Page 5 – Audiofemme

Five Can’t-Miss 2021 Albums from the Eclectic New Zealand Music Scene

Kendall Elise // Photo Credit: Kristin Cofer

Australian music press and fans often look to the US and UK when seeking new sounds. It is to our detriment though, when so many diverse and divinely talented musicians and producers are emerging from the North and South Islands of New Zealand (Aotearoa in Maori).

From the nufolk, gothic, country-tinged ballads of Kendall Elise to the fresh, ambient pop of French For Rabbits, the heartbreakingly soulful Hollie Smith or the dark, strange and compelling Proteins of Magic and OV PAIN, there’s every reason to indulge in a deep dive into New Zealand’s 2021 album releases. Do yourself a favour, even, and book a trip. The epic, abundant natural beauty of the landscape and its diversity might make sense of the enormous variation in art and artists from this Pacific destination.

The following list is but a drop in the ocean of New Zealand’s music scene; in the coming year, readers can look forward to many more features on New Zealand artists in Audiofemme’s Playing Melbourne column. Stay tuned!

Kendall Elise – Let The Night In

Kendall Elise, from Papakura in Auckland, released the darkly soulful country album Let The Night In in August. Her sophomore effort is rich with hauntingly romantic, gorgeously spare ballads. “I Want” is proof Elise can’t neatly be classified as pure country. It’s a crooner, wrapped up in a plaintive, weeping guitar embrace that speaks of open windows and a thundering storm approaching.

She admits she wears her jeans too tight and likes her music too loud on a rip-roaring cover of Suzie Quatro’s “Your Mamma Won’t Like Me;” furious, barnstorming guitar drives the message home with grit. There’s a whisper of traditional English folk ballad “Greensleeves” in the guitar-based melody and melancholy harmonies on “A Kingdom.”

After gaining attention with her self-produced EP I Didn’t Stand A Chance in 2017, she drew enough crowdfunded support to release her debut album Red Earth in 2019. Let The Night In was recorded in lieu of her COVID-cancelled 2020 Europe tour – it’s sparing, stormy, sultry and stunning across all 10 tracks.

<a href="https://kendallelise.bandcamp.com/album/let-the-night-in">Let The Night In by Kendall Elise</a>

French For Rabbits – The Overflow

Salty air, sparkling ocean waves, the brightness of sun glinting off mossy rocks – these refreshing sensations are easily evoked by Poneke, Wellington band French For Rabbits on their track “The Overflow.” It can be found on their third album of the same name, released in November.

Brooke Singer adds vocal gilt to the delicate instrumentals and dreamy electropop of guitarist John Fitzgerald, drummer Hikurangi Schaverien-Kaa, and multi-instrumentalists Ben Lemi and Penelope Esplin. While their past albums – 2017’s The Weight of Melted Snow and 2014’s Spirits – have rooted the mood in more solemn, sad territory, there’s a languid sweetness, a freshness, to the ten tracks showcased here.

<a href="https://frenchforrabbits.bandcamp.com/album/the-overflow">The Overflow by French for rabbits</a>

Hollie Smith – Coming In From The Dark

Hollie Smith released her fourth solo album in October, and Coming In From The Dark more than justifies her four-decade strong career. The album showcases high-caliber collaborations, including the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (which features on the dramatic, full-throated title track), Sol3 Mio (on theatrical pop-operetta “You”) and Raiza Biza (on the slow burn of trippin’ R&B slow-trap “What About”).

Ultimately, the full-body feels are delivered simply by Smith’s sensational vocals. She’s an established artist in New Zealand who began singing in earnest as a teenager in local jazz outfits in Auckland. She went on to record and tour internationally with her father, an expert in Celtic music, before taking the solo path from her Wellington base in the 2000s. Her 2007 debut album Long Player sold double-platinum and scooped a bunch of New Zealand Music Awards. She followed it up with Humour and the Misfortune of Others in 2010 and her third album Water or Gold in 2016, as well as two collaborative albums: Band of Brothers Vol. 1 with Mara TK and Peace of Mind with Anika Moa and Boh Runga. Why hasn’t Australia tried to claim her yet? Maybe we tried and failed. Our loss; Smith is never forgotten once you’ve heard her sing.

Proteins of Magic – Proteins of Magic

How do you describe the unusual, totally captivating strangeness of Kelly Sherrod and Proteins of Magic? Just like that, I suppose. It’s a bizarre, wonderful pagan spell that’s conjured in her cross-border project that sees her living and working between her homes in Auckland and Nashville.

There’s a Laurie Anderson vibe to Sherrod’s operatic, gothic delivery over esoteric electronica on her debut self-titled album, released in August. If you can imagine, it capably combines elements of Enya’s dramatic, atmospheric “Orinoco Flow” and the odd sound-and-voice nightmare vision of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” with the hyperreal, disjointed techno-cool of Miss Kittin & The Hacker’s “Frank Sinatra.” But then, “The Book” is a piano-led, ghostly lament that is absolutely, heart-rendingly beautiful, defying comparisons. In November, Proteins of Magic released stand-alone single “Willow,” a multi-layered, witchy brew of synths, bouncy basslines and punchy digital drums.

Sherrod’s musical debut was as frontwoman for Punches in 2003, followed by playing bass for Dimmer before she moved to Nashville in 2009, painting and recording in her home studio when she wasn’t touring with the likes of The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Her schedule is busy with festivals in New Zealand in early 2022, and seems ample reason for organising a January roadtrip via Auckland.

<a href="https://proteinsofmagic.bandcamp.com/album/proteins-of-magic">Proteins Of Magic by Proteins Of Magic</a>

OV PAIN – The Churning Blue of Noon

Renee Barrance and Tim Player are Dunedin-originated, Melbourne-based OV PAIN. Their second album The Churning Blue of Noon is a more eclectic, experimental beast than their debut self-titled album of 2017. The duo had been nourished by a diet of drone, free jazz and instrumental work, and combined with the apocalyptic global pandemic scenario, their creative vision became murky with gothic, end-of-times moodiness. The August release was admittedly recorded in Melbourne, the duo’s second home.

Player is the Bela Lugosi-esque narrator on “Ritual In The Dark Part 1,” over a hollow-hearted digital organ. Warped, distorted synth fills the atmosphere, and from a ghostly parallel universe, Barrance’s dystopic vocals croon and hum on “Excess and Expenditure.” The track epitomises the feel of the whole album, a dark masterpiece.

<a href="https://ovpain.bandcamp.com/album/the-churning-blue-of-noon">The Churning Blue of Noon by Ov Pain</a>

Vocal Powerhouse Shaina Shepherd Brings Seattle Together with “Never Be Another You”

When singer Shaina Shepherd was growing up in Tacoma, she savored the opportunity to watch her mom sing in church. It was there, belting on-stage with the choir, where her mother would “shine”—and where Shepherd learned what was possible for herself, too.

“I could see her be her true self,” she tells Audiofemme. “[It] got me thinking about who I wanted to be.”

Today, Shepherd’s the one on stage, drawing in joyful eyes. Since moving to Seattle in 2014, she has turned heads as the powerful lead vocalist in Seattle rock outfit, Bearaxe, in her own Shaina Shepherd Band, and most recently, as the solo performer of “Never Be Another You,” a cover of the soulful 2016 hit from Lee Fields & The Expressions.

Shepherd’s version of “Never Be Another You,” released November 18th, is the result of a collaboration between major Seattle businesses Nordstrom and Sub Pop, the work of community-minded nonprofits like Black Fret and Africatown Community Land Trust, and the talent of a cast of additional Seattle music greats. “Never Be Another You,” is featured prominently in Nordstrom’s 2021 “Closer to You” holiday campaign and will benefit the Seattle nonprofit Africatown Community Land Trust.

Doing community work that brings together and benefits Seattle musicians and beyond is not an uncommon for Shepherd. In fact, after she moved to Seattle and began to get noticed in Bearaxe, she also began to develop an in-person and live stream concert series called Artist’s Way to benefit the local music industry that had been so disrupted during the pandemic.

“It happened because [local musicians] needed a gig. Our gigs got cancelled because of the pandemic and we just ended up building our own concert. That project has kind of continued throughout the pandemic and grew and… it also gave me an opportunity to continue to work on my craft and become a better singer through the concept we were building,” she says.

Artist Way’s impact attracted the attention of heavyweights on the Seattle music scene, like Ben London, founder of Seattle’s Black Fret, a nonprofit dedicated to helping local musicians thrive and whom Shepherd had previously connected with during her time with Bearaxe.

“During the pandemic I ended up getting to work with Ben a little bit more and he’s always trying to build opportunities for artists and musicians to get work. He built an opportunity to commission a song for Nordstrom,” she says. “They saw, and were inspired by, what I was doing in my community and building programs and also the way I sing. So they built this all-star band of people who are Seattle music legends. We just got in the studio and recorded a song. And the song turned out really great. We all loved it. Then Megan Jasper at Sub Pop said… they would put it out.”

The lively and uplifting single, which Shepherd recorded at ExEx Studio and Avast Studios in Seattle, features a cast of Seattle music greats including guitarist Jeff Fielder (Mark Lanegan Band, Sera Cahoone), Michael Musburger on drums (Damien Jurado), Ty Bailie on keys (MudHoney), and mastering by Ed Brooks (Death Cab for Cutie). And, per Shepherd’s wishes, all proceeds earned from the sale and streaming of the single are going to to Africatown Community Land Trust (ACLT), a nonprofit based in Seattle’s Central District, which empowers and preserves the Black Diaspora community in the area through land ownership, development, and stewardship.

“I suggested Africatown because they have been, during this pandemic, during the protests over at CHOP, they have been really popping out to me and inspiring me to keep going, to keep moving. So I was like, my heart is telling me to get back to them and everyone agreed that they are awesome and doing great work,” explains Shepherd.

Shepherd will follow up “Never Be Another You,” with the release of her pre-recorded KEXP webcast on December 22. And, in 2022, Shepherd hopes to release a debut record with the Shaina Shepherd band, which formed after the shutdown.

“I want to put out a body of work that represents the times I’ve had through 2020. I have a whole bunch of tunes. When I was in the middle of the pandemic, I didn’t have anybody to play with. But I found these guys—James Squires, Dr. Quinn, and Nick Jessen. And you know… they’ve imbued themselves into the songs [I wrote by] myself in isolation.” says Shepherd. “So, shout out to my first band ever, and then shout out to Black Fret… and shout out to Sub Pop and Nordstrom for giving me the support that I needed to have some kind of impact. Seattle’s my hometown now!”

Follow Shaina Shepherd on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Shanique Marie Helps Keep Kingston Collective Equiknoxx Organic and Eclectic on Basic Tools LP

Opening with a serpentine, strange and seductive rhyme, then layering in stuttering, boxy beats, Equiknoxx keep it dark and spicy on their latest mixtape Basic Tools. For international fans outside of the UK and Europe, the release is likely their introduction to the Kingston, Jamaica collective, made up of producers Gavsborg (Gavin Blair), Time Cow (Jordan Chung), Bobby Blackbird (Nick Deane), and vocalists Shanique Marie and Kemikal.

Shanique Marie is pure magic. She is truly a vocalist in the sense that she sings, raps, hums, freestyles and ultimately weaves her soulful, sure-footed voice into whatever form feels right at the time. She is both an integral part of Equiknoxx and a solo artist, having released her debut album – Gigi’s House, named after her biggest fan, her mother – in mid-2021. When we connect on Zoom, she is at home in Kingston, stifling a yawn at the end of the day, but she regularly segues into song to illustrate what she is describing or remembering. It’s a captivating, small-scale performance.

“I’m pretty sure I can speak on behalf of the entire group when I say this. When I talk about our sound being organic and our creation of music being organic, I mean that it is something that comes from within and something that comes very naturally to us,” she says. “It’s almost magical, in a sense, how things fall into place where our music is concerned. It can just be a conversation that we’re having in the studio that becomes a line that starts a song, or a rhythm is built around this, or a sound that we hear that Gavin, Jordan or Nick are like, ‘oh, we have to sample this!’”

<a href="https://equiknoxx.bandcamp.com/album/basic-tools-mixtape">Basic Tools (Mixtape) by Equiknoxx</a>

The squiggly samples and funky percussion of “UGGH” is a prime example. Gavin and Shanique were having a phone conversation when Gavin said, “You sound like UGGH!” A moment later, he exclaimed, “I’m gonna make a song!” He duly took the line and built the song from it.

“Much of the songs Gavin and I work on tend to be like that, where we’re literally having a conversation and Gavin or Nick makes a joke, or Jordan makes a joke, and then it’s like, ‘we can make a song from this!’, you know?” she says.

Their rough and tumble sound reveals the group’s genius for creating textures from processed bird sounds, smudging beats into odd time, liberally enriching the sonic soup with cymbals, gongs, choir samples and comical vocal snippets, and a quirky, macabre sense of humour. Bird Sound Power, released in 2016, was a compilation of Gavsborg and Time Cow’s productions dating back to 2009. Colón Man – in a sense, their first traditional album, made as a cohesive collection – arrived a year later, attracting “Best Of” listings for FACT, Resident Advisor, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork. Eternal Children was arguably their most accessible album for mainstream hip hop and pop audiences in 2019, in no small part thanks to Shanique’s hook-laden, butter-melting vocals. Perhaps, too, the world was ready for their oddball musical courtship of our eardrums. We’d been primed by the retro-sleaze R&B of Blood Orange, the mad beats and humour of Madlib, and the timeless adventurousness of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry.

Equiknoxx is both the name of the collective, and also the name of their label, Equiknoxx Music. Operational since 2007, they’ve been making intriguing, body-moving, slinky music that sweeps through the trap-reggaeton-electro sphere for just over a decade. Throughout Basic Tools, the groove is so deep you wonder how you’ll clamber out of the funky, hypnotic, languorous beats and patois-laced rhymes. Elsewhere, barely restrained snarls, rapid-fire raps and layered, haunting harmonies threaten to become the matter of urban nightmares. Whether it’s a double-entendre or a straight-up reference to “eating bananas,” drive-by shootings, or queens who do Kegels, the rhymes are clever, sometimes funny, often skewering the listener when they dare to get complacent with their attention.

It’s hard to imagine anyone ignoring Shanique Marie, though.

Raised in a very traditional Christian family, she used to sing in church choirs and spent a lot of time with her grandparents, listening to Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Otis Redding, Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald. A neighbour overheard the then-17-year-old singing and insisted on introducing her to some friends with a studio. Shanique Marie’s mother was having none of it.

