(Despite what we are dealing with at the moment. Do support them whatever you can!)
There is a lot of hype surrounding Dana Gavanski.
Releasing her debut album called Yesterday Is Gone on Flemish Eye Recordsfor Canada and Full Time Hobby for outside of Canada.
She sounds like a mix of Angel Olsen, Weyes Blood and Andy Shauf.
It is an impressive debut that makes you grab hold of your emotions when listening to her music of love and heartbreak.
Basia Bulat wants to ask you, “Are You In Love?”.
Critically acclaimed singer-songwriter Basia Bulat joined forces once again with Jim James (My Morning Jacket) on the fifth album, Are You In Love? out on Secret City Records.
As always this is a lovely records of falling in and out of love.
Basia’s vocals is beautiful and full of emotions in songs like Are You In Love?, No Control and
It is so not easy to fall in love with her music.
A stellar album for those in love or getting over a break-up.
OK this is the best album of 2020! U.S. Girls‘ Heavy Light is the seventh album and is a big departure music/vocal wise.
Thought-provoking with the themes covered and brilliance to the output with it being a vocal driven album.
The reworking on Overtime, State House and the fan favourite Red Ford Radio brings more life and meaning.
I just can’t stop listening to it!
The long awaited album by Caribou called Suddenly came out on February 28, 2020.
It has been about 5 years since his last release which was Our Love.
While Dan Snaith has been focusing in being a father and doing other projects like Daphni.
Suddenly has been a long time coming for his fans.
Certain tracks in the album has that fluttery ambient feel and there are some that seems very mainstream with the sampling on the leading single Home and New Jade.
Suddenly is the most surprising and unpredictable Caribou album to date.
Though it retains the trademark Caribou warmth and technicolor, this album is littered with swerves and left turns.
Songs drop out and morph into something else entirely just as they’re hitting their stride, samples chopped up beyond all recognition burst out of nowhere.
Was going to post this on Valentine’s Day but I got so sidetrack.
All I have to say that this record by Cindy Lee is one of the best for 2020!
What’s Tonight To Eternity is simply beautiful and haunting at the same time.
Mixing in lo-fi guitar to the tragic wispy vocals of Pat.
It is one of those albums for getting dumped or trying to get over someone!
Dutch trio The Homesick released their second album The Big Exercise on February 7, 2020 via Sub Pop.
The Big Exercise brings them to more grounded, tangible pastures.
With its title ripped from a passage in the Scott Walker-biography Deep Shade Of Blue, the record is a concentrated effort by Jaap van der Velde, Erik Woudwijk and Elias Elgersma to explore the physicality of their music in fresh ways.
I really this album not because they are the awesome label but it mixes post-punk and indie pop music into an unique linear album.
Squirrel Flower‘s I Was Borning Swimming dropped today on Polyvinyl Records.
About the artist and album Squirrel Flower’s music is ethereal and warm, gushing with emotional depth that the listener can step into like a warm bath.
The band on I Was Born Swimming plays with delicate intention, keeping the arrangements natural and light.
The album was tracked live, with few overdubs, at The Rare Book Room Studio in New York City with producer Gabe Wax (Adrienne Lenker, Palehound, Cass McCombs).
The musicians were selected by Wax and folded themselves into the songs effortlessly.
At the heart of the album lives Williams’ massive, haunted vibrating voice and melancholic, soulful guitar playing.
The sounds expand and contract over diverse moods, cutting loose on the heavier riffs of “Red Shoulder” or “Streetlight Blues,” both recorded in her hometown of Boston, and holding back with atmospheric restraint on “Seasonal Affective Disorder” or “Belly Of The City”.
I Was Born Swimming begins with an Iowa drive down I-80 and continues to travel, poetically, between her college town of Grinnell Iowa, Boston, MA and New York City where the album was recorded. Throughout the 12 songs, landscapes change and relationships shift, “There’s so much in the record about movement and stagnation. Feeling stuck, needing to move, needing to stay still, swimming, falling, running, growing, etc etc.” said Williams. The album’s lyrics feel like effortless expressions of exactly the way it feels to change — abstract, sad and hopeful.
Loving crept up last year and finally in 2020 they finally released their long awaited debut album called If I Am Only My Thoughts via Last Gang Records.
Think of the song by Gilbert O’Sullivan called Alone Again (Naturally) with its soft folk and pop rock music vibe on the whole which has that style but more lo-fi of a genre.
Today Wolf Parade dropped their fifth studio album called Thin Mind via Sub Pop and Royal Mountain.
“Thin Mind refers to the way that being around too much tech has made our focus thin,” says keyboardist Spencer Krug.
