We’re pleased to bring you the premiere of Mystic Braves’s new song “What Went Wrong” (listen below). The track is taken from the band’s forthcoming album The Great Unknown, which is scheduled to be released on August 17, 2018.
“What Went Wrong” is a deceptively cheerful-sounding track that chronicles futile attempts to reinvent the past while reflecting back on a failed relationship. READ MORE…
In a political and social climate that instigates varying, majorly negative sentiments at a daily rate, finding a mode to articulate simultaneous anger, disappointment, and consequential gratitude for existing comforts is a formidable feat. Enter EE Beyond, the Los Angeles-based soul and R&B singer/songwriter whose sonic influences stem from Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu, and whose lyrical inspirations arise from the fictions she and her peers have been told. Oscillating from a voice that is soft and gentle to one that can be sharp and biting, Elaine Faye, the brainchild behind the project, tackles her frustrations over personal and national circumstances with an admirably controlled urgency.
EE Beyond’s debut EP, Watercolor Lies, shares the stories of the “pretty lies” of Faye’s life–as a woman, as a person of color, as an American, as a dreamer. “It’s a collection of a few different stories that are all based around lies that you’ve let yourself experience or expected yourself to have at any point in time,” Faye says. With aide from producer Solomusiq, né Malachi Clark, a fellow alumnus from Faye’s alma mater, the Musicians Institute, EE Beyond takes Elaine Faye’s soul band origins (she previously performed in L.A.-based weareTheBigBang) and expands them through hip-hop production and the occasional trap beat.
Home studio-recorded, Watercolor Lies begins with a community, homebase perspective on “Dreamers Howl,” produced by Dane Diamond. “[The song is] about experiencing frustrations as a minority…the idea of growing up having dreams and growing up thinking that there was a way to get out of a situation, and a lot of times for people of color living in impoverished areas, that’s just a really difficult possibility,” says Faye, who is originally from Port Orchard, Washington, and moved to Chicago as a teenager. “When we’re experiencing it together, you realize that what I’m experiencing, you’re experiencing, too. It sucks, but at the end of the day, we’re not gonna let it be the final blow to us, let it be the final say in our story.” Above syncopated claps and an acoustic guitar strum are layered vocal harmonies, emulating what sounds like a tribal chant. The refrain of “I’ve got you” conveys EE Beyond’s communal experience of feeling lied to, but overcoming it as a unified group.
On Watercolor Lies’ title track, EE Beyond sheds light on a lie that rarely receives musical attention and treatment. Like many other young working people in the United States who graduated from college at the time of the recession, Faye found herself frustrated with a lack of job opportunities, despite pursuing everything she had been instructed to do to achieve success. “You’re taught about the American dream and you’re taught that anybody can change your circumstances and make things different with hard work and education,” she says. “It’s kind of like the American dream has changed.” “Is this how it’s gonna be the rest of our lives? / Working three jobs just trying to survive?” EE Beyond asks in the track, later accompanied by a staccato flute. “It’s almost like you’re running in one of those hamster wheels,” she says.
EE Beyond confronts different kinds of lies on relationship-based tracks “Too High (The Story of Us)” and “Enemy,” the EP’s final track. The former uncovers lies the media provides audiences with about love. Having grown up in a broken home–Faye’s father went to prison when she was seven years old; her mother passed away when she was fourteen– Faye recalls never receiving a proper “talk” about navigating relationships. “It’s not what you see in Disney movies growing up. It kind of becomes a bit of an expectation given a lot of the things that we see and experience on TV, especially as a young woman,” she says. On “Enemy,” a climactic piano ballad, Faye considers the lies she’s told herself to stay in a relationship. Deep bass and piano chords accompany her profession, “I’m my own worst enemy/ Can’t you see? / I can’t control myself/ You’ll be the death of me.” “You’re allowing yourself to be in a situation that you know you shouldn’t be in, that you know is not good for you,” Faye says about the track’s meaning. “You want that feeling of love; you want that feeling of something more than what you have. You are creating your own false narrative in order to deal with the effects and the consequences of allowing someone else to use you.”