“Equiknoxx was rising in the local dancehall scene… but the thing about Jamaican and even Caribbean culture is that young girls are never encouraged to go into the studio because the whole idea is that it’s gonna be a lot of males that are going to be smoking weed. Young females might be taken advantage of, so growing up in a very traditional, religious family, my mom was like ‘School is the focus, there is no going to studio,’” she recounts.

Instead, Shanique began a conversation with Gavin via MSN Messenger.

“But of course, I was younger than him and at the time, nobody took me seriously.”

Years later, they did. Shanique was midway through her Bachelor of English Literature (and has since graduated, along with a Masters in Education Management) when her work with some event promoters lead her back into the Equiknoxx studio to record a jingle promoting a local party. Gavin was sitting in a corner throughout the session and at the end of the hour, Shanique approached him to introduce herself. What began with her working as a background vocalist on his beats for other artists evolved into a much more equal billing as her adaptability, range and confidence emerged.

“It’s so ironic how the universe works and how things just fall into place,” she reflects. “This was the path that was ordained for me. At one point I was really pushed into the academic path and I had put music down. There’s a book called Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and she talks about how ideas find you, and I apply that to my life. Reconnecting with Gavin and the crew really just confirmed for me what my purpose is on this Earth… music just accosted me. Music came back and was like ‘Excuuuuse me, hello!’”

From 2009, Gavsborg and Bobby Blackbird had been making beats for dancehall stars, including Beenie Man. Then, in 2013, Poland-based reggae DJ 27Pablo invited Gavsborg and Masicka to perform at his club. It was impossible to refuse, since he’d named the club “Equiknoxx” in homage to the crew he’d met in Jamaica. They put together a four-track EP (Equiknoxx Introduces Masicka to King Tubby) to entice Polish fans to come see them, establishing their international career in earnest. Their second home, Manchester, is also a base for the collective but they’re equally likely to be in a club in Lisbon or Berlin.

“We do travel to Manchester quite a bit,” Shanique confirms. “The UK has always been a second home for me and a stomping ground where a lot of music is made for us as a group and as individuals within the group. We do a lot of work with Swing Ting and they’re based out of Manchester. We also work out of London, as well.”

Their theatrical, sweaty performances fuse Shanique Marie’s solo songs with Equiknoxx group productions, criss-crossing through tracks from Basic Tools, Eternal Children, Colón Man, and Gigi’s House. Don’t expect a US tour too soon, though.

“We’ve done some awesome shows in the US, but we found that the market for us has been stronger in Europe and the UK,” explains Shanique Marie. “We’ve done some really wicked shows for Red Bull, Marfa Festival in Texas, we performed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York… but our sound, that whole electronic dancehall fusion, has had a much stronger appeal in the UK and Europe.”

For Shanique Marie, the connection is clear.

“UK garage, dance and grime, drum ‘n’ bass, those are the places where it’s still at the forefront of performances. I’ve never been puzzled by it. I think it just makes sense given that those genres are so prevalent, whereas it’s more of an underground scene in the US; it’s not mainstream, it’s not pop culture,” she reasons.

The immediacy of Equiknoxx’s music is what hooks you in. It doesn’t feel laboured, manipulated, or manufactured to the nth degree by labels and promoters. They’re present. They’re organic. They’re loving making this multi-layered, strange beast of a track in real time as much as you’ll love twerking and twisting to it in your living room. It is the unexpected laugh in the studio, or an exasperated sigh, or an ill-timed clash of cymbals or feedback that can kick off a whole creative adventure in storytelling. Listening to Equiknoxx is an invitation to hang out with the group, and while you might just have to go to Jamaica or London to do it in person, Basic Tools brings the collective to you in its bright, eclectic glory.

Follow Equiknoxx on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

Sarah Elizabeth Haines Reaches Out to Reconnect with “In the Morning” Video

As a frequent touring musician, singer-songwriter Sarah Elizabeth Haines struggled to balance a professional and personal life. The seed for her new song “In the Morning” had burrowed into her mind, inspired by several “failed relationship attempts,” and eventually, its reflected lyrics offered her the space to “remind myself of some of the parts of long distance dating that weren’t actually too terrible.”

“It can be fun and exciting to miss someone, and to feel that longing of a relationship that’s young and tender and that you want to nurture,” Haines says. “You just don’t necessarily want that to be the great majority of the relationship or it starts to feel like a fantasy you’re making.”

“In the morning light everything would be alright/If you were here with me,” she hums over bouncing drums. “Every time that you’re around/Be it alone or in a crowd/You’re the only one I see.”

The music video premieres today on Audiofemme and finds Haines collaborating with long-time friend and director John Carluccio. “He and I did a few photo shoots out in Joshua Tree early this year, and we spent a lot of time talking about how we both were trying to hone our creative visions as artists and what that meant for each of us, individually, and there was already a lot of crossover there,” Haines explains.

After discussing how best to bring the song to life, the creative process itself was as organic as it could be. A strong level of trust had already formed between them; Haines even let Carluccio “choose which of the singles he wanted to work on, and then he sent me a few treatments,” she says. “We decided to go for this dreamy sort of David Lynch-inspired flashback sequence, and I’m so thrilled with the way it turned out.”

“In the Morning” comes on the heels of “Water,” both samplings to Haines’ forthcoming new record, Castaway, due February 25, 2022. Admittedly, the latest offering is “probably the least intense song on the record in many ways, but that’s exactly why I love the space it does take up,” she says of its placement on the LP.

Castaway deals in many themes, and among its central concepts is “how we as people, and I think, as female artists especially, are often expected to present ourselves in a neat little easily digestible box so that people always know exactly what to expect from us,” she says, “but that’s so far from anyone’s actual experience in the world. We all have messy, complicated, sometimes even contradictory feelings all the time; we find ourselves loving someone who’s hurt us or resenting someone who loves us or full of regret or making up an ideal of someone who doesn’t really exist the way that you want them to when you look at them in the light of day.”

“Sometimes we just need a mirror — and sometimes we’re allowed to just be gentle and loving and hopeful,” she adds. And that’s the vantage point from which “In the Morning” is delivered, an almost celestial performance emanating warm lavender.

But the song, ironically, sprouted and grew under intense conditions. In pre-pandemic days, Haines was well-equipped in spending long stretches of time without family or friends. Looking back, it took remarkable self-reliance to paddle through her days. “At certain points on tour, I definitely let the pendulum swing a little too far in the other direction of trying to convince myself I was fine being out on my own. That’s not to say that I’ve been completely cut off from friends—I’ve made some really great, lasting friendships on tour too—it’s just sort of like a weird traveling circus where you see each other every day anyway at work.”

When the pandemic hit, those feelings were further amplified. She eventually learned what it meant to simply exist in stillness, but it took time. “I wasn’t even moving around or working really at all so there were absolutely no distractions,” she says. “I definitely came out of that with a better understanding of myself and a greater sense of peace in stillness than I’ve ever had before. It also taught me that it’s really not so hard to pick up the phone and call someone just to say hello, and I’ve definitely been doing that a lot more recently.”

Such reflections evolved into deep inner work, and as a result, she unlocked her “own power” and now embraces “the messiness of being a human being” in ways she never imagined. “In spending so much time with myself, I found that there’s so much there that deserves to be nurtured, and that if you don’t crush yourself over your mistakes, they’ll end up being more fertile soil for growth.”

This inward journey soon cast ripples into her work, as well. “I learned a lot of new skills during the pandemic out of necessity. I ended up engineering part of my own record and co-producing on it,” she explains. She linked up with co-producer Kevin Salem during lockdown and began ironing out preliminary album details.

Aside from her solo work, Haines plays viola and violin as part of the touring company of Hamilton, as well as with chamber group Contemporaneous. When the world slowly opened up again earlier this year, the singer-songwriter was most surprised by how quickly she was able to settle back into the pre-pandemic routine.

“The first few shows back [for Hamilton] were a wild rush, absolutely, and it’s amazing to feel connected to an audience again,” she says. “But I do think at the end of the day, when you’ve played the same thing almost 900 times (it’s already been over 100 shows since I’ve been back), and since we’re in the pit so we’re generally hidden from most of the audience, it’s just refreshing to feel like it’s something almost completely normal.”

Solo shows are another matter, though. “The few solo shows I have played since the pandemic have definitely been a different story,” she concludes. “It’s like I’m learning to walk all over again in certain ways, and a bit of the performance anxiety that I had mostly gotten over in previous years has returned ever so slightly, but it’s been incredibly exhilarating after such a long time without.”

Follow Sarah Elizabeth Haines on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Bush Tetras Celebrate Four Decades of Fuzzy-Guitared Funkiness On “Best Of” Boxset

New York City in the early 1980s was a jungle of musical genres. No wave, hip hop, R&B, soul, jazz and punk informed the sound of the streets, clubs, parks and gyms, escaping from headphones and pumped from car stereos. Patti Smith had arrived a decade earlier, traipsing bookstores and vinyl shops during the day and riveting audiences at night with her unique spoken word-freewheelin’ rock, jazz performances at night. Madonna was wearing scrunchies, cropped shirts, fishnets and high tops, Debbie Harry was seducing CBGBs, and Talking Heads were pulling strange geometric shapes on stage. Afrobeat was emerging in the clubs and making its way into the percussive drive of punk and dance with street press reviewing Beastie Boys alongside Afrika Bambaataa. MTV was in its infancy, but there was no doubt the city was the place to be for music lovers, whether they wanted to thrash about wildly on dancefloors in the early hours of morning or pick up an instrument of some type and form a ramshackle band.

Out of this melting pot came post-punk progenitors Bush Tetras, who released their debut single “Too Many Creeps” in 1980. Splitting up in 1983 before their first studio LP was released, they’ve formed and reformed over the years, having evolved their sound through various iterations. Three album boxset Rhythm and Paranoia: The Best of Bush Tetras, released in early November via Wharf Cat Records, finally compiles their musical output, showcasing 29 songs (plus some live versions) from their catalogue stretching back to their formation in 1979.

<a href="https://bushtetrasnyc.bandcamp.com/album/rhythm-and-paranoia-the-best-of-bush-tetras">Rhythm and Paranoia: The Best of Bush Tetras by Bush Tetras</a>

Bush Tetras are practically synonymous with New York City, though Dee Pop (Dimitri Papadopolous), born in Queens, was the only New York native in the original lineup. With an intoxicating allure for outsiders, and a ‘weirder-the-better’ attitude towards its eclectic residents, the Big Apple’s siren call lured Cynthia Sley from Cleveland, Pat Place from Chicago, and their original bassist Laura Kennedy from Detroit.

“I had been designing clothes,” recalls Sley, who has lived in NYC for 42 years now. “I had just made all these stage clothes for Lydia Lunch for her tour on ZE Records. I was a visual artist, but I was really into fashion and film, and New York was like a Mecca. I just wanted to do something creative and I felt like Cleveland was limited… I felt like it was really happening in New York, everybody knew it was the hub.”

Originally an aspiring visual artist, Place had dance-punk cred already as a founding member of no-wave act Contortions, which was memorably featured on Brian Eno’s 1978 compilation No New York. She had also starred in feminist Vivienne Dick’s experimental films. Kennedy and Place were lovers who’d been living together for a year before Sley made the move. Sley recalls being cajoled into joining Bush Tetras, since she’d known Kennedy at art school in Cleveland.

“I met Pat through Laura… Pat had quit the Contortions and started up a band with Laura and Dee Pop. They started playing with Adele Bertei as a singer, but it didn’t quite work out. So then they strong handed me into doing that,” Sley says. “I was, believe it or not, a bit shy, so I had to be talked into it.”

The sense of community offered by music and art that rebelliously avoided pigeon-holing, gentrification and commercial motives was born of the scrappy, DIY attitude of young New Yorkers living downtown at a time when it was cheap, but dingy and dangerous. Still, women making music outside of the safe confines of folk, pop ballads or R&B was a novelty, and women wielding guitars they’d taught themselves how to play sent ripples of fear and excitement through the live music scene at the time.

“There was definitely a lack of women in music, absolutely, but I think because of no wave and Tina Weymouth on bass and Patti Smith, there were some new women coming on the scene that were really standing out and it made it a possibility for little punk girls like us to get involved in music,” Sley says. “We just thought, why not? You didn’t really need to be proficient at your instrument. I didn’t have to take vocal lessons. You just had to have the right chemistry.”

Bush Tetras with Clash drummer Topper Headon in 1982 // Photo Credit: Bob Gruen

There’s a lean, rangy swagger to Bush Tetras’ guitar riffs, a menacing rumble of fuzz escaping into distortion every so often. Sley elegantly enunciates every loving, brutal word in her sing-song/spoken word signature style, daring you to piss her off.

On “Sucker Is Born,” the somnific, languid strum of Place’s spangly guitar oozes with cosmically-charged atmosphere. Sley’s sultry croon emerges organically, an additional instrument: “Did you care at all when they found you out, or did you make it out…?” she asks. Minutes later, the drums wake up as if shaken wildly, the guitar emits furied distortion, and Sley wails, “A sucker is born!”

The pace is all go on the determined gallop of drums and sprawling guitar on the live version of “Run Run Run.” It’s a far cry from the Talking Heads-style smudged bass lines, high-pitched guitar tuning, synthesizer claps, deeply funky dance-punk of ironically titled “You Can’t Be Funky.” The clatter of odd percussion in some alien rhythm on “Moonlite” sounds like each band member recorded their parts to their own individual timing and somehow it just manages to hold together. The early influence of Afrobeat emerges in the eclectic, celebratory drums and deep, funky bass rhythms. Guitars chug along like revving engines on “Cowboys In Africa,” a cymbal punctuating the frenzy of angular, serrated-edge guitar and a drumbeat like hot heels running down New York pavement.

The pagan magic of “Rituals” is all-consuming in its gothic, baroque oddity: Nico-style droning vocals, dissonant, creepy guitars, the shake of tambourines, and the repeated mantra “I love you, but I love you, but I love you, but I love yoooouuuuu.” I admit to Sley that it’s a favourite, but immediately apologise for picking favourites from such a rich body of work. The song was founded on lyrics and a rhythm that Dee Pop had devised, Sley explains.

“That song to me has guitar and bass weaved together to form this kind of fabric for the vocals on top of it,” she adds. “The songs were very un-self-conscious. I don’t think we were really thinking of what was it going to sound like. We just kind of did what came naturally. We wrote ‘[You Can’t Be] Funky’ and ‘Cowboys [In Africa]’ all around the same time as ‘Rituals.’ ‘Rituals’ was Dee’s idea of that vocal line almost like percussion; it was very rhythmic, and we wrote it around that. It’s one of my favourites too!”

