In trying to be original in describing “Honesty,” the infectiously-gorgeous new single from Music City’s Slark Moan, I couldn’t think of anything better than the tag “Dream Pop” that accompanied his bio. Friends, believe me, if you are a “pure pop for now people” person like me, this is a song you will savor. READ MORE…
Louien – None Of My Words (Jansen Records)
Not in her wildest dreams, did Live Miranda Solberg foresee the kind of attention a single demo uploaded to Soundcloud would attract. Shortly after she uploaded “Demo no. 1” one year ago, she found herself playing two of Norway’s biggest festivals, Øya and by:Larm – without an official release. And this one demo, along with spine-tingling live shows, has left audiences yearning for more.
Louien is Live Miranda Solberg. She might still be relatively unknown to most, but those who follow the international Americana scene closely will have heard her spectacular voice in the band Silver Lining: a four-piece in which she is one of the main singer-songwriters – her songs attaining several million streams worldwide. Now Louien’s solo debut None Of My Words is finally ready.
Four years ago, she lost her father. He was an actor and singer, who in many ways shaped Solberg as the artist she is today. All the songs on the record revolve around mourning, introspection and also how heavy grief can bring turmoil, but also evolve you as a person.
“Grief allows for beautiful things as well,” says Solberg. “Love and hope, for instance, and you really get in touch with your own feelings. But this album is probably more about the first phase of a grieving process – hopelessness, isolation, anxiety and depression.”
The album was recorded with Øyvind Røsrud Gundersen at Brageveien Studio in Oslo. Among the guests are Kaja Fjellberg Pettersen, Henrik Lødøen, Øystein Braut, Kristine Marie Aasvang, Signe Marie Rustad and Einar Kaupang.
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Sammy Kay – civil/WAR
Life works in a delicate balance, a push and pull of tragedy and hope. Americana singer-songwriter Sammy Kay teeters with acrobatic ease between both facets of the human condition across the entirety of his new record. A storybook by nature, civil/WAR depicts a smorgasbord of characters — many of them weary and downtrodden from addiction, mental health, death, suicide and heartache.
Kay, whose voice is unmistakably shattering, has played with or onstage alongside such iconic bands as The Gaslight Anthem, Mumford & Sons, American Aquarium and The Bouncing Souls. His impressive resume has certainly not diluted the craft itself; even after he wanted to walk away from the industry altogether, the songs inside his head drew him back in again.
“I came home from a tour, and I was just done. I didn’t want to do this anymore. It was November 2017. Everybody’s got mental health issues. I thought the road was really the issue, but it turned out that it was everything else,” he says. “When I got home from this tour, I said, ‘We’re going to leave this be and maybe, if something changes in the future, we’ll revisit it.’” His creativity tugged at him, and so, new songs poured out of him.
Essential cuts like “Silver Dollar” and “Forgotten Ones” are liquored up with the sobering reality that life is often devastating and merciless and brutal. “Miles and Miles, my head is unraveling,” he sings, his breath as ragged as his vocal cords. His conviction hangs thick in the air, only matched by the summer’s sticky humidity.
Before you can even recover from the emotionally-draining performance, he left-hooks your eardrums with “See You Soon,” a song about a friend who took their own life under excruciatingly-grim circumstances. But Kay takes great, stunning care to observe the ruins of a life snuffed out too soon and simply lets the listener feel the blunt force of such misery. “Just tell me why you left that night,” he pleads into darkness that threatens to swallow him alive.
“You can struggle and live a very poor life. Sometimes, you’ve got to go and do it and not be in pain. Some people say suicide is ‘selfish,’ and I see it a lot,” he says, stressing how social media has further exacerbated the agony to unbearable degrees. “What sounds to be a pretty love song, with how we did it with the mellotron and the pedal steel, it’s a love letter that’s also potentially a suicide note.”
That is one of many emotional threads Kay twists together on his new record. “This Old Misery” sifts through the pressures of living a sober life, always the monkey on his back, and then he later takes direct aim at sociopolitical inaction on the aptly-timed “Thoughts & Prayers,” the only explicitly-political track on the lineup. “Your thoughts and your prayers ain’t saving no one’s souls,” he sings, marrying the production’s chewy flavor with a decisively-icy, cutting lyric.
