Category: Listen Up
2021.5 Staff Picks Playlist
Hey there Vinyl Mag subscribers, long time no talk. To reign in the 2021 VM revival, consider this the first half of 2021’s staff top picks. 2020 and 2021 have definitely been a whirlwind, might I call them… “unprecedented times” (okay, I’m sorry… I won’t say it again). However, that can’t stop the jams from jamming, speakers from blaring. We hope you enjoy our staff playlist!
Acemoma – “A Future”
Bobby Kid – “Blue”
THE BLOSSOM – “CLOVES”
Courting – “Grand National”
Dayglow – “Close to You”
Elori Saxl – “Memory of Blue”
Japanese Breakfast – “Be Sweet”
Matt Ox – “Infinity”
Shungudzo – “There’s only so much a soul can take”
Sorry – “Cigarette Packet”
Sorry – “Don’t Be Scared”
Taylor Swift – Fearless (Taylor’s Version)
(Editor’s Note: Yes, the whole thing. I’m not sorry.)
Track Premiere: Tyler Boone – “Jealousy”
Charleston singer-songwriter Tyler Boone and his band are driving home Boone’s departure from his previous pop-leaning sound with his new title track, “Jealousy,” the second single from his forthcoming EP. The single pulls no punches, packing harsh lyrics condemning a toxic, jealous relationship (not to mention a pretty killer guitar solo).
“This track was something I’ve been working on for quite awhile and after bringing it to the group in the studio for a live session, we finished writing it,” said Boone of the song. “We knew this was going to be one of our favorites.”
Recorded at Ocean Industries Studios in Charleston, SC and produced by Eric Rickert, “Jealousy” is out this Friday. The band will be releasing all five tracks as singles this summer and Jealousy will drop early this Fall. Stay tuned, and listen below to the premiere of “Jealousy.”
Writers – Tyler Boone, Eric Rickert, JR Spencer, George Baerreis
Engineer – Eric Rickert
Cover Art – Shannon Duke
Musicians:Drums, Percussion – Eric Rickert
Lead Vocals – Tyler Boone
Electric Guitars – Tyler Boone, JR Spencer
Keys – Ross Bogan
Bass – George Baerreis
Premiere + Track-by-Track: Reverie Rush – ‘Beginners EP’
Reverie Rush is the heart-wrenching bedroom pop solo project of Athens, GA-based multi-instrumentalist, Andy Barton. Written after moving from Athens to Atlanta and back again in the span of a year, Barton’s debut release, the Beginners EP, drops today (as in, right here, right now).
“I lived in the city for about a year or so to try and give Fake Flowers, the band I was playing in at the time, a shot,” said Barton of the EP. “It was a pretty rough period, with a break-up, a dead end job and the eventual (first) dissolution of Fake Flowers…at first, coming up with these songs was just a means to help process a lot of the sudden life changes I’d experienced, but it became clear pretty quickly that I had to put together a cohesive document of that period of my life, like my very being required it.”
The five-track EP was written by Barton and recorded with former Fake Flowers bandmates, Jake Chisenhall (Delorean Gray) and Freeman Leverett. Check out the premiere below, and scroll down for Barton’s track-by-track breakdown below!
“Taking On Water”
“Taking On Water” was actually the last track composed for the EP. The chord progression had been floating around since the early days of the project, but it wasn’t until we went to record that it received a full arrangement and really came together. From the get-go I knew the EP needed an instrumental intro, though. I had envisioned this sad, shoegaze-y score playing over an image of someone lost at sea, their little ship taking on water. Jake and Freeman really helped execute that with their additions to the arrangement, which we just kind of jammed out in just a few takes.
“Coming up for Air”
“Coming up for Air” channels, by far, the darkest themes and elements of the EP. It’s all about grief and guilt and letting your loved ones down. I felt like I’d reached an all-time low, and getting all these feelings out in song served as a much-needed moment of catharsis. Writing this song presented a moment of clarity, where I was able to completely acknowledge that I’d made some pretty big mistakes that put me in a dark place, but I could also just as easily work towards bettering myself, and by extension, bettering others — that I could come up for air.