These false lies and social ironies are what EE Beyond questions and confronts throughout Watercolor Lies. As the artist prepares for the EP’s release and tour, she hopes that listeners will not feel down about the content of her new tracks. “The EP is rather dark, but I don’t think it’s dark, necessarily, in a depressing way,” she says. “I think it’s a state of mind I was just trying to explore…Why are things like this and how did it get here?” Watercolor Lies is a body of music that exposes the lies EE Beyond has realized over time, but but its mission is perhaps an optimistic one–not as much an exposure of lies, but a quest for truth.
Social Media
Website: https://eebeyond.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/eebeyondmusic
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eebeyondmusic
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eebeyond
Deep Gold’s is an instantly identifiable voice. The Maine-based singer-songwriter is a dark and sultry crooner, quietly grinding the vocal gears a la Leonard Cohen on “Everybody Knows” or Bob Dylan circa Time Out of Mind. There’s a gravelly, slow-burning richness to his delivery that can mesmerize with a howl or a whisper, not to mention a subtle, fatalistic wisdom well beyond the enigmatic twentysomething’s years.
In 2016, following the demise of his Brooklyn-based band JOAN, the Miami native moved from New York to a remote island off the coast of Maine, and began writing the songs from which he’d cull his new self-titled debut. “Where I live now, it’s a pretty isolated place—you can only get there by ferry,” Deep Gold says. “Last summer, though, I happened to meet this songwriter from Nashville, Willie Breeding, who was in town with his girlfriend visiting. It’s funny—he was a bit of a fish out of water here, but we shared our music, and he was very kind. He set me up with what he thought would be the best producer and studio for my music. I trusted him, and it worked out nicely.”
The studio and producer Breeding recommended for Deep Gold? Nashville’s The Bomb Shelter, where Alabama Shakes famously recorded their breakthrough record Boys & Girls, and Jon Estes, who has worked with artists from Kesha and Robyn Hitchcock to Steelism, Music Band, and Natalie Prass. When Deep Gold made the trip south, Estes recorded the core tracks to tape, giving the music a rich, authentic sound. He also handled bass and keys on the sessions, tapping Jeremy Fetzer of Steelism to play guitar, Bryan Brock on percussion, Alexis Saski and Maureen Murphy on backing vocals, plus three-piece horn and string sections, which added some lush counterpoint to Deep Gold’s sparse, moody songs.
“Jon really is a genius in the studio,” Deep Gold says. “I’d already written all the songs going in, but there was a huge amount of interpretation to his credit because it’s a pretty big album as far as the arrangements go. I didn’t touch an instrument the 10 days we were in the studio, which suits me because I use guitar in a very basic way as a writing tool. So I was able to concentrate on the vocals and conveying my stylistic and genre ideas to Jon. He really understood what I was going for, and was essential in helping bring my vision of the record to life. It ended up being a refreshingly raw expression of the material.”
The songs on Deep Gold’s debut have a wide thematic range. “Don’t Worry” manifests as a proverb. “Hot Dogs for Sale” gets inside the head of a tube-steak vendor in the throes of an existential crisis. And the satirical “JFK” imagines the young president’s ghost haunting the White House and all subsequent commanders in chief.
Deep Gold’s lyrics are unadorned, direct and often rooted in potent imagery. “I can almost see the pastures / They’re rollin’ underneath the open sky,” he sings on “Rain,” “I can almost hear the nighthawks / With their haunted and relentless cry / Oh how I wish that I could be there / Before the land turned to dust.” “The Waters Rose” references the flood unleashed on New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Both songs tackle the human relationship to environmental destruction and the world’s rapidly shifting climate, representing “a deep sorrow over the forced change happening as people move away from a connection with the Earth and toward something unprecedented in human history. It’s causing a lot of pain,” Deep Gold says, “a loss of identity and of places where people have lived for generations.”
Though he admittedly doesn’t listen to much music (preferring to draw inspiration from either personal experience or classic American authors with “a strong sense of dramatic story and moral reckoning”—writers like John Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin), Deep Gold holds Randy Newman in the highest regard as a songwriter, and also acknowledges the impact of a holy trinity of iconic artists—Waits, Cohen and Dylan—on his aesthetic.
“When I started writing for Deep Gold, I realized I was fitting into that same ‘man in a black suit with a deep voice’ tradition, though I’m more influenced by them stylistically than lyrically. That said, I admit I’m walking a street they’ve paved, and I’m embracing that because it’s something people can instantly relate to.”