“I like ‘Stare,’ I like ‘Nails,’ I like ‘Page 18,’ I like one that we really don’t play anymore and it’s on the original Boom In The Night [LP],” says Place. “It’s weird listening to your own stuff, and I don’t do it that often… but there’s definitely tracks I listen to and think, ‘Hey, I really like that!’”

On Rhythm and Paranoia, the previously-unreleased “Cutting Room” finally gets an outing. Dee Pop had kept an archive and until his passing in early October this year, he was heavily involved in choosing and collating the boxset collection.

“Dee kept everything, so he found ‘Cutting Floor’ and that was a song we recorded with Henry Rollins,” recalls Sley. “Pat and I had completely forgotten about it. I don’t even remember singing that. I had no idea, so some things were really a surprise because I really did not remember that song.”

Really? She forgot working with the heavyweight Black Flag front man, Henry Rollins?

“Oh no! There’s not enough drugs in the world for that,” laughs Sley. “I definitely remember recording with him, but that song, ironically, ended up on the cutting floor. We recorded it but never released that song, and we’d do that. We’d have songs that we would play for a while and then we would discard them.”

As far as recording, Place and Sley have been prolific during the last two years. While they typically write in the same room, jamming and trading lyrics and riffs, their chemistry has remained potent even while co-creating via email along with new bassist R.B. Korbet (Pussy Galore, Missing Foundation). To date, they have ten songs as yet unrecorded, with a planned release in 2022.

“We were able to keep writing,” concludes Sley. “It’s a joyful thing to write in a very dark time.”

Follow Bush Tetras on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for ongoing updates.

Ziemba Grieves For Her Father On Christmas-Tinged LP Unsubtle Magic

“Destabilizing.” That’s the single word René Kladzyk says best encompasses her experience after the death of her father and through rising flood waters of grief. The singer-songwriter, best known under her musical pseudonym Ziemba, lost her father in early 2020 after he spent two weeks in the hospital over the Christmas season.

Her life all but burned to the ground — and with her brand new record, Unsubtle Magic, she sifts through the ash, both literally and figuratively. When her father’s health took a turn for the worse in late 2019, everything began to shift dramatically, even her relationship to holiday-themed music. “Losing a loved one over the holidays made all Christmas music take on a new tinge to me,” Kladzyk tells Audiofemme.

Admittedly, she never intended to make a record stitched with references to such classic Christmas songs as “Silent Night” and “O Holy Night” but perhaps it was a necessary conduit of catharsis to confront her pain so boldly and brutally as possible. “I just kept writing songs that had this holiday frame or holiday lens. That was the context of my dad’s death,” she recognizes.

Beyond her father’s death, Kladzyk also experienced the loss of an aunt, uncle, and good friend. “My experience is not all that unique. A lot of people have really had to grapple with mortality and loss. It’s like the ground falls out from underneath you, and you have to relearn how to stand,” she says. “I wonder about all the different ways that people are going to be struggling this holiday season.”

<a href="https://ziemba.bandcamp.com/album/unsubtle-magic">Unsubtle Magic by Ziemba</a>

In the weeks and months immediately following her father’s death, Kladzyk scrawled out the stray lyric and melody, but it wasn’t until late 2020 that she finished the first song. “Sandia Crest” finds her wondering, “Are we truly gone when we go?” over a bedrock of wind instruments and piano, making a lyrical reference to scattering her aunt’s ashes, which she says was “kind of a complicated process.”

“She died tragically, too,” Kladzyk recalls. “She had been a really bad alcoholic for many years, and I had stopped talking to her. She was a big part of my childhood, but in adulthood, I ended up stopping talking to her, as most of my family did. We all were estranged from her, which is really sad. She had very serious mental health issues — and she was alone when she died.”

As a result, the performance is sullen and weighted down, like shoving a boulder into the ocean. All the sorrow and the heartache bubbles around her as she sings, “The last time I heard her voice before she lost her soul/A goodbye to the swirling skies, swallowed by the stars,” bathing in the moment, simply existing without any concrete answers.

Kladzyk prompts another investigation into the afterlife with “Will You Haunt Me?” in which she retraces the moment when it “hit me that [my father] was actually going to die. We had to make the decision to take him off life support, and it was very fraught and confusing,” she recalls. “At first, they were really optimistic, but it quickly changed when he didn’t wake up. I remember walking down the hospital hallway and feeling my head hanging low in a way that it never had before. I don’t even know how to describe it. But it was like this utterly defeated feeling of helplessness that there’s nothing I can do.”

Meanwhile, the world around her continued to flicker right, as there were “literally babies being born. Every time a baby was born, they would play a little melody from ‘Rockabye Baby’ throughout the entire hospital. So you could always hear when a baby was born,” she says.

As her father died, the song’s sweet, bright melody washed over her. “It was a reminder that everybody’s just going about life,” she reflects. “Life is happening all around me, and my life had totally collapsed.”

The album cover, designed by Robert Beatty with art created by Dian Liang, frames her father’s final moments with a glimpse into the sun’s glaring, hopeful rays. “It’s this moment of looking out the hospital window to watch the sunrise on Christmas morning and trying to feel some amount of hope in it,” she explain.

Unsubtle Magic, co-produced with Don Godwin, relies heartily on “devastating defeat and overwhelming sadness” but filters the experiences through twinges of “sweetness and a feeling of home,” she explains. With “A Nightmare,” for example, Kladzyk observes the literal caving in of her childhood home, which her father bought in the ’70s. In 2020, she and her sister “had this incredibly painful problem of trying to deal with this property,” she says. In the song’s most incisive depiction of her ongoing struggle to cope, she sings with a quivering lip, “Part of me might die here.”

It’s a nail in the coffin, to say the least. “It felt like a whole new way of losing him,” she adds. “It was like losing the metaphysical home and physical home.”

She remembers the moment like it was yesterday. Kladzyk returned to Michigan to attend to things while her uncle was dying, so not only did she say final goodbyes but she closed an important chapter of her life. It was 17 degrees out, and snow capped decayed architecture and rotting beams offered a sobering depiction of everything in her life. “The second floor was caving into the first floor and I was running down the stairs as I heard the floor starting to cave in. I ran out of the house in a panic, and that’s the last time I ever went inside that house,” she recalls. “I was actually in the house, and the feeling was like it was falling in. My dog got loose in the yard, and it was really scary and overwhelming and sad.”

“Time doesn’t freeze just ’cause you want it to,” Kladzyk sings on “Time Doesn’t Freeze,” the exact phrase her sister said to her when dealing with the ramshackle homestead. “My dad just kind of left it as though it would stay how it was. He often wouldn’t deal with things, and he would just put it off as though you could keep putting it off forever. If we hadn’t sold it, the town was about to condemn it. It was a huge burden to put on us, because my dad hadn’t maintained it and hadn’t cleaned it out. Then, it was this emotional burden of not knowing if dad had things in there that were of value to him or would be of value to us.”

Furthermore, the piano-laced song grabbles with “the nature of change and entropy, and just how there’s no way to argue with it — and all the ways that silly humans try to pretend we can. We can try to hold onto a moment forever, but we just can’t. And then we’ll forget.”

“That’s another thing with death; you start really grappling with your own memory. You immediately start realizing all the things that you are slowly forgetting, like what it was like to hug that person,” she continues. “It’s a gradual process of going from being a very clear image in your mind’s eye to being a fuzzy image. That’s a horrible feeling. But it’s unavoidable. You can do things to improve your memory, like learning language or whatever, but you can’t bring that person back. You can’t feel the feeling again, except maybe in a dream, if you’re lucky.”

Kladzyk keeps her father’s memory alive through using the same family piano, now residing in her El Paso home, that she played growing up and her father used in his own musical career. “When my mom got pregnant, he just quit playing music entirely. He was operating at a time when the financial hurdles to record were much greater. So, even though he wrote and did demo recordings of tons and tons of songs, he only captured recordings with maybe four songs. During his 12-year musical career, he was a touring musician and had a circuit that he played and made a good living.”

Now, in possession of a collection of tapes, only four of which were complete, basic recordings, she found herself drawn to “Set In Ice,” which her father wrote in 1974. “I tried out a number of songs with the idea of covering them for this album. I really liked where [this song] sat in my voice. I didn’t change the key for that one, and I really liked how, thematically, it fit in the album,” she says.

One particular lyric struck her most. “Living by myself for so very long/Get up every morning just to sing these songs,” she sings amidst a flurry of percussion and guitar. Surprisingly, the visual brought her great comfort, “to imagine my dad in the ‘70s having those same feelings that I was having now. It felt like a way to connect to him, and it feels that way playing his songs, like a new way to get to know him and expand my relationship to a version of him that I never knew.”

Her father never spoke much about his musical days, except to “drop a crazy bomb” like the time he said he “went over to Tom Waits’ apartment, and the whole floor was covered in Burger King wrappers,” she shares with a laugh.

Unsubtle Magic is fraught with emotional tension. Kladzyk both surrenders to her grief and pushes to extricate herself from it. It’s that vital tug of war that acts as a heavy duty glue to keep her from falling apart, shockwaves vibrating through songs like “Only Lonely Christmas,” “Fear,” and a driving performance of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”

The holidays are in full swing, and a lyric in “Sandia Crest” ensnares these complicated strands of her emotional state. “I hope to someday love Christmas,” she sings, the phrase nearly swallowing her whole. It’s hopeful but doesn’t skirt the pain.

In our conversation, she admits to feeling like “I am doing a great job of forcing myself to get over wanting to cry every time I heard a Christmas song. While it was all happening, that first holiday season, literally hearing any Christmas song made me feel this pain in my stomach, a sadness like everything that was gone would never be again — that sort of thing. I think I’ve done a good job of reminding myself all of what I love about this time of year and the magic I’m still working on.”

Raised Catholic, Kladzyk doesn’t gravitate to the religious iconography or gift-giving aspects of the season. Rather, it’s about “believing in impossible things or believing in mysterious, beyond the realm of the material things in some ways. It’s been more like smelling pine in the air and the winter experience. It has always held this magic for me.”

Unsubtle Magic is Kladzyk’s lifeline. It’s a fearless, imposing, and visceral snapshot of her life in the throes of inevitable tragedy. It’s not the sort of record you’d expect in the Christmas season, but it’s one with unfortunate universal appeal — and one the entire world needs to witness.

Follow Ziemba on Twitter and Instagram for ongoing updates.

Beatrice Deer Weaves Together Traditional and Contemporary Sounds on New LP Shifting

“Sunauvva,” from Beatrice Deer’s latest album, Shifting, is a joyous indie pop song with layered production that gives it a psychedelic feel. “That song, I wanted it to have that sense of happiness and I think that it really came through because it’s a song that I want to dance to,” says Deer by phone from her home in Montreal.

The singer offers a translation of the lyrics, which are sung in Inuktitut, an Inuit language. “If you would have told me back then that I would be happy, I wouldn’t have believed you. If you would have told me that I would forgive, I wouldn’t have believed you,” she shares. The song’s big reveal, though, is that the singer did find happiness. “That’s the meaning of the song. I feel the music really reflects that,” says Deer.

Shifting is the sixth album from Deer, a multiple award-winning singer and songwriter who incorporates Inuit throat singing into songs that she sings in Inuktitut, English and French. It’s an album that was recorded in the midst of the pandemic. “That was kind of a blessing in disguise because it allowed us to stay put in Montreal and focus on producing the album,” says Deer. “In normal circumstances, all the band members are busy and traveling because they’re in other bands.”

<a href="https://beatricedeer.bandcamp.com/album/shifting">SHIFTING by Beatrice Deer</a>

Since touring was off-calendar, though, it allowed for more time to be spent on the production of Shifting. Mark “Bucky” Wheaton, who plays drums for Deer, and guitarist Chris McCarron handled the production duties at their Montreal studio (they’re both longtime members of Lizzie Powell’s Land of Talk project). While some collaborators recorded their parts at home, Deer and a few other other players were able to record in-person, at the studio, in separate sessions. “Normally, we would all be in the studio at the same time,” she says.

The extra time, she adds, gave Wheaton an opportunity to experiment more with the production. “The album is different than our other albums because of that. It gave him a lot of freedom to explore,” she says.

“Sunauvva” is an example of that experimentation. “I write really basic stuff and then the band, Chris and Bucky, were also arranging the songs as we were recording. They came up with the arrangement,” says Deer. “I don’t know what magic Bucky pulled, but he really changed the sound and it just came out that way.”

There was also some experimentation in writing the songs. “Mother,” as it appears on the album, is based on lyrics that Deer wrote in Inuktitut. She asked her friend Kathia Rock to adapt it into French. “It’s not a literal translation,” she says. “It’s a version in French.”

Deer was also pregnant while working on the album. Her baby is now five-and-a-half months old. “I’ve been doing a lot of interviews and rehearsing and I really had no idea that it was going to be this much work with a newborn and releasing an album,” she says with a laugh. “I’ve been juggling a lot of things.”

Deer and her band began playing live again in the fall. Their first performance was at El Mocambo in Toronto last October. “You have a nervousness. The COVID nervousness— am I too close?” she says. “It’s a different kind of stress. But the musicians in my band are so professional and they impress me above and beyond every time.”

Deer continues, “When we rehearse, we’re used to playing with each other, so it’s not any different, but it’s weird playing in front of an audience, after two years of being in the pandemic now.”

On Shifting, Deer and her bandmates seamlessly meld a variety of sounds from the traditional to the contemporary. An example is “Aanngiq,” which is a traditional Inuit song that they reimagined with drone and guitar sounds that swell during the course of the song. “It’s very modern,” says Deer. “Bucky really played around with that one and it turned out great.”

“The traditional version is just a cappella,” Deer explains. “Traditional songs don’t necessarily have a linear storyline. Sometimes, they’re random words and then, all of a sudden, there’s a sentence that means something.”

For Deer, who is of Inuk and Mohawk heritage, traditional Inuit songs and stories are a part of her upbringing. “As soon as Inuit children go to school, they start learning traditional songs. It’s part of school, it’s part of the curriculum,” she says, adding that “Aanngiq” is a song that she learned as a child. “I like to include traditional songs just to keep them alive and promote the language and promote culture.”

Deer notes that storytelling and singing is an important part of Inuit culture and that has been and impact on her work as a singer and songwriter. She says, “It’s my form of continuing that practice.”

Follow Beatrice Deer on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Wrestling with “Sad Girl Indie” and the Limits of Rawness

Earlier this year, in a March listening party following the release of her acclaimed third album Little Oblivions, Julien Baker sat down with NPR columnist and host Jewly Hight and Mackenzie Scott (who performs as Torres). Their conversation revealed an uncomfortable undercurrent of the way today’s booming female indie musicians are framed in popular media: the ever-present discourse of “rawness” and emotion that accompanies critical reception of their work.