“What Have We Become?”
“What Have We Become?” kind of came about after playing around with a lot of dreamy, jazzy major 7th chords that reminded me of Fake Flowers songs. I wanted a guitar-driven song on the EP, something really urgent to express how I felt after moving back to Athens and trying to start anew. I was really pleased with how we were able to incorporate all the different guitar tones I really like: there’s jangle, there’s fuzz, there’s some post-punk influence, there are some shoegaze elements.
“Out of Sight”
“Out of Sight” was probably the second to last song I wrote for the EP, and as such it definitely reflects a more serene, level-headed perspective, bordering bittersweet. The ballad of the record, I wanted to give it a kind of loungey/crooner vibe, especially in the chorus. Jake and Freeman were listening to a good bit of bossa nova at the time, so I think that rubbed off on me, here. Freeman’s Thundercat bass line in the outro is easily one of my favorite recordings on the EP; it was completely improvised and pulled off in just a few takes. He finished tracking it, and I just started busting out laughing; it was so good.
“Run Its Course”
“Run Its Course” is the song that’s the most special to me, as it was the first one I wrote for the project, and the first song that I really ever wrote to completion. Once I’d gotten the verses finished, I was acutely aware of how much of a caricatured sad guy I probably sounded like, so I wanted the chorus to acknowledge that and poke fun at my own mope in a tongue-in-cheek way. I didn’t really know how to end the song initially, but Jake was really instrumental in solidifying the arrangement for the outro. Writing and recording that vocal section with him was one of the most personally gratifying musical experiences I think I’ve ever had.
Playlist: Sasquatch! 2018
It’s time for the 17th annual Sasquatch! Music Festival, running this Memorial Day Weekend from May 25-27. The Pacific Northwest-based camping festival takes place at the Gorge Amphitheatre in George, Washington and boasts a truly incredible and diverse lineup from top to bottom.
This year marks a return to the festival’s original form, boasting a lineup rich with emerging indie artists as well as heroes of the genre such as Bon Iver, The National, David Byrne, and Modest Mouse. Other notable acts include Tyler, The Creator, Spoon, Anderson .Paak, Grizzly Bear, TV On The Radio, Vince Staples, Neko Case, Explosions In The Sky, Slowdive, Thundercat, Wolf Parade, Perfume Genius, Noname, Margo Price, Julien Baker, Whitney, PUP, Pond, Big Thief, Japanese Breakfast, (Sandy) Alex G, Phoebe Bridgers, Chastity Belt, White Reaper, Alex Lahey, Charly Bliss, The Weather Station, Mimicking Birds…honestly, if we listed everyone on the lineup that we were stoked about, we’d just end up listing the entire thing. And look. It’s right there in the image above.
This is genuinely one of the best lineups of the year (in, obviously, one of the most outrageously beautiful locations), and there really aren’t any misses. With that in mind, we made an epic Sasquatch 2018 playlist for you to bone up on these artists, old and new. So just sit back, shuffle play, and we’ll see you at the gorge.
Playlist by Bryan Toti.
Track Premiere: Michael Flynn – “Professional Network”
Oh man, how many notifications do I have right now? There’s at least 300 for Whats-App on my phone at any given time. I can’t imagine how many LinkedIn notifications songwriting folkster Michael Flynn (formerly of Slow Runner) must have gotten to inspire this song:
“I wrote this song from beneath a giant pile of LinkedIn invitations. They seem to be generated by robots, and there’s something almost desperate about them—maybe that’s why deleting them without even opening the email is so satisfying? Maybe I was just disillusioned with how the world works and how hollow we all are, and I blew an afternoon trying to write a song about it?”
