Led by its acclaimed creative mastermind and primary songwriter the New Hampshire-born, Los Angeles, CA-based Christopher Pappas, who’s best known for his work in The Everyday Visuals and has assembled and conducted his own orchestra to play his original orchestral compositions, and has written compositions for NASA, Elle Belle is a Los Angeles-based synth pop/garage rock act — and with the band’s forthcoming, sophomore album No Signal slated for a June 29, 2018 release through Little Record Company, the album sonically finds the band drawing from synth pop, krautrock and indie rock while being among the most politically charged material they’ve released to date.
Interestingly enough, the album’s latest single “The Real World” pairs a slick, dance floor friendly production that brings Tame Impala, In Ghost Colours-era Cut Copy and Uncanny Valley-era Midnight Juggernauts with an extremely cynical and pretty hopeless take on how Pappas believes that Americans have fallen asleep at the political wheel. “The Obama years felt like such a triumph that we failed to stay politically diligent,” Pappas says. “The video shows these tales of us letting our guard down as told between two men living in a now-destroyed world. The song explores the reality that, to a certain extent, the Trump presidency is something that we let happen, not something that happened to us. Then people were dying, all we did was stop and stare. Now it seems so silly, but I guess you had to be there. Trump was a punchline, but it’s not so funny anymore.”
Mikey Wax is a New York-based singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, whose profile has exploded nationally and internationally as a number of his singles and albums have achieved commercial success and placement in a number of major TV series. After “In Case I Go Again,” off his debut effort Change Again won South Florida-based WRMF 97.9 FM‘s Unsigned Artist contest, the song was featured on CBS‘s Ghost Whisperer, NBC‘s 2012 Summer Olympics coverage and ABC Family‘s Pretty Little Liars — and the music video was featured as part of YouTube‘s Music Tuesday spotlight, which garnered over 500,000 views. Wax’s 2011 self-released sophomore effort Constant Motion landed at number 6 on the iTunes Singer/Songwriter Chart, number 47 on Billboard Heatseekers Chart, with album single “Counting On You” receiving major radio airplay on major Adult Top 40 stations across the country.
“Bottle of Jack,” Wax’s most recent single pairs Wax’s soulful vocals with a neo-soul-like arrangement of shimmering keyboard chords, loose and funky guitar chords, propulsive drumming, soaring synths and a sinuous bass line to craft an radio-friendly pop confection that has its narrator describing the sensation of being in love to drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels. And at points, it certainly can feel that way! In any case, Achtabahn released a house music remix of “Bottle of Jack” that pairs Wax’s effortlessly soulful vocals with a warm, Random Access Memories-era Daft Punk production consisting of a sinuous bass line, warm blasts of Nile Rodgers-like guitar shimmering neo-soul like keys, handclap-led percussion, swirling electronics, bleeps and bloops and wobbling, tweeter and woofer wobbling drops that makes the song dance floor friendly while retaining the radio-friendly pop confection spirit of the original.