“Sure, call it ‘raw’ because it was totally spontaneous,” Torres remarked sarcastically; the term hardly applies to Little Oblivions, Baker’s first release with a full studio band and released after a lengthy reckoning with her creative persona. “It’s just a journal entry. Right.”

Hight describes this “raw” characterization as a misplaced focus on “purging as opposed to craft,” and once identified, it’s easy to see how often that lens is focused on the performers who comprise the loose umbrella of contemporary “sad girl indie.” The term “raw” has not only been used for Phoebe Bridgers’ debut Stranger in the Alps, but also her 2020 release Punisher, which was praised by NME for its sonic experimentation and Stereogum for its “biting, hilarious” lyrics. It’s been bounced around to describe Lucy Dacus’ Home Video, featuring “Thumbs,” a track so layered and personal that Dacus spent years refining and reconsidering it in live show performances that she asked audience members not to record. Last month, she released another version of the song, too, with additional instrumentation.

“Raw” is an odd term for the intimate, candid work of these musicians. It implies a certain undoneness, a lack of artistic focus resulting from ecstatic emotional clarity. It also connotes an ancient, patriarchal idea that art created by women is taken directly from personal experience, rather than the filtration of creative vision and process. Conor Oberst, for instance, a longtime influence and current frequent collaborator of Phoebe Bridgers, has largely escaped seeing his music called “raw” — except when he’s specifically sought it out.

“When people hear ‘sad boy music,’ they don’t assume it’s a heartbreak,” Audrey Neri, who releases music as Cherry Flavor, points out in Marissa Matozzo’s zine Sad Girl Indie: The Genre’s Relevance in 2021. In contrast to “rawness,” men like Oberst, Christian Lee Hutson, and King Krule – who create music on the same emo-folk-indie pop spectrum that “sad girl indie” comprises – are seen as philosophical troubadours, engaging with emotion on an abstract level. Héloïse Adelaïde Letissier, who lays claim as Christine and the Queens to unabashed, public female sadness in “People, I’ve Been Sad,” put it this way in a recent conversation with Crack magazine: “even in art, women are refused the apersonal.”

Linked to “raw,” the term “sad girl indie” occupies a complicated gendered space in contemporary pop culture. It’s been cited as a space of solace by New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino, and claimed as a moniker of feminist community and genre by fans and certain artists. But it’s also been lambasted by Dacus, who doesn’t even consider most of her songs to be sad — as well as Bridgers and Baker, her fellow members of supergroup boygenius, who joined forces after being relentlessly pigeonholed and compared to each other as members of the “sad girl” set. These recent criticisms have led some to argue for abolishing the categorization altogether.

The question of who gets to be in the “sad girl” club has also been raised. Though sad girl indie has been praised for its queer narratives, transfemme musicians like Ezra Furman and Ethel Cain are rarely included in the conversation, to say nothing of the “girl” moniker’s implicit exclusion of nonbinary musicians. Discussions of Black and Indigenous artists like Arlo Parks, FKA Twigs, Black Belt Eagle Scout, and Indigo de Souza are also rare, though de Souza recently offered a compelling perspective on “sad girl indie” hagiography in the Michigan Daily podcast Arts, Interrupted. As TN2 Magazine points out, the women of color who are included under the “sad girl indie” umbrella (typically Mitski, Jay Som, and Japanese Breakfast) have been tokenized and ascribed troublingly-racialized descriptions like “feral,” in addition to the old standby of “raw.”

Of course, effusive emotion has always been a double-edged sword for women in the public eye, dating back to Victorian diagnoses of hystericalism, or even the dismissal of medieval “madwoman” mystic Margery Kempe for her public, psychosexual devotion. Reclaiming this patriarchal notion and finding strength in intense, uncomfortable vulnerability has been a hallmark not only of contemporary “sad girl”-ism, but also the musical forebears who influenced it.

Take Joni Mitchell for instance, who Brandi Carlile recalls dismissing for being “too soft” before listening to Blue at the behest of her wife, which forced her to “reconsider what ‘tough’ is.” Proto-“sad girls” like Mitchell, Joan Armatrading, and those that followed in the ‘90s feminist punk and singer-songwriter scenes used the aesthetics of emotion to construct artistic spaces in a world that refused to listen to them, giving voice to complex narratives ranging from unwanted pregnancy to systemic poverty, environmental anxiety, and queer desire. This is echoed in today’s “sad girls,” whose music reckons explicitly with abuse, addiction, and mental health concerns.

The potential strength of sad girl indie, however, is diluted by the critical presumption that its artists’ songs are “raw,” unprocessed “journal entries,” rather than artistic acts of ownership and cultivation. It’s also vastly diminished by the exclusion of trans and BIPOC artists, for whom the reclamation of the complicated, ruminative emotions so key to the subgenre’s success is even more urgent.

There may be hope for “sad girl indie,” if it can escape the “raw” paradigm and be considered expansively as a springboard for artistic community. At the very least, moving on from “sad girl indie” may offer a chance for something new to rise from its ashes: an evolved understanding of the queer and feminist undercurrents of today’s musical landscape, one that appreciates the complexity and artistry of its performers outright.

Liz Stringer Gets Accustomed To Her First Time Really Feeling

Let’s time warp back to April, back when it was just over a year of lockdowns, restrictions, fear (and loathing), and a sense of exhaustion reigned globally. It was glum, in short. But in the bleakness, Liz Stringer released her sixth album, First Time Really Feeling. On it, she revealed the newfound sobriety that it took until her late 30s to embrace. It is a confessional album, her most honest to date by her own admission in multiple interviews. The country, rockin’ folk vibe sonically is warm and lush and the straight-talking lyrics are unvarnished and untarnished by a haze of alcohol and hangovers. It marked two years since she’d been feted at Woodford Folk Festival in 2019 by fellow performers Catherine MacLellan, Tim Levinson, Jessie Lloyd and Jeff Lang, who paid tribute to her catalogue to date by covering their favourite Stringer songs.

In October the same year, Stringer joined fellow musos Jen Cloher and Mia Dyson for the second time since releasing a 2013 tour EP to record their debut Dyson Stringer Cloher LP. The album was a celebration of some of Melbourne’s finest songwriters, voices and guitar talent, though Stringer had moved to Toronto a year earlier to avoid the party scene she’d become prey to in Melbourne. As she told Conor Lochrie at Tone Deaf: “For me there was a lot of grief in getting sober, against all the amazing stuff. There was a period of having to mourn my life that I had been living for around 20 years. That was a big reason why I left and moved to Canada in 2018 because I couldn’t be around here, it was too triggering. Everywhere I went I remembered getting shitfaced there or hanging out there or going to the party there. It was constant!”

Melbourne has welcomed her back with open arms, though – her album received praise widely in media and she’s got tours booked through the end of 2021 and early 2022. She had been touring with Dyson and Cloher in 2019 until the borders closed and she found herself inadvertently but willingly back home.

Stringer’s sisterhood of songwriters did not begin and end with Dyson and Cloher. In 2008, she’d been invited by the esteemed singer-songwriter Deborah Conway to take part in the Broad Festival project. The Australia-wide tour was a vehicle for Stringer, Laura Jean, Dianna Corcoran and Elana Stone to perform their own work and reinterpret each other’s songs on stage. It has never been lost on her industry cohorts that in Stringer, the strength of her songwriting and performing – travelling the country-roots-folk route – are a phenomenon and have been since Soon, her 2006 debut. That was followed by Pendulum in 2008, Tides of Time in 2010, Warm in the Darkness in 2012, Live at the Yarra in 2014, and All the Bridges in 2016.

It was fortuitous and fitting that Cloher’s Milk! Records (founded with Courtney Barnett) signed Stringer in February, merely two months before she dropped First Time Really Feeling – easily her most raw, real album to date. The album, as much as it is about Melbourne and the weight of addiction on her mind and body, was recorded in Toronto in 2018.

“When I made the record, it took so long to bring out, because I didn’t have anyone,” she told Lochrie. “I was totally on my own, I had no money, I was in Toronto working as a session musician. And I just knew instinctively that either I put this album out well or I just don’t. I thought maybe that’s it, maybe I’m done. Then ironically during the pandemic it came together.”

<a href="https://lizstringer.bandcamp.com/album/first-time-really-feeling">First Time Really Feeling by Liz Stringer</a>

First Time Really Feeling had to arrive when it arrived, which sounds obvious, but really – it is nigh on impossible to dig into the hurt, the grief, the true depths you’ve plunged into as an addict when you are still an addict. Stringer did not make the album all about herself though. As with her prior work, her songs are the collected stories of creatives who have nurtured their craft in ways that are self-destructive, no matter how necessary they feel at the time.

The title track is a percussive, country-inflected ballad in which Stringer’s earthy, plaintive storytelling comes to the front. “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me!” she croons early on. Later: “It feels like I’m always leaving, and love, it ain’t a conscious thing/My body is still reeling/The fear of losing everything/When it’s the first time you’re really feeling.”

On “Metrologist,” she channels the Liz Stringer of old: propping up the bar. “I’ve never seen you here before, have you got time for just one more?” is her opening line to the metrologist she meets. An expert in measurement, her newfound friend prompts her to consider the distance between her bar stool and the table, the weight of alcohol, and inevitably the lyrics get darker and the mood more threatening as she begins to probe deeper into weights and worthiness.

“Can you tell me how long before I disappear? What’s the point look like at which I am no longer here? If my body’s too heavy and my list’s too long, have I failed as a woman ’cause my measurements are wrong?”

Then: “What’s the unit for the negative shit in my head that only drowns when I down a solid litre before bed?”

Her voice is a sturdy, weathered, rootsy creature that is delivered in a defiant, captivating, shamelessly Australian accent. There’s a reckless, almost breathless urgency to her realisations that being a woman musician might not measure up to much that is crushing to listen to, let alone to write – I imagine.

On “Victoria”, she sums up the juxtaposing love-and-fear relationship she maintains with the state she has lived most of her adult life in. “Bluestone lane, brick wall and gutter/Every house I got fucked up in ’til they all looked like any other/Informs it all since I could crawl/You taught me all I know, Victoria, Victoria.”

For the most part, tracks are pared back to rocksy, rootsy guitar, vocals and a steady, complementary drum. If it needed to be classified, it wouldn’t be astray in the Alt-Country box. There’s something of the dramatic, frank delivery of Brandi Carlisle and the deep, soul-moving realness of Linda Perry’s voice in Stringer’s sound.

The thrum of guitars creates waves upon which Stringer lands her serene, resolute ode to “Little Fears, Little Loves.” It’s anthemic, without trumpeting its arrival. “When we see who we are/Every secret, every scar/It’s only that moment that we’ll feel love,” comes the rousing, poignant and subtly sentimental message.

Like love, like addiction, like finding a sense of home, this album is the eye of the storm: the peaceful calm within the noise of living. Find your own solace with Stringer’s voice, so close to you, and really feel it.

Follow Liz Stringer on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

Jess Dye of High Waisted Explores “Shame” with Video Premiere for Solo Project Hello Lightfoot

The complex emotion of shame, often unconscious or ignored, happens when cultural norms are violated or reckoned with. There’s a flipside too – the emotional aftermath of rebelling against societal expectations sometimes feels so good. Shame can be exhilarating and lead to us on the journey of life’s greatest lessons, while acting as a vehicle for the kind of catharsis needed to alchemize powerful music.

Jessica Louise Dye of High Waisted explores these varying reactions on her sophomore single “Shame,” released under the moniker Hello Lightfoot, a solo project that’s been nearly a decade in the making, Originally composed of down-tempo folk songs, Dye sidesteps the DIY surf rock chaos of High Waisted altogether to begin releasing intricate, industrial-tinged baroque pop songs. With a noir twist, the lyrics of “Shame” roll off the tongue like medieval riddles on a surrealist intergalactic quest.

“I used a fun poetry method of blacking out lines in an old book to help start my story for lyrics.” Dye tells Audiofemme. “Being forced to work in a thematic box really drove the direction of the song and inspired a dark subject matter. Soundscape wise, Kyle McCammon [a.k.a. PLUS], who produced this track, was able to bring a huge gritty, driving, pulsating to the instrumentation. I love the contrast from intense bass and guitar to light, eerie samples. I think we were able to embody the complexity of what the emotion shame would sound like in the form of a modern song.”

A glitchy montage of found footage and saturated visuals, the music video, premiering today via Audiofemme, follows Dye in an alternate digital reality. She wanders through an urban dream sequence, bleeding into images of a younger self, distorted by digital audio sound waves. Dye dances on rooftops against the New York skyline, the subway her stage, as she commands the camera clad in a mod checkered jumpsuit. Through flashing images of ultrasound clips, the video embodies the evolution of self, and loss of innocence. The chorus rings out with undertones of melodic anxiety. Fast cuts embody a restless night of sleep, subconscious pressures and repressed emotion bubbling up to surface. Disguising her eyes under thick black sunglasses, Dye remains unaffected and dignified in the motion and stance of a 1980s aerobics junkie. A lady of the night, she embraces her shame, and praises the wisdom granted through her learned experience.

A self-proclaimed extrovert, Dye dives into the deeper complex lyrical meaning behind “Shame.” The song is meant to empower, and take back control over the crippling emotion, a feeling we associate with rejection, isolation, and the inability to experience or feel worthy of love. The song exists as an anthem for moving through the emotion, embracing rather than repressing shame. Society expects one to make a mistake and never repeat it, but we all know inner human programming doesn’t flip off like a light switch. Dye coos and delivers a cunning take on empowerment of our flaws and the wisdom we gain by living recklessly and making what society may deem as “mistakes.”

“Sometimes this shameful thing I’m doing becomes heightened and also enhanced by knowing it’s shameful. Self- awareness triggers pleasure, which is sort of naughty. The chorus of ‘Shame,’ it’s my inner voice saying, “you should not be doing this, but you are, and you enjoy it more because it’s wrong,” says Dye, recognizing that the most erotic love often presents itself within complex and debaucherous interpersonal dynamics.

Written when Dye was in her mid-twenties, “Shame” was not initially heavy or drenched with grit. Instead, Dye leaned into an operatic delivery, an almost religious performance coming to terms with her demons as a vehicle for creation. “It’s almost like you’re in church, surrounded by people praying and praising shame, as if it’s passed down on you. The guitars, the melodies, explain my complex relationship to the feeling,” she says. “Having to revisit these lyrics, and go through journal entries I began to figure out what was actually going on in the undertone of my experience. ‘Muzzle be damned’ is a reference to silencing your own opinions around others as a means to be more amicable. It’s very easy to lose yourself if you’re constantly catering to the likes and dislikes of other people.”