No matter what his particularly mixed feelings are about the ever increasing necessity of keeping up with social media, he can sure as hell produce something catchy from it. There’s an auto-tuned folk aesthetic to brand new track “Professional Network” that recalls Blood Bank-era Bon Iver, but with a lighter, more whimsical sentiment that fits right in with the subject matter. The achingly postmodern refrain, “I’d like to add you to my professional network” repeating in the background would normally drive me crazy, but Michael Flynn’s songwriting chops are powerful enough to elevate this song beyond millennial drivel. Granted, this man could probably sing the phone book, and I’d gladly listen.
Michael Flynn’s new album Pretend Like is out on May 1.
You can stream “Professional Network” below:
Track Premiere: Saw Black – “Mama Knows”
Are you feeling comfortable right now? Wrapping up in a blanket might be the best move for listening to this one. Richmond, VA folk artist Saw Black’s new single “Mama Knows” is so pillowy and lush, that anything less than your coziest outfit will seem out of place once you press play. While his voice never falters, it feels he also never raises his voice any more than necessary to deliver his heartfelt narrative. It’s as if the song was engineered to create feelings of calm in the listener. To the songs extreme benefit, the synths recall a more sedate sitar part from a Revolver era Beatles song—sort of like a vaguely vaporwave-esque “Tomorrow Never Knows” sample. It all adds up to being the aural equivalent of a big cup of hot chocolate in the best way possible. Or maybe like floating in the air/through the clouds like a cheerleader as suggested by the album’s artwork.
You can pre-order Saw Black’s upcoming (and most likely extremely comfortable feeling) LP Water Tower from War Hen Records/Crystal Pistol Records here.
And you can stream the song here and below:
Savannah Stopover 2018 Spotlight: Wild Child
Indie pop band Wild Child has grown a lot since Alexander Beggins and Kelsey Wilson initially formed the group seven years ago. What started as a duo with a ukulele and violin has now turned into a seven-piece mini orchestra. In the wake of their fourth studio album, Expectations, I sat down for a Q&A interview with Beggins and Wilson at Savannah Stopover Music Festival to talk growth, inspiration, and the songwriting process.
VM: How did you two go about meeting everyone else and recruiting the other members of your band?
KW: I mean, we’ve gone through a few different lineups actually in the past couple years, especially with drummers and bass players. It’s kind of always been just whatever friends we have around us that want to play with us. This lineup we have now actually feels like Wild Child. It’s the dream team.
VM: Yeah, I feel like Wild Child has definitely grown a lot.
KW: It has. We’ve added guitar, a trombone, and we used to only have horns for the bigger Texas shows, but now we have a brass section. We didn’t even have a bass player for the first two years. We’ve just been slowly getting bigger and bigger.
VM: So let’s talk about your new album, Expectations. I know you’ve said your previous album, Fools, was kind of your breakup album, so where would you say Expectations falls on that spectrum? Is there a way to define it?
AB: Well, it’s kind of the closest thing to opening up a page in our journals and what’s going on at the time. With this one, there’s a little bit of duality in the title. The expectations of being our fourth record and wanting it to do well, and the kind of precedence we set for ourselves, and expectations of the relationships we’ve been in and out of the past couple of years.
KW: This one is—as much as we did write a lot just in and out of relationships—this one felt a lot more like just us, you know? Just us singing about who we are, really, and what we’ve learned so far. This is kind of like, we even wrote songs all together as a band in the studio for the first time. We haven’t done that before on any record.
VM: I know you’ve said in the past that the two of you write the skeleton of the song and then let the band add to it. So did you kind of change the songwriting process for this album and use a different method?
KW: Yeah, on this one Alexander came forward with more full songs, and then I came forward with full songs, and then some of the songs we wrote together as a band. It was a lot more collaborative.
