A staggered beat is flanked by a bittersweet piano melody as we listen in on the first few seconds of “Barcelona Butterflies,” the debut single from singer/songwriter Leni Black, and as endearingly subtle and wholly surreal as these opening bars of the track are, they’re but a drop in the bucket compared to the breathy
Jodi Marxbury
If you ask me, indie singer/songwriters around the world have been doing a pretty good job of weathering the storm of discord and unpredictability 2020 has thrown in our direction, and for evidence supporting this, I point you towards none other than the new record from Canada’s Sébastien Lacombe, Fly, and its lead single “My Thousand
You can say a lot of things about rapper and impresario DawgGoneDavis, but one thing you can’t say is that she gives up. “No More”, Davis’ latest concoction is a blending of killer melodic guitar riffs, passionate backup vocals and Davis’ whimsical spoken word/rap stylings. You might call her style and her image a bit
Saying that 2020 has been a year of diverse output for the international underground just isn’t fair – when compared side by side with recent years past, 2020 has been a rainbow of rhythm and tonality that a lot of critics really couldn’t have seen coming. This fall, Canadian players like Chris Ning are gaining
Even in despair and betrayal, singer/songwriter Tanille exudes grace. Her new song “Not This Time” plays out like a soap opera, but Tanille’s fierce voice and harmonizing leaves the listener to dream up only scenario – she took the high road. “Not This Time” is a love gone wrong story, but it doesn’t mean things
The summer of 2020 has been called many things, but love hasn’t been at the top of many lists. Until now. Summer Of Love, the debut album from Robert Miller is full of delightfully warm, endearing tracks. Miller, who is the driving force behind the popular band, Project Grand Slam, steps up for his first
Baltimore singer Cristal Carrington lights up the night with her thrill of a song “See You Dance”. A splash of Español and a heavy dose of electro pop, this R&B goddess is on her way to something pretty big. It’s rare for an R&B/pop artist to have such an impactful first outing, but “See You
The urban pop songbook of the 90’s is getting the revival it really deserves right now, and it’s coming thanks to independent players like Ronnue, whose new cover of Janet Jackson’s “That’s the Way Love Goes” feels as contemporary as anything topping the charts this autumn does. Right from the moment we press play forward,
Girl, you gonna find out, singer/songwriter Maurice sings in his debut single “The Wall”. It’s late. The night is still young and Maurice takes a detour to his house after a date. His voice carries the weight, the underlying music emphasizes his impassioned desires. “The Wall” is about taking things to the next leavy, getting
Real versus fantasy? Looking past the outer shell, underneath the armor to discover the man within? What is the deeper meaning of “I, Don Quixote”? One man on a mission to interpret the legendary Broadway song is Houston’s Ricky Comeaux. His new album, If I Ruled The World features this piece from Man of La
Peering out from behind a blanket of silence with a glimmer of melodic ribbonry, “Giants” slowly finds a route out of the darkness and into the light, eventually filling the air around us with an aural richness I simply wasn’t prepared to hear when I first sat down with Twin Flames’ Omen this past weekend. Strikingly different
Industry without inspiration never leaves a lasting impact. Hard work and discipline often produce a reliable product but, without the spark of love behind its creation, posterity will take a dim view of its ultimate worth. Ten years ago, worldwide charting singer/songwriter, musician, and producer Stephen Wrench launched Musik and Film, LLC, henceforth referred to
“I’m facing four walls / I’m going nowhere at all” complains a frustrated Jupiter in Velvet at the onset of the record-opening “And so the Earth Stood Still” from Punk Goes the Velvet, his vocal and its lyrics echoing much of the mood that will persist throughout the entirety of the tracklist here. Putting rebellion at
Pop singer Giadora has been taking her time stepping into fame. Her first single, “Twisted,” was released in 2019 to more than a warm reception from critics and fans – it lit up almost sixty thousand streams in the wake of its debut, and immediately had the independent press sniffing around for the new and
Rolling out of the shadows with a fiery guitar-driven groove that only gets hotter as we press on, “Simple Song” is anything but, and it’s a fair taste of what listeners should expect to find around every turn in the new album Live at the Saxon Pub from Matt Smith. Billed as Matt Smith’s World, Smith and