“‘Secure your namesake/Embellish to reclaim/What you choose to ignore will tear you apart’ are my favorite lyrics in the song,” she adds. “I don’t really think I realized how powerful it was until looking back at it ten years later.”

Dye describes the resurrection of these songs, now fully actualized for her current project, as a form of spell casting through writing notes to her future self. “I think in this sense, I was expressing the self awareness of the damage I was potentially doing, living recklessly in my 20s,” she admits. “Drugs are one thing, but hurting people feels like the real crime, whether it’s emotionally or physically. I think I definitely did a lot of emotional damage to people in that period of my life. Essentially a lot of people met a much different version of who I am today.”

“The hope is that one continues to change and grow, but I don’t think everybody does. Some people get stagnant, in a stage of arrested development, stuck at a certain stage,” she continues. “I think that’s why I chose to revisit these songs and reinterpret the meaning in context of the person I’ve grown to become.”

It’s the little things, whether you’re dissecting a relationship, or looking inward, the micro glitches that you choose to ignore, or give permission to stay, that start to add up. Whether it’s excuses for bad behavior, patterns of negative thinking, or self destructive tendencies, often (and hopefully) this programming will one day implode and come to a breaking point. This inevitably becomes a catalyst for self discovery, change, and personal growth. As our culture evolves by holding space for difficult conversations surrounding mental health, shame, and creating new boundaries and formats for interpersonal, romantic, and sexual relationships, songs like “Shame” move the needle forward. Difficult emotions never live in black or white territory – rather a monochromatic spectrum of grey tone.

As a rockstar, lyricist, empath, and community organizer, Dye continues to throw iconic downtown happenings like Home Sweet Home’s Femme Fatale, and create and share new multi-faceted introspective alternative music. As she steps into her next chapter, Dye explains, “I think I’ve made progress by not giving so much power to pleasing people who feel undeserving. That’s the trick – investing in the right relationships. I think without even knowing exactly what I’m ashamed of, the actual music, the guitars, the melody, explain it.”

Follow Hello Lightfoot on Instagram for ongoing updates.

PREMIERE: Jane Honor Captures the Weirdness of COVID Relationships with “Melt”

The pandemic changed what it means to be in a relationship, with many couples facing the decision between basically breaking up or living together. Some people rushed into relationships for companionship, and other relationships that seemed meant to be never materialized. LA-based indie pop artist Jane Honor meditates on the strange turn dating took during COVID times in her latest single – the dark, moody “Melt.”

Honor wrote the song about starting a new relationship in the “apocalyptic world” of early 2021. She remembers being inside a vortex with this person, disconnected from the rest of the world and each other’s worlds as well.

“I don’t think you get the full view of a person when you’re not completely immersed in their life and sharing that, because that’s what relationships are all about — and so without that connection to their life, you just have this fantasy world,” she says. “After COVID, we led very different lifestyles in that we just really didn’t mesh with each other’s friends well, and it just started to fall apart out of isolation.”

The song starts off with heavy guitar and bass sounds and somber rock vocals painting a picture of a hauntingly enclosed space: “Melt into the bed with me/Feel the fluff between our feet/Breathe in noises of the street/Baby, are you scared of me?” These verses escalate into a surprisingly refreshing, breezy chorus, giving off an impression of stepping outside after a long period of isolation: “Yellow light in our eyes/Do you think we’ll be the same?”

Honor writes the skeletons of all her songs on the piano, and for this one, she worked with bassist Jed Elliott of The Struts, who produced the single as well as played on it. Reverb, vocoder, and vocal effects give it a familiar indie rock sound, and they used “really intricate, not-as-pleasing-sounding harmonies to build the tension of the song,” says Honor.

“I knew I wanted it to be a big production, a big song. So I just really went into it, and I didn’t care if it was extra or too much, and I made it really cinematic,” she explains. “Some of the feedback has been that it wasn’t too articulated or enunciated, but that’s the point — that it’s supposed to be kind of wishy-washy and misunderstood and sounding underwater a little bit, because jumping into something so scary during the pandemic kind of feels like you’re drowning.”

Writing this song — and songwriting in general — has been a way for Honor to deal with feelings of fear and hopelessness during the pandemic, and she hopes the song can help normalize these feelings for others experiencing them. “I hope that listeners take away that it’s okay to feel scared in relationships and to feel scared in life,” she says.

Honor is only 20 years old but has been singing and writing music since she was eight, beginning mostly with musical theater and going on to perform in venues like the Apollo Theater in New York. She’s currently a student at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music and has released four other singles beginning last year.

Throughout her body of work, Honor’s deep, rich, full-bodied voice makes her stand out, from the 80s-inspired “There Won’t Be Any Music” — an account of a tumultuous relationship with another musician — to her first single, the percussion-driven “Deer in the Road,” where she sings operatically about moving on after a breakup. “Green” contains similarly theatrical vocals and piano and she sings about retaining the positive memories of a fraught relationship.

Her last single, the folky “Sunset to London,” was co-written with producer Matty Carlock about her first solo trip around Europe. “We pulled from my experience of going to London and added a lot of fictional aspects and storylines that were fun to create,” she remembers.

She’s compiled these songs and others into an album dubbed Spiraling in Central Park, set for release next spring, which deals with mental health, addiction, and “sticking to yourself and who you are,” she says. “I think the overall theme is just growing up, and maybe growing up too fast.”

Inspired by artists like Regina Spektor, Maggie Rogers, and Phoebe Bridges, Honor hopes to get more involved in the production and engineering side of music as well as singing and songwriting as her career develops. When she’s not making music, she explores other art forms like drawing, painting, and writing.

Despite the weirdness of pandemic life for her, she’s also seen it bring some positive things to her relationships and relationships in general. “I think that we don’t take people for granted as much,” she says. “I know I hold my friends a lot closer because there’s always a thought that they could be ripped away from us again for a year and a half or a few years. That’s a really scary thought, so I definitely value my friendships a lot more. People have just been a little bit kinder and more understanding through the whole pandemic.”

Follow Jane Honor on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Bren Joy and Jake Wesley Rogers Step Out of Creative Comfort Zones For Red Bull SoundClash

Nashville is called Music City for a reason. From the country music capital of the world to the home of the famed Fisk Jubilee Singers, Nashville is brimming with creative talent. Red Bull is working to elevate that creativity with SoundClash, its long-running event that sees two artists face off in a musical competition where the winner is decided by the audience. The artists entering the musical octagon must be willing to step outside of their creative comfort zones and adapt to new situations. Willing to step up to that challenge are two of Nashville’s rising stars: Bren Joy and Jake Wesley Rogers, who will take over Marathon Music Works on December 9 at 9pm EST.

Bren Joy, an R&B artist influenced by ’70s Motown and California culture, has credits that include writing “Dynasties & Dystopia” for Netflix’s hit animated series Arcane: League of Legends and opening for Megan Thee Stallion; Jake Wesley Rogers, a former America’s Got Talent contestant turned glam pop artist was featured on the Happiest Season soundtrack and has made fans in Hollywood ranging from Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds to Madonna and Elton John.

“I love companies that really invest in upcoming artists. That’s very important for me,” Joy shares with Audiofemme about what drew him to SoundClash. “I intentionally wrote these songs in a way that I can flip them and interchange them. I want to show people versatility.”

“It’s also a fun creative challenge too because it’s so different than a normal show,” observes Rogers. “I do like a challenge. I do like to be put out of my comfort zone because I think that’s when interesting things happen and this feels like a good way to do that.”

Part of that challenge stems from the fact that the artists are tasked not only with reimagining their own songs, but working together on performing collaborative renditions of each other’s music, along with a cover song.

Rogers says he worked closely with his music director to reinvent his sound for the occasion, adding a barbershop quartet to an a cappella version of one of his songs, with Joy teasing a “big surprise” for his performance of “Insecure,” his collaboration with R&B-soul singer Pink Sweat$, and even took himself by surprise with his new rendition of “Twenties,” the title track of his 2019 EP. He also hints at a special appearance by a female artist whose 2020 album he’s been listening to “nonstop,” teasing that they’re sharing a “beautiful moment onstage.”

”My music’s very special to me and it’s very close to my heart, so I think it’s going to be good for me hearing different versions of my music that I write. I’m very intrigued and I’m very excited for that. It’s a very unique opportunity,” Joy expresses, adding, “there’s so many surprises.”

As a Nashville native, this opportunity is especially meaningful for Joy, who asserts that he’s going to stick to his roots and “follow my gut” in presenting his music as an example of the diverse talent born and bred in Music City. “I’m so stoked for the opportunity to do something special in my city. Nashville’s very important to me and live music is a very special part of the city’s culture and I think whenever we can take live music and go a step further and really push the envelope and push the norm, that’s what I want to do,” he asserts. “It means a lot being able to do something like this that’s very original that I don’t know if I’d get another chance to do.”

Meanwhile, Rogers plans to take what he’s learned performing other live shows, going back to his theatre days growing up in Missouri and singing in a rock band in church. There, he learned about the value of transitions in maintaining the natural flow of the songs, skills he intends on channeling on the SoundClash stage. “You have to serve the moment and the live environment, what is going to serve this show and what is going to sound the best, feel the best, look the best,” Rogers describes of his approach, hinting that he’s had several new costumes made for the show, draped in sparkles and sequins. “I feel the most me when I’m performing. There is something so different about performing live when it’s a very intimate connection with people and it feels so cathartic.”

And while they’re poised to be competitors, Joy and Rogers are approaching it with a healthy mindset. Having met as students at Belmont University in Nashville, the two artists were already familiar with each other’s music coming into the competition, offering nothing but praise for one another’s gifts.

“Our styles are quite different, but I think we’re both inspired by each other, so that’s helpful,” Rogers laughs, citing Joy as a “sweetheart” and “stupid talented.” He adds, “It’s nice to talk to someone that gets it and understands how fun and wild this career is.”

For Joy, SoundClash has allowed him to connect with an artist whose style is vastly different from his own, the common ground allowing them to build a unique sense of trust needed to perform in such an event. “I love Jake, I love his music, and I think what’s important that people don’t realize in a SoundClash is trust. These songs are very vulnerable and special to me, so I have to really trust the other artist. I trust Jake to do my songs justice and also to be sensitive to the topics,” Joy remarks, calling Rogers “visually stunning.” “It’s definitely been interesting trying to keep the same motive and intention that Jake had in the song and be respectful, but also give it different legs. It’s been really cool.”

Part of building that trust is understanding who one another is as an artist. Rogers, who identifies as gender-fluid, is intentional about telling his story in a genuine way. Deeply observant, Rogers harbors a unique ability to capture the “friction of life,” pointing to the song “Pluto” as a metaphor for how many people feel like outsiders, and our lifelong quest to find love.

“Anytime anyone is able to be themselves, it inspires somebody else to be themselves, and that’s really important to me. My mission as an artist is to find freedom in myself and talk about it and hopefully some other people find it too,” says Rogers.

As for Joy, he reveals that 2020 allowed him to view life through a new lens, learning more about who he is at the core and leaning into it, that personal growth shining through “fully” in his music. “I think over the past year, I’ve fell so much deeper in love with my culture and my background and I have stood up for things in the past that I had been quiet about. I think that I’ve learned to be a badass, give no fucks,” he professes. “I feel like that’s where I really had this disconnect with my art in the past; I was coming from a very insecure place. I feel like now I’ve grown in my art and grown to love what I do and to stop caring so much about what people are going to think or what’s going to happen and really trust in my taste and the taste of the people that listen to my music. I feel like I’ve grown up. I’m a little more open, everything’s a little more queer, everything’s a little more cool. I feel like I am very zen at the moment.”

While the two singers have differing perspectives on how they want the audience to perceive them, the common thread is to feel a sense of connection and community. Rogers hopes fans feel the wonder of escapism in his presentation, while Joy encourages people see the vast range his music has to offer. “I hope they take away my versatility. I think versatility is something that’s very important to me and I have grown so much. I think we all have grown over the past year, we’ve all learned a lot, we’ve all been educated, so I am very excited for people to hopefully take away not only my versatility, but my ability to write songs,” Joy declares.

“I hope that they forget about their life for a minute and forget about their brain. Music is one of the most magical things in this world and I hope that’s a moment. I hope it’s cathartic. I hope it’s surprising,” Rogers reflects with a smile. “I hope they see themselves in me.”

Follow Jake Wesley Rogers on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook , and Bren Joy on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook for ongoing updates.

Composer Uèle Lamore Fans the Flames of Mass Appeal with “Breathe” Video

On her full-length debut LOOM, Franco-American producer/composer Uèle Lamore tells a story that is actually as old as time; in eleven tracks, she charts a loose history of the primordial beginnings of life on Earth. Echoey percussion, enigmatic synth and spidery guitar kick things off on previous single “The Dark,” while spoken word by Parisian poet Gracy Hopkins narrates the potential evolution of humanity over aching strings on “The First Tree.” While the album, set for a January 28th release via experimental Sony Music imprint XXIM Records, is certainly cinematic, it’s never too dense or arcane.

“I just wanted to put together a record that I thought would be super fun to play live with an electro-rock band, with guitars and bass. And also I thought that it would be good to try to make a record that everybody understands but offers something different to everybody,” Lamore tells Audiofemme. “If you come from hip hop there are things you understand, but you discover some elements that come more from electronic; if you prefer neoclassical or ambient there are some tracks you’re going to like and I’m going to show you stuff that comes from rock. I wanted to craft sounds that would be interesting but accessible and enjoyable for most people. It’s a record for people that like music, basically.”

In fact, Lamore’s next single, “Breathe,” was directly inspired by skateboarding and indie pop icons like Phoenix and Air. “I was near a skate spot in Paris, doing some field recording – I do my own field recordings to insert into tracks,” Lamore says. “When I was recording them I was like, man, it would be so cool to do this track with guitars and everything. I was really thinking about Phoenix; I really wanted to be super ‘French touch’ about it. I only had the backbone of the track and I composed it thinking about that and putting the sounds of the skaters inside it. I just wanted something really fun and upbeat to contrast with other tracks on the record.”

The video, directed by Yannick Demaison and Alexis Magand of Biscuit Productions, takes these seeds of inspiration and sets fire to them – literally. Premiering today via Audiofemme, the black and white clip compiles stirring images of a girl gang of skaters (played by Camille Fleurence, Océane Pasquet, Joana Dumoulin, Tiffaine Voisin, Emmy Jardoux, and Elissa Karami) kick-flipping across a skatepark with their decks consumed by flames.