AB: It’s kind of like the nature, the beast of this record was just write when we can. Because we were touring a lot at the time it was kind of like we were writing songs during soundchecks and writing songs in the van. It wasn’t like, “okay, today’s going to be a writing day!” There were a couple of writing retreats that we did, but for the most part we kind of would just write whenever it was convenient. And that kind of created a different kind of atmosphere.
KW: And normally we wrote when we needed to. Like, something would be happening, and we’d be like okay, let’s get together, drink some wine, and let’s write a song about it.
AB: And we kind of took our time with this record. We were like whenever it’s done, it’s done.
VM: Did you guys have a definite idea of how you wanted this album to sound, or did you just kind of let it happen how it happened?
KW: We usually just let it happen. With this one, we were working with so many different producers, and we love and respect all of them so much that we kind of left a lot of room for them to steer us. We finished the writing of the songs, but we thought when it comes to the speed, the arrangement and the vibe, we just wanted to see what the producers each had to say…they each kind of picked the songs they wanted to do, so they had ideas. So we just kind of let it ride. Initially, we were just going to release like a song a month for a year and just not do a record, ‘cause records are kind of dying, and it’s really heartbreaking. It’s all about Spotify singles now.
VM: Yeah, and you guys did release a lot of singles leading up to this album.
AB: We kind of “hybrid-ed” the idea in anticipation of this record.
VM: I feel like that’s true what you said about records dying. It’s not like many people go to record stores and buy the physical album when it’s released anymore.
AB: Yeah, it’s like you release an album when it comes out, and everyone’s stoked for like, two weeks. Then it’s over, you know? It’s done and out there in the world. So, we released singles in pairs for like three months before the record dropped. Which I thought was cool, because it kind of created some hype around it.
KW: Yeah, and we did music videos for like half the record.
VM: Do you guys have a favorite music video from Expectations?
KW: The “Think It Over” one we just did was so much fun. Literally it was just absolutely only our friends and family dressed up. We built a club in a giant empty warehouse in one day. It was just a garage, basically.
AB: Yeah, in that one we just got to have fun. Sometimes you make a video for you. We had this idea and we were like, let’s just ride with this as far as we can. The director is our homie and he knew the vibe that we wanted to try and communicate.
VM: [How has] your sound has evolved since your, slower original songs?
AB: I think that we…when we started we were just naive babies trying to make music, and I think we’ve gotten better.
KW: Yeah, we didn’t really know what we were doing. It’s always been good for us though, because we’re not limited to the rules of music. We didn’t know shit about anything, so we were just like, “I guess that sounds good I don’t know!” So we’ve just gotten better over the years about knowing what sounds good.
Wild Child is on tour now in support of Expectations, with shows across the US and in Europe. They played at Savannah Stopover at the historic Trinity United Methodist Church.
Nap Eyes: ‘ I’m Bad Now ‘
Upon first listen, Nova Scotia, Canada natives Nap Eyes‘ I’m Bad Now felt like nothing but a snarky stoner’s revelry. Too zonked or tired out to outgrow the comfortable Loaded era Velvet Underground, Nashville or SoCal instrumental trappings, the album on first listen quite frankly felt very flat.
Oh, how wrong I was.
Like an unglazed clay pot viewed at first from a distance, Nigel Chapman’s rich lyrical details reveal themselves like thoughtful patterns carefully etched into the surface with a surprising amount of attention to detail and clarity upon closer inspection. Chapman’s lyrics, delivered with a Lou Reed-meets-Steven Malkmus-esque dry listlessness serve as a pitch perfect contrast to the weighty album themes of existential meaninglessness and sadness.
