Tag: Best new music

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Treaty Oak Revival: An Alliance Between Punk and Country

December 15, 2022

Treaty Oak Revival didn’t really have a choice but to be a country band. They grew up in West Texas, a market that practically demands bands play country, and, well, it’s also hard to escape your roots. 

“I have an accent,” said Sam Canty, the band’s lead vocalist, in an interview with BandWagon – and for the record, he sure as heck does.

Even so, all that Texas red dirt country the band seemed destined to play couldn’t bury their love of rock and roll, especially in a world of modern crossovers. Canty is unafraid to proclaim his love of big punk acts such as Sum 41 and Blink 182 and Treaty Oak Revival finds themselves with their feet in more than one arena.

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Birth, Death and Time In The Sun: SUSTO’s Justin Osborne Finds new Dimesion

September 12, 2022

“There were ravines growing between me and people in my life,” Justin Osborne tells BandWagon. “And with COVID, everybody got pushed back together. Some of those changes had to be faced head on.”

Osborne is the commandant of North Carolina’s Susto and he’s just gone through some of the most intense years of his life.

“If humans are dimensional,” he says, “there’s a whole new dimension of myself that was awakened.”

Susto’s sound sits between Americana, psych-pop and the indie-rock church of rootsy folk. A mix of satire and earnestness adds a roughness; a raised eyebrow setting it apart from rural radio. Its dark, drug-influenced sentimentality and staunch idealism is, at its heart, just barefaced American songwriting.

“There were a lot of attempts at reconciliation – my own beliefs with how I was raised,” he says. “I’m trying not to disrespect,” he says, “but to participate in these big life events.”

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Bevin Luna: 105.5 The Colorado Sound’s Featured Artist

July 21, 2022

“Madison & Angelus is a garage rock EP because it’s rock and roll. And it was literally recorded in a garage in LaPorte, Colorado,” Bevin Luna says.
True to the garage band ethos, the 6 tracks mesh originals, covers and co-writes with big, fuzzy guitars, overdriven vocals and bashing drums. But the garage has a heart and some depth behind its door. Much of the writing discusses the turmoil of being a musician in the digital age, and as Luna puts it: “In the middle of a pandemic sandwich: never knowing where to begin or if it’s ever going to end – constantly trying to reassure ourselves that everything was gonna be OK.”

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How The Arcadian Wild was Loved Into Being

June 9, 2022

The Arcadian Wild really listen. You can see it in their patience with fans, their gentleness with each other, and most of all in the cohesive interplay of each melodic line in their music. Like mycelium spreading nutrients throughout a forest, each individual is inseparable from the whole.

The band began in an impromptu post-choir-class jam session in 2013. The lineup has shifted so often over the years that founding member Lincoln Mick refers to the band as a “revolving door,” but he remembers the band’s five-or-so departed members with much more sweetness than bitterness.

“To take a turn of phrase from Fred Rogers, so many people have ‘loved this band into being’ over the years,” he told BandWagon.

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Album Review: Companion – Second Day of Spring

June 8, 2022

Fort Collins based identical twin sisters Sophia and Jo Babb, otherwise known as Companion, release their debut folk/americana album Second Day of Spring with vocal harmonies that match as perfectly as their DNA.

They find creative ways to use their voices throughout, processing the trauma of their father taking his own life and their own feelings of isolation. Their unisons are striking, the balance and the carefully constructed harmonies giving the illusion that they are coming from the same person.

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