Lamore says she used to skate herself, but another hobby took precedence: music. Picking up an acoustic when she was only nine, she quickly moved on to electric guitar and then, via YouTube videos and how-to magazines, began teaching herself production techniques and how to make beats in middle and high school. She left France to study guitar at Musicians Institute in Los Angeles, then earned a degree in composition and conducting from Berklee College of Music in 2016, and since 2019 has been an associate conductor, orchestrator and arranger with the London Contemporary Orchestra. Her debut EP TRACKS, released in 2020, was inspired by train travel across Europe and Japan, some of the songs even named for specific locations, all of them imbued with a sense of romance and movement.

Forward momentum is intrinsic to the way Lamore builds her compositions. “I need to know where the song is going, from Point A to Point Z. So I sketch out the whole melody from the beginning to the end basically,” she says of the process. “Then I pay a lot of attention to sound design – that’s an aspect that’s often overlooked in production, all these little sounds that don’t have any importance but really add a universe to your song.” That’s where her field recordings – of skaters, birds, church bells, crowds, and more – come into play, adding richness and context into each of the songs.

With such dramatic world-building, it’s not surprising that Lamore also composes music for film (she just finished working on the soundtrack for a forthcoming British movie about young cannibal women with discerning tastes). But whether she’s composing for films or for her own albums, Lamore says she always has a visual in mind.

“One of the most vivid memories that I have, that made me want to do music, is that I was lucky to experience MTV when they still played a lot of these crazy music videos in the 2000s, where the budget was probably insane, with helicopters and real stories happening,” she explains. “That’s how I digested music at first, so I think that for me it has always been connected with the idea of telling a story and the very visual aspects of that, because I discovered music through music videos. For me, it’s super important to tell a story, and try to paint something, with sound. I don’t think I can do it any other way basically – it’s kind of hard for me to do super abstract stuff.”

Still, LOOM started out with an entirely different concept behind it, and a lofty one at that. Upon returning to Europe after college, Lamore said she had time on her hands and wanted to make a succession of “super nerdy” songs about “complex stuff… ecosystems and molecules and bacterias.” There was no plan to release it as an album, really. In the meantime, she made connections and collaborated with musicians like Moor Mother, Alfa Mist, Max Cooper, Etienne Daho, Silly Boy Blue, Drum & Lace, Yan Wagner, and more. But after signing her record deal, she revisited those demos.

“I was like, waaaahhh man, I hate this! It sucks so bad!” she recalls with a laugh. Lamore didn’t despair or start from scratch; she began re-working the material track by track without trying to communicate the scientific narrative, but kept things in the same order for continuity’s sake.

“The title of each track became kind of like a metaphor. ‘The Dark’ can be something that happened in your life and ‘Breathe’ can be a kind of feeling that you can have. They all become mirrors that everybody can relate to,” Lamore explains. “I purposefully didn’t want to give a true symbolic [meaning] to everything because I want it to become everybody’s personal object and interpret it the way they want.”

To make the songs even more accessible, Lamore took a cue from landmark 1998 Massive Attack album Mezzanine, which featured guest vocalists Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins, Horace Andy, and Sarah Jay. “There needed to be vocal tracks [on LOOM] because it’s the easiest way for most people to digest music,” she says simply. “I had this list of people that I knew from different projects or from word of mouth or I had seen them perform live, and I always kept in the beck of my mind that I would love to do something with them.” Besides Hopkins, these include the honeyed vocals of UK singer Cherise on hypnotic cut “Pollen,” a wistful Ana Benabdelkarim (a.k.a. Silly Boy Blue) on atmospheric album closer “Warmblood,” and her own manipulated vocal on “Currents.”

With the band she’s assembled, Lamore should have no trouble translating these kinetic, mesmerizing tracks on tour, even if they have to get creative with vocal features and samples. It’s how she originally envisioned sharing them, after all. Japanese video and performance artist Akiko Nakayama, who directed “The Dark” video, has created visuals for the show.

While LOOM positions Uèle Lamore as a genre-defying producer well worth keeping an eye on, she still has humbling moments. Recently, she attempted to show a young skateboarder some of her old tricks. “I had forgotten that I hadn’t skated in like ten years right? So I go, ‘Yeah kiddo, this is how you do this, let me show you,’ and I took his board… and I just like completely fall,” she laughs. “Him and his little friends started making fun of me and my friends. My ego just fell in the toilet.”

Follow Uèle Lamore on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

Premiere: Mimi Oz Goes Under the Microscope In “Hate” Video

Mimi Oz wrote her song “Hate” as a way to deal with conflicting feelings of being an outsider. The Toronto-based singer-songwriter thrives on “being alone,” she says, as a “highly creative” person. With a strong support system, she adds, “I can’t say that loneliness is a regular feeling that I experience.” And yet, when she was living in New York City from 2018-19, pangs of loneliness continuously ripped right through her psyche, inspiring her to write “Hate.” A visual for the track, directed by Dylan Mars Greenberg, premieres today via Audiofemme.

“I was hit hard by a lot of things that were adding up, one of them being that it didn’t matter where I went, I just kind of felt like people didn’t like me,” she tells Audiofemme. “That was a hard truth that wore on my mental health. Not fitting into my community was also part of it, and that was every area of NY that I lived in.”

The song appears on Oz’s third studio record, Growing Pains, released October 22. “All my life, I tried to live outside the hate,” she huffs in almost a dream state, then caterwauls, “I see the hate you feel for me,” as electric guitar intensifies into a rolling boil. Oz reaches her hand through space and time to appeal to our collective sadness and the pressures of modern living and dying. With drums played by Miles Gibbons and guitar from David Celia, Oz conjures up a “perfect hollow space where you can feel the intensity of the lyrics, and everything hits hard and together and pulls you along. There is also a sense of violence, and I wanted to somehow explore that in the video but it didn’t end up turning out that way.”

Instead, the accompanying visual plants Oz smack dab in the middle of a bustling NYC subway. Trains whizz by, and preoccupied people in suits shuffle off to their 9-to-5, desperation hanging in the background like gnawed-up cork board. Within this setting, Oz and Greenberg accentuate the heavy sorrow woven into everyday existence. “It’s true millions of people feel that sadness. I’ve seen a number of people pushed off the edge in New York, mentally,” says Oz. “Sharing my experience and writing music that is relevant is key. If I was living without passion or purpose, that would be a cause for concern.”

Reality-rooted imagery mingles with absurdism like floating heads and oversized eyeballs, a creative idea Greenberg brought to the table to illustrate “the world inside my mind and the real world, the physical world,” Oz explains. “I’m isolated and alone, telling the story with menacing floating heads above me. I think the CGI helps the viewer really clue into the storyline and focus on the lyrics more.”

“Dylan has this really renegade, hands-on approach to film-making that I admire,” she continues. “The original artwork I released for this single was a watercolor that I had painted of a black sheep with a psychedelic coat of fur. I recreated this by tying together bright pieces of scrap fabric into a long boa that I wore across my neck. The character is someone that people don’t understand, but are fascinated with.”

While her journey to acceptance “probably doesn’t matter,” Oz says frankly, the experiences that lead her to write “Hate” have at least given her some perspective. “Life is confusing, so just try to be a good person,” she says. “I think now I care less, and also try to have as much compassion as I can, while also taking care of myself.”

Follow Mimi Oz on Instagram for ongoing updates.

GrandAce Reflects on Midwest Living with “No Beaches in Ohio” Video

GrandAce takes the good with the bad while soaking up some sun for his new video, “No Beaches in Ohio.” With co-director Ciara Cruder, the Cincinnati MC traveled to the beaches at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park in Michigan for the visual, which also features shots of the song’s Australia-based producer, Inigo Magno.

“He sent the beat to me and I did what I always do: I added my own touches,” GrandAce tells Audiofemme. “It really was an active collaboration because we were talking about different ideas, switching out baselines, and doing stuff like that.”

“No Beaches in Ohio” was GrandAce’s first time working with Magno, and since the single was such a collaborative effort, it was important for him to include the producer in the song’s visual.

“It’s not something I could have made on my own because one, I don’t play guitar, and two, that type of sound isn’t where my head is at,” he adds. “I love working with people who bring their own complete sound like that, and then I was able to come in and add some sparkle. It’s literally our song, because I would’ve approached it completely differently on my own and it wouldn’t have happened without him on there.”

The sing-song-y track, underscored by synths and guitar, finds GrandAce reflecting on his Ohio dwellings, fighting against the comforts of nostalgia, and holding onto his passions.

“There was a lot of reflection on what it’s like living in the Midwest, and Ohio specifically. Depending on how you’re doing in life, Ohio can be a very bleak place,” he explains. “The winters are hard, the skies are grey. It’s a very melancholy state, which is why everybody likes to rag on it. But because everybody likes to rag on it, it’s actually becoming one of the more popular states to mention.”

GrandAce is quick to point out that there are “certain beauties” to living in Ohio, too. “Things are not as expensive as they could be, which means you can stretch your dollar to more experiences. Partially growing up in Ohio, I have a lot of really fond memories here – hanging out with friends, throwing art shows, going to malls, typical stuff,” he says. But with the simple pleasures comes a caveat: “Nostalgia is the enemy,” GrandAce sings on the track.

“There are beautiful things in the midst of such a bland place, but it’s very easy to get stuck here. It’s very easy to be complacent when you’re in a place like Ohio,” he elaborates. “I’ve met a lot of very cool, talented people who, when I met them, had very big dreams. But life can kind of beat you down, and years later they haven’t thought about what they love or their passions. Some people forget. That’s kind of what I’m trying to avoid because it’s so easy to slip into that mode, and that’s really what the song is about.”

Living by example, GrandAce has had a productive year, releasing a collaborative two-pack with Gladwell, Pad Thai. He also put out his French Vanilla EP and loosies “Granite Countertops” and “Sufficiency,” and has another single, video, and two full projects coming out early next year. “The projects are finished now, but I keep adding to them and tweaking them,” he says. “What they are now might not be what they are later.”

For now, “No Beaches in Ohio” is a great reminder to keep at it, no matter where you are in life. “The song is appreciating the good with the bad and reflecting,” GrandAce says, “but also being aware that reflecting too much can be a bad thing.”

Follow GrandAce on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Lady Lash Pushes Boundaries with Power of the Feminine Divine on Spiritual Misfit LP

As Lady Lash, South Australian artist Crystal Clyne (née Mastosavvas) translates elements of hip hop, R&B, soul, and electro into a language all her own. On her fifth album, Spiritual Misfit (out November 22 via Heavy Machinery Records), she pushes back on the expectations on her as a woman, a mother, and an artist; the sonic mood of the album is a distinct shift from her primarily beats-driven, hip hop roots. “This album, I feel, was in the frequencies of my alien brain, coming from hip hop to this completely other sound. I feel it’s a journey through light and dark worlds, exploring who you are outside of society’s boxes, not being afraid to change and evolve,” she tells Audiofemme.

When she started writing the album, she recalls thinking, “There’s something happening here;” that was nearly two years ago. “I felt like I was moving into this different musical frequency in my brain, and I had to step away from hip hop for a bit. The first song that came out… was ‘Love My Darkness,’ which began as a straight guitar track, very simple.”

Last year, Clyne received funding and creative support from the Victorian Government and City of Melbourne’s joint initiative, Flash Forward, allowing her to transition the songs she’d been working on into an album. Her co-producers, composer and artist Miles Brown and Wiradjuri studio engineer/experimental interdisciplinary artist Naretha Williams, were supportive of Clyne’s intuition that “Love My Darkness” needed more “edge” and more feeling. Brown added the synths and bass to flesh it out, and the result is a full-bodied, immersive tour de force.

The song was the first of nine tracks that pay a creative homage to her psychological and spiritual hurting and healing over the past few years. “Through my life I’ve been in domestic violence relationships and the trauma that sits deep within your liver, your heart, your soul, it was a massive journey for me,” she reveals, now having overcome problematic drinking habits and broken free of damaging relationships. “I’d also given birth to my third child and I felt a massive shift, a massive rebirth and I wanted to be more poetic in the lyrical content, but also understanding myself, because it is therapy when I write. It’s like a diary of my life.”

<a href="https://mcladylash.bandcamp.com/album/spiritual-misfit">Spiritual Misfit by Lady Lash</a>

Lady Lash is no stranger to establishing her own identity through making sense of various languages of speech, song and family. She spent her teenage years on Koonibba mission in South Australia with her family, of both Greek and Indigenous Kokatha descent. These two ancient cultures have at least one obvious cultural commonality: a love for the ocean and an appreciation of it as both a source of life and beauty. Her earliest memories are of playing with her brothers and sisters on her dad’s boat.

Her albums have harked back to the ocean and family, not the least in their titles. Her debut EP Pearl came out in May 2010, followed by Crystal Mercy: The Fisherman’s Daughter in 2013. It honoured her father, whose family migrated from the Greek villages of Siana and Kritinia on the island of Rhodes. Her grandfather, Bapoul George Clyne, was born in Ceduna in South Australia, later becoming a fisherman. Samuel, his son, met and married Theresa Ware, and Crystal is the first of their six children.

It was a far cry from the seaside coast of Adelaide to Melbourne, where she moved in 2009. The hip hop scene in this city is strong and she was a fresh talent, energised and intelligent. When she dropped Pearl in 2010, it drew critical acclaim. She was nominated for a Deadly Award, won Redfern Records‘ “Female of the Year” award, and was invited to perform at the One Movement Festival in Perth. When she released her debut LP, the awards kept coming: a VIPA (Victorian Indigenous Performer Awards) for Most Promising Act of 2013 and a nomination for “Best Indigenous Act” at The Age Music Victoria Awards of 2016.

The references to the natural world made way for the cosmic with second album Milky Way in 2015. From the oceanic to the interplanetary, she then took a 180 degree spin and came plummeting back into her own psyche for Therapy Tapes in 2018, exploring themes of transporting her consciousness beyond her physical body to take in the world from a far-distant view, whether from beyond the Earth or looking back into today from a day centuries in the future.

On it, she had fully embraced a jazzy boom-bap vibe. It’s a flowing, melodic adventure that sounds like a pared back Lauryn Hill on tracks like “Self Love,” in which she depicts the crystals on her windowsill, the dreamcatcher nearby as she meditates. “Organic Domes” reveals her struggle with loneliness, being in a place with “no friends,” and trying to imagine an escape through the sensation of flying.

Her focus is more earthy and introspective on Spiritual Misfit, where Clyne has morphed her sound palette again to introduce synth-pop, sultry beats, and echoey, almost New Age ambient soundscapes. She is not the fierce MC on The Fisherman’s Daughter. She is a dramatic pop singer – sounding like the lovechild of Adele and Florence Welch on tracks like “Love My Darkness.”