Long before Deep Gold was making music, he was writing poetry. “I didn’t pick up a guitar until I was 20 years old,” he says, now 28. “I was writing short and pointed poetry—instead of explaining something complicated, my poems would just poke at it, in their brevity bringing up whole worlds by association. But I found that, being this kind of poet, there was really no venue for it.”
For a time, he tried turning his poems intro street art, creating stencils and spray-painting his words across walls and bridges. “I thought what I was writing was really for the public, and needed a pop audience. Eventually, though, I picked up guitar as a reprieve. As soon as I knew two chords, I started writing immediately. I found it was the most effective form of communication for what I’d been doing all along. So I just dropped everything else and went for it with music.”
The name Deep Gold means many things to its creator. It’s the color of the guitar he plays, a Gibson Les Paul Gold Top. It reflects the honeyed tone of his voice, and also hints at something precious that’s been unearthed, like gold from a mine, a once-buried nugget of truth or beauty now revealed in song. It also invokes his publishing company, The Golden Door, an image taken from the inscription at foot of the Statue of Liberty.
“My grandfather gave me a gold coin when I was a kid,” Deep Gold explains. “His parents were killed in the Holocaust, but he survived and escaped to the U.S. after the war with absolutely nothing. He was one of the millions of immigrants to pass by that statue en route to Ellis Island, and he really lived the American Dream—got an education, started a business, found a secure and free life for himself and his family. Later, I realized the gold coin was symbolic. So many Jewish people in Europe were persecuted for so many years that they kept their savings in gold coins because it was the easiest thing to take with them if they suddenly had to flee persecution. The gold coin was something from my grandfather’s history, but it was also emblematic of his journey to the United States. It’s a story of suffering, and of America—one that has really shaped me. It has a lot to do with who I am, and my mission in music.”
Social Media
Website: deepgold.us
Facebook: facebook.com/deepgoldofficial
Denver’s Bud Bronson & the Good Timers have a reputation as one of the Mile High City’s hardest working, most fun loving, relentlessly positive rock & roll bands. Their debut LP Fantasy Machine was released in 2015 and contained twelve tracks of upbeat, dual-guitar-driven pop/punk that poked fun at everything from quarter life crises (“I’m living in a beer commercial, minus all the beaches and girls. It’s a cold and shallow world and I’m drowning in it”) to the then-newly popular vaping trend (“That’s the way it always goes when you’re growing up, you’ve got to say goodbye to the things you love. Dude, is anyone still rolling blunts?”) with a carefree wit and nostalgic haze. The band’s energetic live shows and unpretentious, all-are-welcome mentality earned them spots supporting some of modern rocks underground heroes including Parquet Courts, The Menzingers, Twin Peaks and fellow melodic punk shredders Diarrhea Planet.
Now, the group—helmed by singer-guitarist Brian Beer—are at a crossroads. “We’ve hit the reckoning of what it means to be a party band getting into your 30s, and in this world that feels very different than it did three years ago,” says Beer. It’s true, in the time since Fantasy Machine was released, technology has continued to develop at an exponential rate, the United States has become more politically divided than any other modern time, and rock & roll has continued circling the drain in terms of social relevance. For Beer and his bandmates there was only one option…
Bud Bronson and the Good Timers forthcoming sophomore LP, Between The Outfield and Outer Space (out Oct. 12), is a ten track collection of dynamic, stadium-ready melodic punk that chronicles Beer’s struggles existing in a world that feels more foreign day-by-day. As the title implies, baseball plays a major role in the album’s narrative, existing simultaneously as a metaphor for childhood, innocence, rock & roll and humanity itself. “Baseball is the idyllic simple American pastime,” says Beer. “We wanted to take that childlike innocence of baseball and juxtapose that against this complicated reality that we’re all a part of these days.”
While Fantasy Machine existed as a testament to good times that would never end, Between the Outfield and Outer Space finds Beer grappling with maintaining that outlook. “This band has always been an escape mechanism, a vehicle for indulging childish fantasies and ignoring reality,” he says. “These days, though, it feels harder tune out the heavy stuff and pretend that everything is fine.”
