In Their Words: “In my early twenties, I would often find myself trying to have ‘the correct emotional response’ in confrontational situations. Smile instead of cry. Laugh instead of scream. This song was written in a moment of observing how fear was standardizing my ability to be vulnerable. Over time, I realized that one small act of bravery could be crying instead smiling, and living that truth out in the open. This song is an ode to that.” — Jennah Bell
Set to release his fourth album on 3 May, Brad Byrd sees himself standing at a vantage point from which he can look back at the ebb and flow of the life he’s led thus far. Appropriately titled Phases, Byrd’s latest has the Los Angeles singer-songwriter blending indie rock and alt-country influences as he always has, but framed in the sense of each song focusing on a particular highlight in his own story. Taking a look back while propelling his ethereal sound forward, Byrd casts a wide sonic net to craft realms awash with spacey reverb, delay, and layers of rhythms and riffs laid out across electric guitar and keyboard-driven synth.
Boo Ray is back with his first album since 2016’s Sea Of Lights. That album saw him stretching out his country fried rock and roll sound a bit while this new one sees him landing more firmly in honky tonk territory. There are plenty of rockin’ moments to be found here, but this album is in my opinion his most country leaning. Let’s take a deeper dive into this record.
The re-emergence of girl-driven garage rock is one of the best trends of the last few years. It isn’t easy to balance the discordant and the beautiful. Post-punk requires a bare soul and poetry wrapped in barbed wire. With Cycles’ fuzzy guitars and hard-driving drum beats, Church Girls manage to keep the garage rock sound alive without irony.
When you hear an artist like Charles Wesley Godwin sing, there is no need to power cycle your sense of disbelief. The sinewy roots of West Virginia’s hardscrabble existence seem to be intertwined with Godwin’s synapses and muscle tissue, almost as if he’s a construct of the land itself, like a scrub tree clinging to life on the ridge side of an especially steep holler.
How we react in the face of adversity says a lot about us as people. Unfortunately, some people barely hold on, but those that do manage to reclaim some semblance of normality and themselves, inadvertently inspire those around them. This is why Rose & Cigarettes sophomore album Echoes and Silence is an extraordinary release that not only looks at the past but moves forward beyond lead singer Jenny Pagliaro’s battle with Stage IV cancer.
It’s fair to say that this new album has all the hallmarks of their classic Californian sound we heard on their self-titled debut album. But in a lot of ways it is sonically superior which is a testament, for instance, to Petrilli’s amazing ear for musicality and her ability to draw on her influence from Stevie Ray Vaughan to Led Zeppelin.