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In Your House There. Jane Willow
In April Jane Willow travelled to Montreal and came back with a beautiful video for her latest single, In Your House There, her tribute to her musical hero Leonard Cohen. In Your House There is a duet with Pat Byrne. Look on the Internet and you can find a few versions of this song. It is one of the kind that is easy to step over and simply not notice. It is so modest, so soft, "so simple and sweet", as Jane Willow sings herself here, that to not hear it, is the biggest risk to the song and to you, potential listener. Pay attention and a song of pure beauty unfolds itself in your ears. A song so filled with emotions but all almost hidden, giving the song the touch of exceptionality. The spark that sets it apart. Releasing it as a single is totally correct, as on her beautiful album, 'Burn So Bright', it even falls away against all the more solid songs on it. In Your House There is a song very much deserving to be heard.
That age is relative is shown by the members of Kid Gulliver. Like me, people of a certain age, who still like to rock out, but unlike me able to expand the pop-punk collection no little with a bunch of great originals. Nothing But Trouble is the latest single by the Boston band. It comes with a great central riff and a keen understanding how to build a song. Even when the topic of the song is far from fun, it doesn't keep Kid Gulliver from writing a fun rock song. Super tight, like I already wrote a great riff, a short, flashy guitar solo and an unhappy, almost beyond caring sounding lead vocal by Simone Berk, Nothing But Trouble has it all. Let the fun times begin for everyone concerned, trouble or not.
New Zealand trio Soft Plastics returns to this blog with another alternative rock song. It must be all that clean air blowing in from the arctic and the ocean that makes so many people in New Zealand create and play alternative rock, and so good. Day Job is a gravelly monster of a song. Dark, muddy, charged with energy Day Job is. Sophie Scott-Maunder's voice makes clear she is not kidding. A serious version of Wet Leg. She's also responsible for that dirty bass underneath the song. Day Job starts like a landslide. A mudslide of sound cascades over the listener. Slowly but surely the song emerges. With ears already more than pricked, it is easy to get into the pace of Day Job. Soft Plastics is obviously inspired by at least thirty years of (garage)rock and comes up with its own version. Believe me Day Job is a fantastic single. One to check out fast.
There are bands that are huge, without me having any clue. My Chemical Romance is one of them. They played Ahoy this week, the second biggest arena in The Netherlands. For me the band is one single and I notice that I've truly forgotten it. Title, melody, when? gone. I'll look it up. Enter The Foundations Of My Decay. My Chemical Romance really goes of in all sorts of rock and emo directions. And they all work. This 6 minute single covers a lot of ground and does not relent for one second. Pain, despair, screams, it all comes out. That is only one side, as the band shows itself in more traditional rock as well. Not to forget the great bombastic beats and just plain noise. From a soft intro to a noisy ending, everything in between is simply good. I'm surprised by My Chemical Romance for the second time.
With Thinking Back we all take a huge step back. Gildor is working his way towards his debut album, 'Silent River', out on 4 November. The singer-songwriter has listened to Jack Johnson (is he still active?). Thinking Back has that same relaxed vibe as the Hawaiian singer. There's not a lot of surfing in Utrecht where Gildor lives though. Baking banana pancakes is doable though. It comes totally through in his first single. With a pleasant, slightly deep voice, Gildor presents himself to an unsuspecting audience. An acoustic guitar lays down the ground work, an electric guitar plays a lead melody all through the song. Soft drums and a bass do their thing in the background. Add it all up and hear a song that is so pleasant to listen to. Don't expect Gildor to move mountains, expect the perfect soundtrack for a lazy, sunny day in the park. Any singer-songwriter wanting to present himself musically, can do a lot worse than releasing a song like Thinking Back.