From the swirling intro of the record’s title track straight through ‘til the end, Between the Outfield and Outer Space immediately stands out as the most mature, fully-realized effort yet from Bud Bronson and the Good Timers. “Between the Outfield and Outer Space” churns and builds before seamlessly transitioning into the band’s fist-pumping “We Are the Champions (Of The Basement),” a heartland-punk anthem about the depressing and dangerous reality of society’s obsession with nostalgia.
Many of the following tracks act as couplets that examine Beer’s split perspectives on the world around him. “Carmine’s, The Day After (Life of Purpose Pt. 1)” harnesses the negative feelings associated with self-indulgence and a lack of purpose, while the following track “End of Our Lives” serves as a reactionary reflection on powerlessness in a gigantic, frightening world. “Enter the Infinite” and “Back to the Womb” examine two perspectives on absurdism, with the former taking comfort in the vastness of the universe, and the latter feeling paralyzed and overwhelmed by its supreme indifference.
The record hits its peak with “(Brave New) World Series,” an expansive track that tackles Beer’s fear of the future and the reality that his father won’t be around to share it with him. “Hey Dad, I used to hear you talking to our dog / He’d just stare back at you but you would keep keeping on / Now I hear you tell Alexa everything that you want / The future is here but you’re about to move on,” Beer sings before adding, “There’s a brave new world series coming / I hope you won’t be around to tune in / Even the playoffs won’t be worth watching / ‘Cause we all lose no matter who wins.”
Though the content on Between the Outfield and Outer Space may be bleak, Bud Bronson and the Good Timers retain the same fun and welcoming presence that has been their trademark since forming in 2012. Rather than existing as a means for Beer to shout into the void, the album feels like a rallying cry, a call out to everyone who feels intimidated by or lost in the modern world. Bud Bronson and the Good Timers don’t claim to know what’s next, but they’re curious to find out. In Beer’s words, “The world is huge and we’re small and there’s only so much we can change. Instead of denying that all of these bad things exist, we’re trying to find and address our place in everything. This record brings up a lot of questions—and we don’t have the answers. But we’re here wondering, and that’s good too.”
Social Media:
https://www.facebook.com/bbgtband/
https://budbronsonandthegoodtimers.bandcamp.com/
In February of 2018, Abhi The Nomad was in a race against time. He had just found out that on account of his new student visa he had acquired four months prior, he couldn’t publicly release any music or perform at any shows without risk of deportation. Only because he wrote and recorded all his songs when living in India and France was he able to legally release his debut album Marbled to critical acclaim from outlets such as NPR, Consequence of Sound, This Song Is Sick, Cool Hunting, Acid Stag & more.
Ironically, without his income stream from live show performances, he wasn’t going to be able to pay for the education that granted him access to the U.S. in the first place. With three months left in his semester, Marbled represented the best opportunity at earning Abhi the notoriety necessary to land a talent visa that would unshackle him from the restriction of his student visa.
Seven months and over eight million streams later, Abhi the Nomad is a free man with a place to call home. And in his first 100 days as an “Alien of Extraordinary Ability,” as crowned by the U.S. Government, Abhi is planting his flag with a national headline tour. Called “The American Alien Tour,” his debut headline tour serves as a celebration of his freedom from restriction of any kind in his pursuit of happiness in the states. The chaos and clutter that have defined his last year just before and after his visa are represented visually in his tour poster, as well as sonically in his new single “Run.”
Due August 24th, his first single since releasing Marbled is dedicated to his hometown of Madras, and is a victory lap personified. What does one do on a victory lap after a huge race? They wrap their country’s flag around their neck and run around the racetrack one more time to cap it all off. Starting in his new hometown of Austin, Texas, and hitting cities like Atlanta, Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Abhi’s debut tour truly represents a complete trip around the track to celebrate his triumph in his race against time.
Social Media:
https://www.facebook.com/abhithenomad
https://twitter.com/abhi_thenomad
https://www.instagram.com/abhithenomad/
“Produced by Fernando Perdomo (Linda Perhacs, Jakob Dylan), this record is simultaneously forlorn as it is warm and enveloping. Perdomo also handles bass and keyboards on the record, and features Danny Frankel (Lou Reed, Fiona Apple, Nels Cline) on percussion and drums.”
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