Throughout his career, Kay has dabbled in punk rock and soul music, linking up with many of music’s most enduring torchbearers. He played in numerous bands in high school and would soon befriend King Django, a heavy hitter of ska and reggae music in New York City who taught him the ropes of the business when Kay was 16. Kay initially began selling Django merch and soon linked up for sessions and collaborations with countless other local outfits, which led to support tour gigs for any major bands that traveled through the area.
His debut album, Fourth Street Singers, arrived in 2014 and cemented his potential as one of Americana’s most ambitious players. “I had always written songs as folk and turned them into whatever it was,” he says. That record was destined to be the catalyst for his entire career. During the album’s creation, he decided to sober up, and before it was even mastered, Gaslight Anthem and Mumford & Sons offered him various tour opener slots. He was later signed to Stomp Records (whose roster boasts such names as Creepshow, Joystick and Gutter Demons, among many others), and he dropped his follow-up, Untitled, in 2015.
With the help of The Bouncing Souls founding member, songwriter and producer Pete Steinkopf, Kay cobbles together an explosive, yet introspective, masterpiece. civil/WAR is indebted to his personal struggles with addiction as much as it is to his keen eye in observing the world around him. “I don’t care what I do, and I don’t care necessarily that I make money. I like to break even,” he says. “I fell in love with songs, and as somebody who struggles here and there with addiction and mental health, songs have kept me alive.”
“This album is what you see is what you get, in regards to mental health, the state of the country,” he adds. “It’s also the projection of self.”
The 10-song collection — featuring contributions from Pat Kelly, Alex Brumel of Westbound Train, The Mercy Union’s Rocky Cantese, Matthew Benneti of Toy Cars and Will Romeo — calls to the work of John Moreland and Ben Nichols, whose The Last Pale Night in the West is very much fused into Kay’s own sonic palette. Yet Kay emerges with his own undeniable style and a spirit that’s certainly learned a few things in this life. “This album made me think about who I was and how I could be a better person,” he says. “We’re all just trying to be the best people we can be.”
civil/WAR is, more than anything, a mighty confessional about what it means to live, to love, to fail and ultimately to rise triumphant.
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Rock & roll is rarely defined by maturity. By its nature, it’s boisterous, free-wheeling and hedonistic—not often are those words associated with the wisdom gained through life experience. On their forthcoming self-titled LP, however, New York City’s Mail the Horse defy these connotations, seamlessly blending raucous boot-stomping rock & roll with nuanced self-examination and expression. As the band’s members enter their 30s, their music has retained the bar-room romance and youthful abandon that characterized 2015’s Planet Gates and 2016’s Magnolia, but songwriters Michael “Hess” Hesslein and Mike “Donny” Amidon have turned their focus towards the existential hangover that occurs when the party is over.
Since 2010, Mail the Horse have been churning out rootsy rock & roll that has garnered high praise from numerous media outlets including Brooklyn Vegan, Paste Magazine, Spin, Relix, Exclaim, PopMatters and more, and that saw them captivating audiences at high-profile festivals including Bonnaroo, Firefly Festival, and South By Southwest. Throughout it all, the band has maintained a steadfast DIY ethos, self-funding nationwide tours in a run-down school bus, and releasing each of their records either on their own label, Sexual Decade, or on close friends’ small imprints. On Mail the Horse, the band decided to take it one step further and self-produce and record the album at Amidon’s house in Stanfordville, New York, isolating themselves from the outside world and crafting an album that fully encapsulates their independent spirit.
“Recording this was really eye-opening in terms of realizing what this band really is,” says Hess. “My original idea had been to record in a proper studio like last time and we tried that for a few days and just hated it. We scrapped those recordings and went up to Donny’s place to do it ourselves. We really wanted to get away from outside influence, so we did it at home, no producer, tracking live—just pure Mail the Horse.”