Phoebe Green plays totally different music. Ultra modern sounds and beats, that at the same time would have been impossible to imagine hadn't bands like Depeche Mode and Pet Shop Boys pioneered combining pop with electronic beats. Phoebe Green takes these electronics and beats into the third decade of the 21st century. Lucky Me manages to be totally in my face, while Phoebe Green's singing in a totally dreamy way about what a lucky girl she is. The result is an almost mysterious mix. She sounds like someone who is not at her own dance party because she's dreaming in her bedroom at home. And here I come to the reason that I like Lucky Me. Both sides of the song work totally. I'm internally dancing and dreaming all at once. That may be a first. Well done, Phoebe Green.
Don't expect the new Larkin Poe album before half November. To ease the wait the duo released this single and it is sort of exploding out of my speakers. It is as if The White Stipes are back from indefinite leave and The Black Keys were fed some red peppers instead of Cuban cigars. The sisters Rebecca and Megan Lovell from Atlanta, Georgia brought a southern rock boogie with them that is more dirty than the local tip. Guitar and slide guitar are distorted and producing riffs as if there's no tomorrow. All sung with a rough, tough voice. One that can sing about a bad spell very, very convincingly. In fact this is the toughest female rock voice I've heard in a while. It's an impact like Ann Wilson had on me a long time ago, when I heard 'Magic Man' for the first time. Bad Spell does about the same in 2022.
A song starting like a classic The Who track from around 1971 does catch my attention quite easily. That accented way of playing the guitar, creating a stop start effect, is classic Pete Townsend. Swedish rock chicks Thundermother present a song ready for arenas with the whoah-whoah shouting over the intro, but takes a turn when the song properly starts. Singer Guernica Mancini knows how to convince as a female rock singer, while the band plays classic rock rock rhythms. It's in the lead guitar that things get truly interesting. Fillipa Nässil plays with a punky attitude and has the right notes in all the right places. The song is about people who are able to bring out the worst in each other and the music assists in getting that message across. The desperation can be heard in the notes that come by. Classic rock still works, especially when infused with some more modern elements. There's more to come in August.
Met De Woonwijk is er alweer een nieuwe single van De Toegift. Sentimenteel als De Breek en semi-fragmentarisch als Spinvis kan zijn. De single kijkt terug op de tijd van een onbezorgde jeugd, die van voordat de wereld groter en groter werd, bekeken en bezongen vanuit een tijd waarin de wereld op een bepaalde manier ten einde leek te komen. En sindsdien alleen maar ergen lijkt te worden, ook al mogen we, op eigen risico, weer naar buiten.
De Toegift doet een aantal dingen erg goed op De Woonwijk. De combinatie van dromerig en stevig valt heel goed. De gedempte gitaarnoten in het intro, de stevige, maar zacht gespeelde drums laten de dromerige keyboards en zang prima uitkomen. De samenzang maakt het nummer spannender op een subtiele manier en het nummer neemt je mee naar die andere tijd, naar de eigen herinneringen aan de die tijd en de omslagpunten in mijn leven. De Toegift mag gaan spelen in de Popronde dit jaar. Dat gaat de band live laten groeien. In de studio heeft de band zijn weg al goed gevonden. Dit is een heel interessante nieuwe band op het Snowstar label.
Released on May 27 Ditches' new single has 25 views on You Tube, so can use some extra attention (hint). According to the bio, the band consumed quite some alcoholic beverages before writing, arranging and recording the two songs on the 7" single. This may explain the loose atmosphere I'm hearing on Lost In Time. Ditches is a band from Stockholm in Sweden, inspired by punk bands of the 70s. Think early The Clash, The Ramones, bands that no matter the leather jackets and what nots, knew how to write a song and what to lend from things that came before. Ditches follows this line perfectly. This band knows how to write a song, how to present it in the most exciting way and lends from what came before, as it's far from afraid to throw in a great guitar solo, entering the song on a bit of feedback, like a rock band would. True 7" singles are a thing of the past (and extremely expensive to buy these days), as things come however, this is one very much worthwhile having, if your into punkrock that is.
Wout de Natris
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