Driven by a giant bassline but hardly devoid of substance in its vocalist’s blistering rap, Chilleano’s “That Shit” is perhaps best described as being rapid-fire where it counts but executed with immense thought and self-control just the same. There are aesthetical contradictions in the track that immediately confront us in the intro – there’s a
The Mary Me Margret podcast series by Randall Wheatley, co-created with music by Matt Smith, is an oddity of sorts but it is also a great story to kick back to during the global pandemic. The 14 short stories string together with a nail-biting edge, told by the excellence of Wheatley who created something he’s
The gilded strumming that signals the start of Rod Stewart’s legendary “Maggie May” is left wholly intact in the version we find in Origins – Singers and Songs That Made Me from Jeff Coffey this September, but from the onset of the melody forward, there’s a tense pressure in the instrumentation that won’t find relief until Coffey
OG Cuicide has done a lot since his 2011 breakthrough single “Never Give Up” first hit record store shelves. He’s recorded numerous singles, dropped a couple of albums and appeared on quite a few collaborative projects, and in his latest release “Keep it G,” he brings his wealth of experience to the writer’s room and
Where is the music world going? Who will emerge as the next generation of top flight performers and bands? What will come into fashion and then fall out again? These are the sorts of questions serious music heads often ponder and sometimes the answers are far from clear. One thing I am certain of, however,
The rhyme, the look, the beat, the poetry, the intensity, the artistry, the creativity, rapper Nate Soundz has got it all. Almost from out of an abyss, he’s arrived on the scene in full effervescence and dazzle, owning his unique and edgy soliloquy. Already a sparkling producer, Nate Soundz has a soundcloud repertoire including tracks
Categorizing an artist like HeIsTheArtist isn’t easy when trying to use the standard labeling that applies to most performers in 2020. When listening to his new EP, Adam & Eve, there’s a general sense of continuity to the music we hear in tracks like “Boom – The Explosion,” “Sometimes / I Want You Around” and “Boom
Folk and rock have a hybrid together on the new Psychopath Etiquette – Rough Draft EP. The band are a duo out of southern Main, consisting of David Sprague and Paul Sprague, two fine musicians who’ve been at it with various projects over the last decade. The first EP features “When Anxieties Attack” and they
The characters in The Little Wretches’ songs are so real, so close to the listener it’s like you can almost picture them crossing the train tracks. They’re putting out a smoke, chucking a pebble or looking up at the Pittsburgh sky trying to see the stars beyond the airplane lights. Robert Wagner, lyricist and lead
Rocks blues roots have been getting some long overdue respect from underground players lately, and for evidence of this, I point you towards none other than “Shaking Off The Evil,” the new single and music video from one Moon Fever. Moon Fever have a rock n’ roll sound that is bred from their edgy collective
From one verse to the next, there’s not a stitch of inauthenticity for us to look past in the new single “Hurt Me” from Taylor Colson – if anything, there are so many raw lyrical barbs being thrown in our direction that trying to evade them becomes next to impossible by the completion of the
The music more than the lyrics speaks volumes in the new track, “Biznasty” from genre-defying trio, The Dream Logic. Distinguished in their musicianship, the members of The Dream Logic have collaborated with an astounding who’s who of music for several decades. On the surface it might sound like a merry, mix matched blend of genres,
Rock n’ roll rebellion comes in a lot of different forms, but in the case of Pretty Awkward’s new aptly-titled single “Misfits,” it’s hitting us in stylized lyricism that is sharper than a samurai sword. There’s been a lot of talk among the critics lately about whether or not gentler pop rock in the style
Chilling and ominous in its strut, the beat we discover beneath the melody and vicious rap in “Off the Block” is arguably just as big an agent of evocation as Livefromcedargrove’s lyrics are. The North Carolina-born hip-hop artist isn’t pulling any punches in this all-new single; instead of retreating from the sizzle he set off
The magic between songwriter Bonnie Warren and crooner Manny Cabo is lightning in a bottle – especially when it comes to the new ballad “All Night Again”. Cabo, a rocker with a strong sense of sensitivity, bleeds Warren’s words into a moving tune for our times. Inspired by the front line care workers during an
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