Author: Clark Lamson

Music, Print, Reviews

New Music Monday: My Brightest Diamond — I Had Grown Wild

May 25, 2015

When the whisper quiet fire that is My Brightest Diamond first hits your headphones, you wouldn’t expect that its matriarch Shara Worden hails from Arkansas. For that matter, you wouldn’t assume she hails from this solar system. Beginning her musical career in the band AwRY, Worden soon left the group, and began producing music under the moniker My Brightest Diamond. Enrapturing fans with the deft composition and ghostly vocals of her debut record Bring Me The Workhorse, Worden would go on to release a her Shark Remixes EP series, as well as a handful of full length albums, including the ethereal and cheeky All Things Will Unwind.

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Music, Print, Reviews

New Music Monday: Mac Demarco — “The Way You’d Love Her”

May 18, 2015

“The Way You’d Love Her” is the lead single from Another One, the mini-LP scheduled for an August 7th release. The track doesn’t do much to push outside Demarco’s wobbly-kneed stoner yodels, but I’m not sure anyone wanted him to. I know I didn’t. “The Way You’d Love Her” features the same smiley strumming and light keyboard work we have come to expect, though the vocal ventures closer to earlier works from Rock and Rock Night Club. Demarco creates a lazy river with his melodies, which the listeners glide abidingly down. The author has an unusual knack for writing melodies that feel upbeat, while creating a sneaking feeling that the content doesn’t echo the sentiment.

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Music, Print, Reviews

New Music Monday: Mumford & Sons — Wilder Mind

May 11, 2015

Mumford may have gained their fame riding (some say starting) the wave of popularity for pop-folk music, but Wilder Mind finds the band ditching almost all of their familiarly twangy tunes for a fairly straight laced alternative rock sound. In place of fever pitched banjos come shining, sometimes dry guitars. The resulting sound places them closer to War on Drugs, Ryan Adams, or Ben Howard than any of their pop-folk contemporaries.

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Music, Print, Reviews

New Music Monday: Peach Kelli Pop — Peach Kelli Pop III

May 4, 2015

The tunes on Peach Kelli Pop’s aptly named third record Peach Kelli Pop III are crunchy, low-fi, and (maybe obviously) poppy. Think Ariel Pink meets Blink-182 with a Sailor Moon costume. Tracks like “Princess Castle 1987,” the album’s intro track, features the same fuzzy nerd-pop fans have come to expect from Peach Kelli herself, Allie Hanlon. With releases stretch back to summer of 2011 with her first EP Panchito Blues, Hanlon dances the line between The Runaways and MC Chris, blending nerdcore sentiments with headbanging riffs.

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Music, Print, Reviews

New Music Monday: Alabama Shakes — Sound & Color

April 27, 2015

If fans were worried about the band resting on laurels on their second time around, they need not be. Sound & Color is a noticeably more challenging collection of tunes. What made B&G so great was its immediacy. The second you put in the headphones, it was as if the songs coming through had been on your “most listened to” for years. Sound & Color finds the band leaving one foot in their Southern rock roots, and planting the other in soul and blues. While the lead singles, “Gimme All Your Love,” “Don’t Wanna Fight,” and “Future People,” highlighted the electric Brittany Howard’s ability to send hooks screaming into your long term memory, the majority of the tracks require a little more patience.

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Music, Print, Reviews

new Music Monday: Tyler, The Creator — CHERRY BOMB

April 20, 2015

24 year old rapper/producer/writer, and founding member of the Odd Future hiphop collective, Tyler, The Creator is without a doubt, one of hip hop’s most controversial figures. Exploding onto people’s desktops with the infamous “Yonkers” music video, Tyler would go on to release two albums full of the pervasive, bludgeoned horror-core he would come to be known for, Yonkers and Bastard. Though in 2013, with the release of Wolf, Tyler dropped the horror-core facade, in favor of a jazzier, more main-stream sound that capitalized on the snot-nosed braggadocio Odd Future does so well, while still leaving room for the best storytelling we’ve received from the rapper so far. As big of a departure as Wolf was, Cherry Bomb is from Wolf.

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Album Review: Policy— Will Butler

April 15, 2015

In May of last year, I was lucky enough to score some tickets to see one of my favorite bands in concert. The show was at the Pepsi Center (not my first, second, or third choice in venue) but the show was everything I hoped it would be. It was raucous and colorful. The band’s members were decked out in Bowie-esqe face paints, the set changed with every song, and at one point, the stadium was filled with gold confetti to the effect that I couldn’t see my hands in front of my face. To the left of the singer, holding a tambourine, or guitar, or pounding on the keys, was who I would later come to know as the lead singer’s younger brother. I know the singer is typically the focus in band settings, but the energy coming off the tambourine man was inescapable. The music was his voice, and he screamed his throat raw every song. The band was Arcade Fire, and the man was Will Butler.

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Music, Print, Reviews

New Music Monday: Desaparecidos — City on the Hill

April 13, 2015

Love him or hate him (because it’s more than likely one of the two) Conor Oberst is one of his generation’s most eminent singer/songwriter, not to mention prolific. Most commonly known as the one man/band folk rock act Bright Eyes, his side projects include Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, Monsters of Folk, and Desaparecidos. The latter is a punk-rock band. As a fan of his works, I was a little surprised (and embarrassed) to find an Oberst project I hadn’t heard of. When the guy who turned me on to Bright Eyes told me about the single, I knew what I’d be writing about this week.

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