On “Mother’s Cries,” Clyne channels her newfound sensation of being both a mother and a grandmother (her daughter gave birth last year). On the track, fellow artist and friend Katarina Stevens plays the bağlama, a stringed instrument traditionally used in classical Ottoman and Turkish folk music. It was at the peak of Clyne’s darkest period during COVID that circumstances conspired to bring the two women together.

“She’s another Greek sister and we connected through Facebook last year. I’d just separated from my husband of many years during COVID and I was in such a dark place,” she recalls. Stevens messaged her in response to Clyne’s post about suffering and feeling alone. “After that, things evolved to understanding that she’s a Greek artist playing these amazing instruments.” Once the sketch of “Mother’s Cries” had formed, Clyne sent over the skeleton and Stevens laid her bağlama over it.

“As I was writing it, I wanted to write about a woman understanding her ancient voice: a witch, a goddess, an empress. I wanted the sound to be big and to use all my vocals to project it out and let people feel the strength of a goddess that sings to the universe, that sings to Mother Earth,” Lady Lash explains. “Adding the bağlama, I felt the Greek side of me and the Aboriginal side of me coming together and using that in a powerful way.”

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Aisha Badru Finds Transcendence on the Ground on The Way Back Home EP

Spiritual growth is often framed in terms of ascension: rising up above the seemingly trivial matters of the world, communing with other dimensions. Yet for many, true enlightenment occurs when one is able to be on the ground, in the present, connected to the people around them. It’s the latter achievement that Orlando, Florida-based indie-folk singer-songwriter Aisha Badru has come to value over the years and celebrates with her latest EP The Way Back Home, out December 3 via Nettwerk.

Badru spent the bulk of her 20s traveling through Bali, India, and other spiritual destinations. “I’m someone who is very flighty; I’ve always felt like I have to travel to this place or that place to find myself and find the meaning of life,” she says. “I was really just searching for something better than what I felt my life was, but I realized when I was traveling that that wasn’t the answer — that the meaning of life was something that was with me, not necessarily something external that I have to go on a voyage to find.”

As she came to understand the value of “grounding and sinking my roots into a life of stability and consistency and committing,” Badru did a 180: last year, she bought a home with her partner, with whom she has twins. “That feeling something was missing helped me get centered and really ask ‘What am I really looking for?’ and I think what I was looking for was a sense of security, which was ironic because what I was doing was insecure, like traveling. I was trying to find somewhere I really belonged.”

The notion of learning to stay in one place is perhaps one many nowadays can relate to. Even as restrictions lift, we’ve been forced to find roots, sometimes in places where we didn’t plan to plant them. So, Badru’s single “Rooted” may be encouraging to those who think they’re stuck but could actually be building a foundation. Against gentle guitar strumming, twinkly chimes, and hopeful synths, she softly sings: “Plant your feet upon the earth/Know your value, know your worth/Take a breath that’s long and deep/You’re carried by the ground beneath.”

The folky single “The Way Back Home” speaks to similar themes of building a home and staying there, and also holding the space for those who aren’t as grounded: “Go ahead and see what you need to see/I can only hope that you think of me/And when your feet are tired and swollen/Follow the sound of this melody,” she sings against soothing acoustic guitar, bass, and drums. Similar to her 2019 single “Water,” the song speaks to the ability to find peace and acceptance within yourself when the world around you is chaotic and unpredictable.

Another single off the EP, “Rebirth,” uses mellifluous spoken word poetry against piano and drums to describe the painful process of personal transformation and the larger evolution of humanity, with inspiring and thought-provoking lines like “What if God is here undercover hidden within each other?”

“Graves,” the first song on the EP, has a darker sound, with dramatic violin and cello telling a story about the parts of ourselves we “bury” because they’re too painful to look at. On the atmospheric “Home,” she sings about how the people we love give us a feeling of stability, and on “Worthwhile,” she describes navigating COVID times against simple piano: “Trust that the dark days are gonna end/First the old has to fall for something new to ascend.”

All in all, the EP is about “understanding the deeper meaning of the things that happen to us in our lives and looking at them from a perspective that helps us move forward in a productive way, as opposed to getting caught up in the bad things in life,” says Badru. “It’s about really interpreting these things from a different lens so we can move forward and feel alive.”

Badru released her first song, “Waiting Around,” in 2016, and after being picked up and used in a Volkswagen commercial, it now has over 40,000,000 Spotify streams. She released her first full-length album, Pendulum, in 2018, and recently performed at The Big Quiet with Deepak Chopra in Brooklyn, which helped her understand the impact she hopes to make on the world. “I want to serve the role to people that Deepak serves for the people that he touches,” she says. “Going back to my first EP, it was a lot of me just dumping out my suffering and my feelings and my sadness. Now [I’m] reaching this point of: How can I be someone that can help someone feel better, help someone feel more secure in their experience?”

The Way Back Home marks a big step in that direction, as she inspires listeners to value people and connection as they define home for themselves — and to keep a steady, peaceful center no matter where their current home is or what’s going on around them.

Follow Aisha Badru on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

Casper Skulls Build Monument to Memory on Sophomore LP Knows No Kindness

When Casper Skulls vocalist/guitarist Melanie St-Pierre was eight years old, she witnessed a murder. Playing outdoors with childhood pals, a neighbor shot her best friend’s father seemingly unprompted. St-Pierre testified at the trial, then buried the memory deep. On her band’s latest record, Knows No Kindness (released November 12 via Next Door Records), she excavates this and other moments – some bitter, some sweet – with a poet’s precision, unearthing truths about the human condition in the process.

“Witness,” for instance – the song that deals with the murder – doesn’t recount the grisly details of what she saw that day. Rather, it reframes the trauma as moment in time where a young girl fought for and found justice, resonating with strength while, understandably, honoring the innocence that was lost. “When I was young/I never knew what death was/Or that I could live next to it,” St-Pierre sings in the last verse. “Loving someone and then they’re gone/What have you done?” It’s a powerful statement about believing children, and young girls especially, and how traumatic events can reverberate through our lives to emerge in unexpected ways.

Released November 12, Knows No Kindness takes its title from Georgia O’Keefe’s description of the desert’s formidable beauty, but also the process with which she rendered overlooked objects in exacting detail. St-Pierre does the same with fleeting and forgotten echoes in her life’s history, turning them over and over until her songs, like O’Keefe’s paintings, take their larger-than-life shapes. And the rest of Casper Skulls – guitarist Neil Bednis, drummer Aurora Bangarth, and bassist Fraser McClean – help bring out each detail with compositions just as painstakingly rendered, recorded across four different Toronto-area studios.

<a href="https://casperskulls.bandcamp.com/album/knows-no-kindness">Knows No Kindness by Casper Skulls</a>

“We worked with so many different engineers on this record… We knew what we wanted for it. We self-produced it, but the engineers that we worked with really helped us get it to where it needed to be and it was a little bit meticulous,” says St-Pierre. “We worked very hard on this record. Down to the arrangements and everything – we all had helping hands, we all made contributions. It was really nice to work with some local people in Toronto that helped us, that understood our vision, and understood what we were going for and understood the songs.”

That’s vastly different from how they approached debut LP Mercy Works, whose lead single “Lingua Franca” was nomimated for a SOCAN Songwriting Prize in 2018. A noisier affair that earned them supporting slots for Thurston Moore, Julie Ruin, PUP, Hop Along, Speedy Ortiz, and Charly Bliss among others, the attention may have “spooked” St-Pierre just a bit, she says, though she notes that her bandmates help keep her grounded. Almost immediately after the release of Mercy Works, the songs that would form Knows No Kindness began to pour out.

“Actually, we’ve been trying to get to this record for a while. We started off being a bit of a louder band in the beginning – [Neil and I] were just kind of fooling around in a basement with some pals and ‘King of Gold‘ happened, and it’s just like, [your first song] ends up being the trajectory of your band,” St-Pierre says of the decidedly post-punk inflected track, on which Bednis takes lead vocal. “That’s what was coming out at the time. But that was such a long time ago. That was six years ago! And just as you grow and change, you get better at writing, you get more mature. And I think for me anyways, this is the record where I really do feel like I have improved so much with songwriting and this is the statement of that, I guess. I’m a musician, I really feel it, it feels nice.”

“This album is almost like a fresh start in a way,” says Bangarth, who joined the band as Knows No Kindness was taking shape, bringing both classical training and years of studio drumming to provide the band’s heartbeat. “There’s still a lot of sonic similarities – Neil’s guitar tone is a defining characteristic of the band. It’s still there. But it does kind of feel almost like a fresh start in a way because there’s such a different take on things.”

“I feel like we never do songwriting the same way each time. We change our sound a lot… and that’s great cause it’s a growing process, you’re learning how to write, you’re learning how to put away things that don’t serve you anymore, and you’re picking up new things,” St-Pierre confirms. “This new record was just what was serving me at the time aesthetically. I was homesick a lot, thinking a lot about Massey, which was a town that my grandma grew up in; I spent a lot of time there as a child. And [my hometown] Sudbury as well. Those are just the things that organically came out. I think it made things a little bit more melancholy but in a really nice sort of way that we could still keep it very much Casper Skulls.”

“Tommy” was the song that kickstarted things, and it opens the album with resonant piano notes. St-Pierre and Bednis had noticed that a friendly man in their neighborhood was leaving items behind in the bus shelter for others to take. “They were things that were really useful, like bike helmets or jams, CDs, things to make people happy, and they would be gone by the end of the day,” St-Pierre recalls. She began to wonder about his interior life, about the unknowable realities of everyone we encounter. “I’ll never understand that part of me that is tied to you,” she sings as the band builds up a lush sonic palette.

“The second verse on ‘Tommy’ is my favorite thing on the whole album,” Bangarth says. “Just all of those layers and pieces together… I just really love it. It’s dense but everything has its place and I’m just really proud of how that turned out.”

Like her mysterious neighbor leaving useful items behind for others, St-Pierre leaves breadcrumbs across Knows No Kindness for listeners to follow. “Honestly it really did create these helping hands to like hold up my childhood and examine these things, and it started with ‘Tommy,'” she says. On “Thesis,” she pays tribute to an English teacher who encouraged her scattered prose – and kept St-Pierre writing. But it also acts as a blueprint for the rest of the record. “The first few lines of it literally talk about ‘Witness,’ the next few lines talk about ‘Knows No Kindness,’ the next few lines talk about ‘Stay the Same’ – it’s all in there,” St-Pierre points out. “The last lines are about me being who I am. I love winter; I think that it has something really beautiful in it and for me. It reminds me of my femininity, it’s what makes me feel good and creative.”

While St-Pierre cites “Ouija” as the best song she’s ever written, Bangarth points to “Rose of Jericho” as a personal favorite. It’s named for a type of tumbleweed that goes dormant and appears dead, but dramatically revives when in contact with water. “The way that song grows, it starts off completely different but it feels natural. I think that song is a good representation of where we are now, and remember, this is where we were.”

The personal touches extend to the album’s artwork too, which St-Pierre designed (she’s also a visual artist who has directed the bulk of the band’s visual aesthetic). The 1960 photograph depicts Massey, Ontario townsfolk (including St-Pierre’s grandmother, Velma) protesting the A.E.C.L in an attempt to stop the now-defunct nuclear waste company from creating a runoff where the Spanish and Sables Rivers meet, in an area known as The Mouth Park. They were successful in running the company out of town, and St-Pierre spent her childhood swimming in the park, referenced in an album track called, appropriately, “The Mouth,” which exhibits the quiet/loud dynamics that make Knows No Kindness such a revelation to listen to. “The Mouth” ranks among Mercy Works track “Colour of the Outside” as one of the band’s favorite to play live. “I love being able to do some loud things. I love to rock out. If we couldn’t do that live anymore, I’d be sad.” St-Pierre says. “I like being able to get really quiet and little and then get really loud. I think that there’s such a space for both.”

Though Casper Skulls had to take a break from touring amid the pandemic, they’d already been working out most of the songs on Knows No Kindness on stage. “It’s almost like the album was written in two phases,” explains Bangarth. “We got all the sounds written for being tour-ready first, and then just by touring them a ton, we got really comfortable on them. Then there was kind of this second process of arranging them for the album. By that point we’d already become super familiar with them, and had been tweaking them along the way anyway.” All but one of the recording sessions took place before lockdown in March of 2020; that last session got pushed back to July. Since then, they’ve been working on new stuff – and will likely go in a completely new direction once more.

“I don’t think one person has all the answers for songs – maybe some people do if they’re like, Bob Dylan. But I personally really love collaboration. I think it’s a really beautiful thing. It’s nice to bring people into the story, into the fold and just have these ideas bouncing around and these exciting moments. I live for that,” says St-Pierre. “I think our next record I just want to make some really nice striking songs and collaborations and let things kind of breathe a bit more, and just see how that works out.”

After making such a vulnerable record, St-Pierre definitely needs the emotional respite. Writing Knows No Kindness was, at times, “pretty unbearable,” she says. “We would jam and you would be able to tell I’d be kind of getting weird, crying, or something. But then eventually it started to be better. When you bring them to jam and start working on them, you start seeing these songs taking all these different shapes. It becomes this other thing and you can detach a little bit. Then when you start playing them live, you’re the one singing, it comes back again, but then when you do it over and over and over again for a tour, you’re like, okay I got this, I’m not gonna break.”

“But there are still moments,” she adds. “Say I’m playing live and it’s getting real emotional, we’re playing really well and I’m really feeling it, I’ll cry during a set. It’ll happen. And I’ll play it off a little, but you can hear the vulnerability in my voice or something, you can tell. People will come up to me after we play and be like, I don’t know what that song was about but it made me really reflect on something that happened to me. I’ve had a lot of those [comments], like this song made me think this, and thank you for that and that is a huge accomplishment. That’s why we do this.”

This is the very fiber of Knows No Kindness, and each song is constructed in service to building up those moments and memories. It’s the kind of album you can only write once, though; while there are glimmers of Casper Skulls’ noisy past, no song here feels interchangeable with any on their debut.

“I really enjoyed like honing in on all these things but they’re very much for this,” St-Pierre says. “There’s a time and a place for each record, I think, and this one is just, this is its time and place. I wouldn’t have put ‘Witness’ on Mercy Works and I might not put it on the next record. It exists in this universe that Knows No Kindness exists in.”

Follow Casper Skulls on Instagram for ongoing updates.

PREMIERE: Wild Heart Club Embraces the Art of Breaking in “Rainbow”

In Japanese culture, there’s a special method of repairing a broken object. Known as Kintsugi, the art form uses lacquer mixed with gold to not only mend broken pottery, but celebrate its imperfections, incorporating the broken pieces into the object’s history. The art from continuously revealed itself to Kristen Castro – singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist behind Wild Heart Club – while in the writing process for her new album Arcade Back in Manitou, released November 12. “That was a visual I had the whole record,” Castro tells Audiofemme. “I was like ‘Okay, maybe I’m on the right path.’” But before she could walk the path to her destiny, she had to embrace her own brokenness.