Mail the Horse kicks off with “Gimme Gimme,” a rollicking burst of timeless rock & roll that blends Sticky Fingers-era Rolling Stones swagger with Hess’ surreal and reflective lyrics about romantic exhaustion and getting older. “When you’re dating in your 20s, you’re trying to find someone to do something real with, but everyone’s so confused about what they’re doing and who they are it can get to be real exhausting,” he says. These sentiments are echoed and expanded upon in “Sweet Red Lies,” where Hess explores cohabitation, the performative nature of romantic relationships and the worry that comes with being unaware if you’re living up to the expectations of your partner.
On the soulful, gospel-inspired “Kid Gloves,” Hess tackles the concept of fragile masculinity. Loosely based on the current President—but reflective of traditional masculinity as a whole—Hess depicts a stubborn, fragile man, steadfast in his ways but prone to crumbling at the slightest provocation. “Keep it light / Keep it off the ground my man / Ain’t got no saddle, I’m free / But you gotta wear kid gloves around me.”
Elsewhere on Mail the Horse, Amidon reflects on his personal demons and social injustices in equal measure. The upbeat, thumping rhythm section and beautiful vocal harmonies highlighted on “Purple Yellow Shade” almost mask the song’s anxious self-examination as Amidon sings, “I got country women singin’ on my mind / I don’t wanna be lonesome all the time. / I got a little thing called drinkin’ on my mind / But i don’t wanna be wasted all the time.” Meanwhile, the Amidon-penned album closer, “P-Town” calls attention to the realities of income and social inequality in modern America, exploring the ways that it affects small town communities, personal lives, relationships & more, and the way that modern political rhetoric intensifies those effects.
For much of Mail the Horse’s existence, the band were fully immersed in each others lives, living together in a dilapidated basement apartment in Bushwick Brooklyn affectionately referred to as Gates Motel. These days, things are a little different. Gates Motel is no more. Amidon moved out of the city. Bassist Brendan Smith owns and operates a screen printing business. Pedal steel player Chris May moved to New Mexico, lives in a camper, and is working on a novel. In 2016, original drummer Will Lawrence joined The Felice Brothers and was replaced by Andrew Joseph Weaver. Gone are the days of constant parties and mid-20s debauchery, but the bond between band members has continued to grow. As Hess explains it, “These guys are like family. We can go days, weeks without talking and then it’s totally normal when we see each other. There’s this unspoken agreement that we’ve just got each other’s backs—it’s not friendship, it’s brotherhood.”
“A happy marriage of late-’60s instrumentation with the rough-edged attitude of early-’00s garage-rock.” – SPIN
“A walking juxtaposition of outsider cosmic-country and psych-folk sounds and the concrete-laden cityscape of Brooklyn.” – Paste Magazine
“Embued with an early ’70s rock n’ roll spirit, be it the twangy leanings of the Stones and the Kinks during that time, or the gritty street life of Lou Reed.” – Brooklyn Vegan
“Twangy guitars, slinky pedal steel and drawling vocals invite listeners in to the group’s unique world of Americana.” – Exclaim
“Galloping percussion and guitar wash up to meet Amidon’s head-pounding lyrics and the struggle to balance music-making and mundane, everyday life.” – American Songwriter
“The kind of rock as at home in a Williamsburg bar as a Topeka barn, a universal style meant to unite.” – PopMatters
“A raw and bluesy critique of toxic and fragile masculinity full of soulful and heartfelt ire.” – Atwood Magazine
Glide is thrilled to premiere “The Victim” (below) an inspirational anthem that mixes passionate guitar rock and a punctuating chorus. Vines mixes shades of early Tom Petty, U2 and modern touches of War on Drugs to create a knockout social commentary.
“’The Victim’ is the first track off of Family Business giving it the daunting task of previewing the rest of the record. I did my best to take what the universe gave me and write songs without thinking about their final packaging, so there is a variety of lyrical content and stylistic influences you’ll experience throughout the record. That diversity is what I think I’m most proud of with this album. Lyrically, ‘The Victim’ is simply about victim mentality. It’s easy to slip into that mindset and you have to realize that you are in control of your own outcomes in order to get through it.
Emergency Tiara is preparing to release her debut LP, Unsophisticated Circus on September 13th. Surviving the Golden Age is excited to premiere her new single “2 Kool for Skool.”