Villagers – {Awayland} album review
Folk music is a wonderful thing. It’s easily approachable, it’s melodic, and its tradition is rich. However, with so many acts throwing their cap into the circle–weighing in with their take on the variable genre–it is seemingly easy for anyone striving to be a well-received folk musician to become lost in anonymity. When you consider music from the likes of Conor Oberst, Jim James, M. Ward, Hayward Williams, etc., gaining notoriety becomes increasingly daunting. Seething with emotionalism, the aforementioned front-runners do well is sensationalizing their craft, [...]
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Rituals – Mesmerized EP review
Rituals are a band that appears to have self-awareness in spades. They aren’t concerned with making a statement so much as letting you have a peek into their world. Once you look through the keyhole, however, you’re miniaturized and sucked into the sonic universe they have crafted. With their new EP Mesmerized, Rituals isn’t just playing their songs for you to hear, they’re letting you inside their heads. It’s not all entirely an abstract concoction that they’re brewing. They summon [...]
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The Besnard Lakes – Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO album review
Besnard Lakes create a space to float through, you could even call that space a dreamscape. Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO is an ambient record, at times psych-influenced, at times dream-pop. With eight tracks all over five or six minutes long, “Until in Excess” surrounds you in a vague place that is disconcerting and comforting simultaneously. Forming in 2001 in Montreal, Besnard Lakes is the project of husband and wife team Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas. With a rotating cast [...]
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Super Wild Horses – Crosswords album review
Melbourne garage rock duo Super Wild Horses have made great strides from their decidedly humble beginnings. After first meeting while attending an all girls Catholic school together Amy Franz and Hayley McKee formed the band without any experience playing instruments but with a passion for loudly singing along with one another in the car. The pair picked up the craft quickly with each sharing duties on vocals, guitar, keyboard, and drums. Eventually, the efforts led to their 2010 debut Fifteen. [...]
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The Belle Game – Ritual Tradition Habit album review
The Belle Game are a Vancouver based quintet who, with their debut full length release Ritual Tradition Habit, have been generating lots of positive buzz. Having previously released two separate EP’s over the past couple of years and with some pretty extensive touring opening up for the likes of Gotye and Hey Ocean!, it would seem fitting that the ‘dark chamber pop’ collective come out with a full, dignified release with all these steam behind them. To start, Ritual Tradition [...]
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Volbeat – Outlaw Gentlemen & Shady Ladies album review
Genres are a necessary evil of categorizing any kind of art. It can be a great place to start; they immediately bring to mind a general idea of the piece in question, a rough list of all the things one can expect. But as a launching point, they, by definition, must be vague. And unless the artist is the first (or the best) working in the genre, generic labels will never really quite fit the piece. To compensate for that, [...]
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The Modest Revolution – Enter The Haggis (ETH) album review
“The Modest Revolution” is based on a newspaper. For their eighth studio album, the Canadian folk rock/world fusion band went high concept – they picked a random day in the future and promised to create an album around the contents of that day’s newspaper. Call it an ode to the dying medium of print or a seemingly random choice of a concept album – though the press release explains how Enter The Haggis made the concept album, it never quite [...]
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Hello Creatures – Let’s Say We Did album review
We should definitely be paying more attention to Stockholm’s 5-man band, Let’s Say We Did. Their newest album, Hello Creatures, certainly offers lo-fi melodramatic tones, and it also seems to whisper with an indie rock sensation that’s all their own. Hello Creatures comes complete with a hint of forlorn, but also with a sense of direction. They intermingle concentrated guitar riffs with a hypnotic melody that spews out somewhat distorted and groovy. “Into Wherever” is an outstanding way to begin this journey. [...]
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Summer Camp Music Festival 2013 Preview
Summer camp is all about seeing old friends and making new ones, taking part in activities you will find nowhere else, and reveling in a place that feels completely separate from the rest of the world. The aptly named Summer Camp Music Festival has reinvented this experience for an older crowd with top musical acts providing the soundtrack. Getting lost in the forest, huddling around the campfire, and staying up until sunrise are all common occurrences at SCamp. This year [...]
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The House of Love – She Paints Words in Red album review
One of the leading British indie rock bands of the 1980s and early 1990s, the House of Love have had such a tremulous history that recounting it would take several pages (just take a peek at their Wikipedia page). However, on She Paints Words in Red, the band’s second album since they returned from a ten-year hiatus in 2003, the band appears to have mellowed with age. That isn’t a bad thing. The group’s newest effort is a melodic and [...]
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