New Music Monday: Sharon Van Etten — I Don’t Want to Let You Down

June 15, 2015

For me, the best artists (musical or not) are the ones who are growing from project to project. Whether the development is a growth in the boundaries of their particular sound, or an emotional one, which garners tasty new morsels of insight, it’s important to me that the struggle is present. It makes the music feel more genuine, more organic. Last year, when Sharon Van Etten released Are We There, we glimpsed into the gnarled and fraught mental scape of a woman on the edge of love. Now, in her new EP, I Don’t Want to Let You Down, we visit Van Etten on the same heart break, now with room enough for perspective.

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New Music Monday: Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment — Surf

June 8, 2015

If you were confused this week about reports of a new Chance The Rapper album, don’t worry, you weren’t the only one. And even if you and I are the only two who were, I’ve got the facts here: while Chicago born kid dynamo Chance The Rapper does have new content out, it is not his highly anticipated follow up to Acid Rap. The new album is credited to Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment. What is The Social Experiment? Beginning as Chance’s band on his “Social Experiment” tour, the four person group (Chance The Rapper, Donnie Trumpet, Peter Cottontale, and Nate Fox) are now some sort of songwriting/production/band amalgam, and have released their new album, Surf.

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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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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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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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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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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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