In the hands of a less capable songwriter, these musings would have just come off as some stoned pseudo philosopher with an acoustic guitar in one hand and a lit marijuana cigarette in the other. The dry delivery of such heavy themes is beautifully on display in the song “Every Time the Feeling”:
Oh I can’t tell what’s worse
The meaninglessness
Or the negative meaning
I figured out a way to get on with my life
And to keep on dreamingEvery time the feeling comes
You never question why
It comes to you this way
You say you never get an answer that way
But then you wonder anyway
Just you don’t really think about it
And you don’t really try to figure it out, out
Nap Eye’s lilting instrumentation provided by Brad Loughead (lead guitar), Josh Salter (bass), and Seamus Dalton (drums) also provide a deft and wonderfully understated backdrop. Unburdened by the need to flex too hard on their technical chops (even though they’re all fantastic players) they focus more on providing necessarily a sunny sonic color palette. Because of this, even Nap Eyes’ bitterest pills go down nice and easy.
As if they were borrowing from Of Montreal‘s playbook of pairing their darkest, most morose subject matter, Nap Eyes make even the depths of their low key existential dread feel like easy listening. Maybe that’s why it took me so long to get into the lyrics, when I think about it. “Easy” digestion is the name of the game here. I’m not to say that any of this was easy or slapped together, though. Nap Eyes just happen to make it look effortless.
7.9/10
Camp Cope: ‘How to Socialise and Make Friends’
Let me get one thing out of the way: Camp Cope are not fucking around. The moment singer/guitarist Georgia “Maq” McDonald lets loose the first lyrics of the How to Socialise and Make Friends, all bets are off that this is going to be an easy listen. Don’t get me wrong, the instrumentation on the album bears more than a passing resemblance to the relatively placid Galaxie 500, but Maq has a lot of shit to say and damnit, we owe it to ourselves to listen.
Dismantling the patriarchy is a full time job and Camp Cope need overtime pay for the amount of emotional labor put into this album. Laying her (and many other women’s, for that matter) frustrations bare about the overabundance of machismo in the music industry in the aptly titled song, “The Opener”, Maq lets out full-throated screams about the misogyny that is all too common in the music industry:
It’s another man telling us we can’t fill up the room
It’s another man telling us to book a smaller venue
‘Nah, hey, cmon girls we’re only thinking about you’
Well, see how far we’ve come not listening to you“Yeah, just get a female opener, that’ll fill the quota.”
And that’s just in the first song.
On an aesthetic level “The Opener” is a perfect crystallization of Camp Cope’s sound on How to Socialize. In a very punk move, the arrangement never strays from the bare bones guitar-bass-drums set-up because it never needs to. Maq’s voice and lyrics are the stars of the show here and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Her voice never falters even at the albums most tender moments, like the devastating, haunting acoustic closer “I’ve Got You”. The autobiographical tale of a relative’s or friend’s slow descent into death and her attempts to figure out hers and their place amid the cruel realities of the world is only made even more heartbreaking by her acknowledgement how much they’re a part of each other.
The sheer breadth and depth of the emotion conveyed on this record is astounding, reaching an intensity that I haven’t really felt since Blonde dropped. Yes, this might be devolving into gushing but if the rush of emotion I felt after I listened to this for the first time is any indication I’ll be listening to this album A LOT. I hope you will as well.
9.5/10
Track Premiere: EL MAR – “Dreamcatcher”
Brooklyn singer-songwriter Joey Primero, under the moniker El Mar, is all set to release her debut full-length, Try To Forget, next Friday, August 11.
Self-defined as “mystic mermaid rock,” the album is a follow-up to her recently released The Road EP.
To give you a little taste of what Primero—along with a collective of musicians—has cooked up for us, we’ve got the exclusive premieres of “Dreamcatcher,” a track about lost love that shows off Primero’s vocal chops in a big way.
“‘Dreamcatcher’ was written on Cape Cod last summer,” said Primero of the track. “I wanted it to have a sense of urgency in order to capture that feeling of being frazzled or just unsettled in knowing things are coming to an end. And realizing that they were never meant to be.”
Frazzled or not, Primero has found her voice on this debut, and we’re already ready for more.
Be sure to catch El Mar at Rockwood Music Hall on August 26th—it’s a FREE show, so get your ass down there.