“It’s opening one more page, scrolling one more thing,” adds guitarist Dan Boeckner, “and the weird, sort-of hollow automaton feeling that you get from it.”
“This record is very personal, but at the same time, we’re all coming from the same place of a general sense of anxiety,” says drummer Arlen Thompson. “How do you deal with the constant barrage of having your opinions swayed by all these different actors when you don’t know who they are or what their purpose is? There is no normal anymore.”
Thin Mind marks a return to the original power trio of Dan, Spencer, and Arlen, following multi-instrumentalist Dante DeCaro’s amicable departure from the group in 2018, after the conclusion of their world tour supporting Cry Cry Cry.
One month later, the trio got together at Risqué Disque, an old stone barn-turned-studio in the woods of Vancouver Island, to begin writing Thin Mind—emerging with an album about making sense of the present while reckoning with visions of the future.
“It’s the first record where we did the whole thing in one place from start to end,” says Arlen. “It was just the three of us until John came in, woodshedding in this moss-covered, rotting building.”
Paradoxically, the band’s decision to forge a future-forward sound using a myriad of synthesizers—from ‘80s synths and ‘90s MiDi to more modern, kitchen sink instruments—recalls the sonics of Wolf Parade’s earliest EPs.
Album highlights include “Julia, Take Your Man Home,” “Forest Green” and “Against the Day”, with lyrics split evenly between Dan and Spencer.
On “Julia, Take Your Man Home,” Spencer imagines the worst version of himself over a deep groove and an exaggerated, fictitious caricature.
“It’s not literally me,” he says. “I’ve never carved shapes that look like dicks into a bar, but it is the toxic male version of myself.”
“Forest Green” gallops along to a synthetic clip of Arlen’s electronic drum kit while Dan’s lyrics encapsulate the profound beauty, and ugliness, of Vancouver Island—not only where Thin Mind was recorded, but where Arlen and Spencer now live, and Dan grew up.
“The island has a really weird, pervasive darkness to it,” explains Arlen. “It’s got amazing nature, and there’s an inescapable spiritual vibe to the place. But it’s held with this tension between real estate money and nature now constantly being logged and developed. It’s a process that’s been happening for maybe 150 years—you’re watching this beautiful place just kind of melt.”
“Against the Day,” which features shared verses from Spencer and Dan, similarly constructs a synthetic shell to examine what’s natural and what is not.
“Dan told me it was about two vampires exploring the human world,” says Spencer, who assumed the role of one vampire in his verses.
“I wanted to tell a story about Lovecraftian, geological love passing in a place,” says Dan. “And two souls that were connected to each other. Every era that they go through, they are always on the outside of culture, always outsiders.”
Ultimately, the band was only able to subvert the “thin mind” phenomenon by jumping right back into its creative process after Cry Cry Cry’s tour, with each member bringing their anxieties out of the modern world and re-examining them on an elemental level.
“There’s this positive element to Thin Mind, too,” explains Dan, “if you’re in that liminal, very modern psychological state in nature. At best, you become an incredibly powerful being for interpreting and processing information at a speed that our parents and grandparents couldn’t possibly comprehend. In the cognitive dissonance where we made this record, there was no escape.”
While an artist can’t replicate what they did in their last album.
Case in point for Andy Shauf in The Neon Skyline which is the follow-up for the massively successful The Party that came out in 2016.
The album where he sets a familiar scene of inviting a friend for beers on the opening title track:
“I said, ‘Come to the Skyline, I’ll be washing my sins away.‘ He just laughed, said ‘I’ll be late, you know how I can be.'”
The LP’s 11 interconnected tracks follow a simple plot: the narrator goes to his neighborhood dive, finds out his ex is back in town, and she eventually shows up. While its overarching narrative is riveting, the real thrill of the album comes from how Shauf finds the humanity and humor in a typical night out and the ashes of a past relationship.
For The Neon Skyline, Shauf chose to start each composition on guitar instead of his usual piano. He says, “I wanted to be able to sit down and play each song with just a guitar without having to rely on some sort of a clever arrangement to make it whole.”
The resulting album finds its immediacy in simplicity.
While the arrangements on folksy “The Moon” are unfussy and song-centered like the best Gordon Lightfoot offerings, his drive to experiment is still obvious.
This is especially so on the unmoored relationship autopsy “Thirteen Hours,” which boasts an arrangement that’s both jazzy and adventurous.
This album has more of an upbeat guitar and mellow drum feel and vibe.
Miss the intimate and moody vibes from the Party like Quite Like You and Twist Your Ankles.
This is what makes Andy so unique and take on risks.
