and a warped beyond recognition Adele sample, and “Undecided,” which featured Foxes in Fiction appeared on a number of year-end lists.

The project’s sophomore EP Control is slated for an August 12, 2022 release. Understandably, informed by the vast changes of the sociopolitical climate that have occurred since 2016’s Permanence, Control EP thematically is a large, perceptive grown towards modernity with the EP’s material touching on various concepts of individualism vs. collectivism, intimacy vs. alienation, and the self-consciousness of empathy — but in an understated, largely philosophical fashion.

The EP also sees a deeper sense of collaboration between the project’s core members, inspired by the insight that relinquishing one’s own ideas can provide both empowerment and diminishment simultaneously. And as a result, the EP reportedly feels more like a group of friends in a personal therapy session, in which all their collective fears, joys and uncertainties are shared in a way that touches upon a more expansive reflection of the human condition.

The material is rooted within the intersection of warmth and isolation — and the band’s desire to acknowledge their own literal and symbolic closeness and distance, shaped by each member’s own reality. “The songs are connected by themes of remoteness and looking at relationships as a negotiation of what you get and what you give up,” Plaster Cast’s Wilson explains. “Ultimately the work of looking at your place in your relationships is worth the pain it can cause, as we are useless alone.”

But ultimately, the central theme at the heart of Control is the relinquishment of control in one’s life: The control of our thoughts, the control over the circumstances and impermanence of life, the control over a world that’s often confusing, uncertain and mad. And paradoxically through relinquishing control — and the possibility of it — there often comes a sense of great mindfulness and calm.

Control‘s lates single “Waves” begins with an ethereal introduction featuring dreamily cooed vocals and atmospheric synths. Around the 25 second mark, the song quickly ramps up to feature a relentless, disco-tinged, motorik groove paired with dreamily delivered harmonies, mournful synth pads and an infectious hook. While sonically bearing a resemblance to Chromatics and others, the song expresses an aching yearning for understanding and companionship in a desperate, uncertain moment.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

 

Saul Rivers is a New York-born and-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and self-taught virtuoso, who began taking piano lessons when he turned three. By the time he was 16, he taught himself trumpet, clarinet, alto sax, tenor sax and guitar. And while citing the likes of John Mayer, Eric Clapton, B.B. King and James Taylor as his major influences, Rivers has developed a sound blends elements of the blues, R&B, soul and pop.

2017’s Couldn’t Do It Alone EP featured EP title track “Couldn’t Do It Alone,” which amassed over a million streams. Since the release of that EP, the New York-born and -based singer/songwriter has released the acclaimed live EP, The Pineapple Sessions, collaborated with Gideon King and his band City Blog, and released live performance videos covering Eric Clapton’s “Old Love” and James Bay’s “Let It Go” filmed at Laurel Canyon. Adding to the growing buzz surrounding him, Rivers recently signed to Level.

Saul Rivers (Live Sessions) – “Old Love” cover from Albatross Pros on Vimeo.

Saul Rivers – Let It Go (cover) from Albatross Pros on Vimeo.

Rivers’ latest single, the Scott Jacoby-produced “Waves” is a seemingly effortless, hook-driven and soulful jam centered around atmospheric synths, a shimmering and looping guitar line, a two-step inducing groove that subtly reveals a careful and deliberate attention to craft. And while clearly indebted to neo-soul, the song as Rivers explains in press notes “is about getting out of your head and back into your body. As a native New Yorker, I’ve been surrounded by the hustle and bustle of a city the truly never stops moving. My hope is that this song takes you to a place where you can groove, dance, and forget about everything in your head and just enjoy the music.”

 

 

 

 

New Audio by William Ruben Helms

Deriving their name from a scientific theory that suggests that Earth may have had a second moon, a twin moon that was destroyed in a massive collision during the early days of our solar system, Lunar Twin, an electro pop/dream pop/shoegaze duo comprised of Bryce Boudreau (vocals) and Chris Murphy (multi-instrumentalist and producer) can trace their origins to the 2011 Denver Underground Music Festival when Boudreau joined Murphy’s goth band Nightsweats as a guest vocalist. And by 2013, the duo started collaborating together full-time.

Now, it’s been some time since the duo have released new, original material as both the Los Angeles, CA-based, Hawaii-based Boudreau and the Salt Lake City, UT-based Murphy have been involved in a variety of creative pursuits — with Murphy working in projects that have shared stages with an impressive list of renowned artists including Grimes, Bonnie Prince Billy and Peaches among others; however, the duo’s latest effort Night Tides EP was released earlier this month through Texas-based dream pop/shoegaze label Moon Sounds Records with an extremely limited run of lathe-cut vinyl through the band’s own imprint Lunar Industry Records, and a limited cassette run through their new label. Unsurprisingly because of the distance between the two collaborators, that distance plays a significant thematic role on the material of Night Tides. As Murphy mentions in press notes, ” We both live thousands of miles apart, separated by the Pacific Ocean and miles of mountains and desert. These totally different places of isolation are the nexus of our songwriting. The ocean plays a big part in this album. The ebb an flow of the die and the effect the moon has on it.”

Boudreau adds, “For this EP, we wanted to channel the spirit of the primordial world and a lost island in the equatorial night feeling. The dense warm air smelling of flowers beneath a canopy of banyan trees.”  “Waves,” the first single off Night Tides, Boudreau explains “is about drifting between two worlds — the primeval and the technological and between Earth and Water spirits.”  And while sonically speaking, the duo’s latest single will further cement their reputation for crafting moody and atmospheric pop in which they pair Boudreau’s rich Mark Lanegan-like baritone with a minimalist production featuring propulsive, tribal-like drumming, ambient synths with brief bursts of shimmering guitar and twinkling keys. It’s a hauntingly gorgeous track that manages to evoke  the sensation of awakening from a pleasant reverie and swimming within a warm and gently ebbing  body of water with the moonlight shimmering right in front of you.