Hovvdy, the indie duo featuring Charlie Martin and Will Taylor, has released their fourth record in five years, True Love, which, cliché as it sounds, is a perfect fall record. There’s something about open tunings and vocal harmonies on a delightfully slow-fi record that pairs well with the transition from warm to cold.
Zelma Stone, fronted by Chloe Studebaker, is notable for her disarmingly vulnerable lyrics and dynamic arrangements. The Best explores themes of loss, discovery, and evolution; the project is sonically reminiscent of artists like Sharon Van Etten, with poignant lyricism comparable to the likes of Phoebe Bridgers and Adrienne Lenker.
Two feels as exciting as a live music experience, full of intricate surprises and clashing dynamics in their genre of experimental rock. They utilize the constraints of long-distance art-making to create multi-layered unique sounds, weaving different ideas into melodies and patterns that often feel like entering different colorful rooms of the same colorful house.
How do you collect the essence of modern Americana music from various sources and then present it as your own vision of what music should sound like? If in doubt you might consult Philadelphia’s Sheridan Frances ‘Francie’ Medosch, who goes under the artistic name of Florry and take a deeper listen to her latest album Big Fall.
Shot Clock King recalls the cypher, inspiring breaths of life, communally shared for the respect, preservation, and progress of the art and broader art across humanity. One might just as well feel comfortable playing this music in a public setting, with the adaptable lyrical content offering something for everyone.
These songs are like dropping diamonds into heavy machinery—the onslaught of fizzing melodies add warmth and a sense of familiarity to a barrage of fuzzy guitar tones and unrelenting, impersonable drum machine thud. There is a great deal of finesse and genuine, honest-to-goodness work involved in this compilation, but it doesn’t feel that way.
Smoke Bellow, the Baltimore-via-Australia psych-pop band, revels in fitting together wildly disparate influences to create wholly new sounds. Open for Business is an excellent slab of jigsaw pop, collecting pieces they’ve cut out over the course of their discography and arranging them into something beautiful and unexpected.
Greg Ahee (Protomartyr), Mike Wallace (Preoccupations) and AJ Lambert (daughter of Nancy Sinatra), have teamed up to form Bloodslide, a trio that just released its first self-titled EP. All four songs straddle the border between unhinged noise and shatteringly beautiful moments in an otherwise stark and occasionally dismal EP.
Nastavi, Caliope, the latest from Maya Bon’s Babehoven, is a must listen. Written in the wake of twin upheavals – the death of her dog and the reunion with her estranged father, the EP captures the sadness, anger, isolation, and monotony of these moments, transforming them into a musically and emotionally compelling seven tracks.
HEY WHAT, Low’s stunning third album with BJ Burton, refines its predecessor’s approach, sculpting its slabs of noise into something more defined and accessible without losing any of the impact. It’s an album that grapples with the questioning of faith and the acknowledgement that the answers sought may never appear.
Life, and Another is a fourteen-track, 44-minute affair, transmitted with the descriptor, Sci-Fi Pop, and yes, with James Krivchenia of Big Thief producing the sound palette is ripe of the sort. If there is a novum for what Mega Bog is currently accomplishing, then it is found within that synthesis of Birgy’s lyricism and sonic arrangements.
Bachelor, the musical project of Palehound’s Ellen Kempner and Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, combine fuzzy guitars, pop hooks, and introspective words on their debut, Doomin’ Sun. Holed up for two weeks in Topanga, California in January 2020, Kempner and Duterte spent their days sleeping in, drinking iced tea, and writing songs.