Growing up in Simi Valley California, Castro always had a deep sense of observation and empathy. “As a kid, I was always weird,” she confesses. “I could always tell when people would click, the popular kids. I was really empathetic and I could feel when people were lonely and I was like ‘you’re just as important.’ Quiet people are usually weirder. There’s a lot going on in their head. Maybe they’re not as confident, but they’re just as important as the popular people.”

Embracing her weirdness is a habit Castro carried into adulthood, particularly her career as a country artist. After moving to Nashville, Castro joined country trio Maybe April in 2013, their sparkling harmonies and bluegrass-infusion scoring them opening slots for the likes of Bonnie Raitt, Kris Kristofferson, Gavin DeGraw, Brandy Clark and others. But in spite of their growing success, Castro still felt like an outsider.

“I wasn’t like everybody else. I struggled with being confident, and I really want to uplift others who struggle in that same area,” she professes. “If I have this ability to make music; why not make it to connect with other people who can’t create and want to connect. It’s nice to be heard. I have a duty to myself to be honest. It took me a long time to get there though.” Amd it wasn’t without a personal toll – what got her to the point of being honest in her music was “constantly letting myself break, which was really hard,” she says. “Every time I’d put myself first, it would break something.”

The first break came when she departed Maybe April after six years, realizing she was not speaking her truth through the music. She also ceased co-writing with other Nashville songwriters as it began to feel “artificial,” the blossoming singer-songwriter drawn more to connecting with people through the power of music rather than chasing a number one song. Then, Castro experienced another break when she endured a devastating breakup with her girlfriend. At the time, she thought, “I need to grow and I need to figure this out or else I’m not going to get better.”

But those moments of darkness put Castro on a path of truth and honesty that inspired her to launch a career as a solo artist. With only her guitar and a slew of ideas and emotions waiting to be turned into songs, Castro flew to Los Angeles to stay with her brother, where she created Wild Heart Club’s exquisite debut. “It was a lot of healing. No one’s around me, I get to make this music for nobody right now,” Castro describes of making the album in solitude. “This is just for me.”

But the song that started it all was written years prior. Castro penned “Rainbow” when she and her ex-girlfriend starting dating. The couple was part of a now-defunct band, Mountain Time, and after a show in Colorado, they attended a bonfire where Castro saw a shooting star race across the sky, wondering in that moment if it was a sign from the universe that her then-girlfriend was “the one.”

“When you’re young and in love, you’re looking for any sign to tell you you’re on the right path. I saw so much magic in that moment and in that person, and looking at myself now, even though I miss her, I feel like all my favorite parts of her are part of me now,” Castro reveals. “I love when the sky is crying and all of a sudden you get a rainbow. For some reason, I felt like that sky, and I was like, ‘I deserve a rainbow. Is she my rainbow?’ I’ve had a lot of sadness in my life, so it’s just looking for signs.”

In the live acoustic video, premiering exclusively with Audiofemme, Castro strips down the upbeat pop number that appears on the album to the bare bones. With just an acoustic guitar, her soft voice and the gentle sound of the waves crashing along the shore behind her, Castro maintains the song’s dreamy element as she sings, “Break down like a waterfall/When your tears dry there’s a rainbow/Lost in love, lose yourself/When your tears dry there’s a rainbow.”

“It talks about this magical moment with a person, [and] it alludes to toxic moments,” she notes of the lyrics. “That relationship had so many beautiful parts to it and also so many negative parts to it where I would cry if I was happy, I would cry if I was hurt. But at the end of it all, she was always there.” As songwriting partners, the couple would write verses back and forth to each other. One of the verses her ex wrote foreshadowed a breakup where one partner encourages the other to go to the beach to find peace.

When Castro’s friend and videographer suggested they film a live version of “Rainbow” on the beach, it marked a full-circle moment for the singer. “I think it honors the song in the way that we used to play together,” she observes. “It was honoring what she wanted for me and what I want for myself.”

Castro received yet another sign from the universe that she was where she was meant to be while filming on the remote beach in California. A bystander approached to remark on the “beautiful” song. “The first thing she says is ‘I could tell it was a really hard song for you to sing. It sounded like you were in a toxic relationship.’ It took everything in my power not to cry. It was again this full circle feeling, these little moments where you’re like ‘I’m on the right path’ and respecting your life guides,” Castro observes. “I needed somebody to be that rainbow for me and now it feels like I’m my own rainbow.”

Castro continues to walk a path that is deeply honest, living fully in her truth as she works to pass on the core message embedded into her music: it gets better. “Something I kept thinking about was if I could talk to my past self who was going through all of this and let her know that it gets better, because so often it feels like it won’t. This album was more than just a breakup. I finally lost myself and gave myself the ability to find myself,” she proclaims. “I think lyrically [and] sonically it was me being honest for the first time, and being honest let me start to find myself, my truest self.”

As for how she defines her truest self? “Someone that’s free. Free of self-judgement, others’ judgment, free of being critical of yourself, free to create. It’s to find the beauty in the little things,” she expresses. “I think it’s letting yourself go through it, even though you know it’s going to be really awful. If you feel a pull to something, sometimes you need to walk through it. There were so many red flags where it was like ‘don’t do it,’ but if I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t have this album, I wouldn’t have broken. It’s being grateful to others and myself for letting myself go through that.”

Follow Wild Heart Club on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

Deap Vally Invite Creative Collaborators Into Their Rock ‘N’ Roll Marriage

Photo Credit: Ericka Clevenger/Kelsey Hart

The musical marriage between Lindsey Troy and Julie Edward began a decade ago when they committed their respective rock ‘n’ roll talents to Deap Vally. Their long friendship and professional partnership has been creatively fertile in the last two years, culminating in the release of their third album, Marriage, released November 19 via Cooking Vinyl. It follows two EPs released earlier this year: in February, they dropped the Digital Dream EP and in June, American Cockroach.

Both the EPs and Marriage are the products of the “collaboration series” the duo began after releasing their second album Femejism in 2016, which was produced by Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeahs notoriety.

“After Femejism came out, we did quite a bit of touring in the US,” says Troy. “We were on the road a lot, and then, once we finally got time to do some more writing, we were trying to figure out how to shake up the writing process and make it exciting for us again, because we’d spent so much one-on-one time with each other.”

Reaching out to potential collaborators – something that happens often in EDM and hip-hop, but not so much in the rock ‘n’ roll world – proved to do just that. One of their first acts they got in touch with was The Flaming Lips, with some unexpected results.

“That ended up turning into a full record!” says Troy. “We released that first, but originally that was meant to be a song as part of our collaboration series.” The Deap Lips album, a scuzzy, hazy-glam, psyched-out antidote to the pandemic blues, whet their appetites for more creative partnerships. The possibilities open to them as they expanded beyond their two-piece lineup felt suddenly real and immediate, as evidenced by the bleepy, trippy, Wayne Coyne-flavoured track “The Pusher.”

“The beauty of collaborating is that you can always take something new away from witnessing and participating in someone else’s approach,” says Edwards. “Although we had many of our collaborations already in progress when we wrote with the Lips, it was inspiring to see their seamless blend of practical work ethic with spontaneous inspiration. Definitely recording at the Flaming Lips studio in Oklahoma was a true highlight so far.”

“So far” refers to the ten years since Edwards and Troy formed Deap Vally in 2011. When they met in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, Edwards had been a vocalist, drummer, and keyboardist for LA-band The Pity Party alongside Marc Smollin since 2005, which toured and released EPs until 2012. Meanwhile, San Diego-born singer-guitarist Troy had (child-prodigy style) teamed up with her sister Anna to form The Troys, recording their debut album for Elektra Records in 2002 but never releasing it (Lindsey was just 15 at the time, and Elektra closed shop soon afterwards). The sisters released their solo projects in 2006: Anna’s Ain’t No Man LP; Lindsey’s Bruises EP months later. Lindsey had been doing her own solo thing until meeting Edwards, in the last place you’d expect given their hard-hitting sound.

“Lindsey actually came into my shop, The Little Knittery, and I taught her how to crochet and knit, and that’s how we met,” says Edwards. “At this point, there’s pretty much no downtime to make stuff, but we used to knit compulsively on the road and sell our handknits at shows.”

They shared more in common than a love of crochet. The two women spoke the same language when it came to rock, bonding over a love of Led Zeppelin.

Their own raw, noodling, punk-garage-blues rock relies purely on guitar, drums and frank, feminist lyrics delivered in a full-throated holler. The duo signed to Island Records in 2012 on the strength of their first single, “Gonna Make My Own Money;” the raucous, frenetic drums teamed with fuzzy, savage guitar riffs and a Karen O-style guttural-yet-melodic moan was undeniably a anthemic feminist cry in the spirit of Bikini Kill, L7 and Babes In Toyland. It would appear on their 2013 EP Get Deap! alongside three additional tracks that Spin declared “a burst of self-reliant aggression.”

“It’s unapologetic, heavy and groovy,” the duo stated in their trailer for the EP, in which the furious, fabulous “End Of The World” soundtracks footage of Troy and Edwards looking suitably rock ‘n’ roll with their big hair, swigging hard liquor straight from the bottle and ferociously swinging their instruments about on stage. That was but a sampling of the 11-track debut to come: Sistrionix, recorded in LA with producer Lars Stalfors of The Mars Volta, dropped in June of that same year. With instant acclaim came festival spots at Latitude, Leeds and Reading Festivals in the UK, and tours with The Vaccines, Muse, Wolf Mother, Marilyn Manson and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The same album spawned one of my favourite Deap Valley bangers: “Baby I Call Hell,” a hot, hollering, anthemic rock beast in which Troy demands of her lover, “Are you gonna please me, like you swore you would, or is it just to tease me? Better treat this woman good!”

Femejism followed in 2016, and 2017 saw the duo touring with Blondie and Garbage on the Rage and Rapture Tour. But their marriage was feeling frayed at the edges and the creative spark had been dulled by domestic demands (both Troy and Edwards have very young children). The thrill of releasing music as Deap Lips only confirmed that collaborations seemed to reignite the muse, and Marriage showcases that renewed passion.

<a href="https://deapvally.bandcamp.com/album/marriage">Marriage by Deap Vally</a>

“High Horse” features KT Tunstall and Peaches. “She’s brilliant as fuck, bold, funny, and completely down to Earth,” says Edwards of Peaches. “She’s a blessing to humankind, truly.”

Eagles of Death Metal bassist Jennie Vee is a primal force on “I Like Crime.”

“A few years ago, we played a really great rock festival called Aftershock…one of the bands playing was Eagles of Death Metal,” recalls Troy. “I’m a huge fan of Eagles of Death Metal – they’re such a tasty, feel-good, unique, authentic rock ’n’ roll band. We were watching them side stage and Julie and I were like, ‘Holy crap! Who is this woman?’ We didn’t know they had a female bass player… she’s incredible, she had such good stage presence, she looked so cool. We were blown away.”

The mutual love affair resulted in studio time in LA, with “I Like Crime” completed in three days.

On “Look Away,” the dreamy, sadly romantic Warpaint vibe is unmistakable thanks to jennylee. It’s a bittersweet, ’80s-style ballad in which the refrain “This is heart, this is heart, this is heartache” smarts with the raw, hopeless lonely fog of a breakup.

“We booked a day at the Cave Studio in LA with engineer/producer Josiah Mazzaschi and we went in with jennylee, and basically the way we started writing together was just with spontaneous jamming in the live room that Josiah recorded,” recounts Edwards. “We jammed out a few different spontaneous ideas that were just springing up and then took a break to listen to what we came up with. Listening to jams can be painful and funny, and we embraced that. Then we picked which jam we all agreed was our favorite, and we started to build on that. We got most of the structure and ideas done in a day, and then did two more days to finish the song. It was really fun and easy. The whole point was not to overthink it and to surrender to the song that was forming, rather try to control the outcome.” Spontaneity and surrender: the perfect recipe for a rock ‘n’ roll marriage likely to go the distance another ten, if not twenty, years.

Follow Deap Vally on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Riki Turns Introspective on Sophomore Album Gold

Riki knew that she wanted to include a cover song on Gold, released on November 26 via Dais Records, and had been working with a couple different song possibilities when she settled on “Porque Te Vas,” the 1974 melancholy pop song from Spanish singer Jeanette. “When I was demoing it, it just felt right,” she says on a video call from her home in Los Angeles, adding that it was a song where she could inject something new into it while also conveying “the message of the song is in an honest way.”

“Porque Te Vas” is a song that’s been in Riki’s life for so long that she can’t recall when she first heard it. “It’s in my mom’s vernacular of songs that she would play, so I’ve known that song since I was a little kid,” she says. “My mom, when she would drive us— my brothers and sisters and I— around, we would listen to a lot of music in the car. Both of my parents were really into music, but that was a different vibe. It’s like everyone is having their introspective time, kind of quiet time, even as a kid, just listening.”

In her version of “Porque Te Vas,” with vocals that sound as if they are transmitting from the past, Riki captures that special connection people can have to songs first heard as children. “Songs like that, they become part of you in such a profound way, like DNA-level almost,” she says.

The cover also reflects the very slight shift in sound— and a big shift circumstances— between the release of Riki’s debut album and her sophomore effort. Her self-titled debut was released on Valentine’s Day of 2020, a few weeks before Los Angeles clubs, and nightlife throughout much of the world, shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “I had no idea what was in store, of course,” she says. Ultimately, the pandemic would impact the sound of her follow-up; the songs on Gold, from upbeat tunes like “Lo” and “Marigold” to slower numbers like “It’s No Secret” and “Florence and Selena,” are reflective of the period in which the album was made. Riki describes it as a “stay at home with your headphones and your stereo system” sort of record.

Running counter to that, Riki’s first album was steeped in pre-pandemic life. With nods to classic synthpop and Italo disco, it was music to make you move. “The first album was a bit of a dance, a club thing,” says Riki. “I think that’s where it would be best served, a club, and the second album is not at all that way.”

“When I was demoing these songs, there was an altered state of everything, everyone was in either solitude or a little pod of people that they were shut in with,” she says. “That was interesting for demos because there’s a lot of introspective energy there.”

When it came time to record the songs, Riki worked with producer Josh Eustis (Telefon Tel Aviv). “We have a huge overlap in our musical tastes,” she says, adding that this allowed them space for creative exploration. “It was really fun in that way. I’ve never had that experience before, so it was very exciting.”

Riki grew up in Portland, Oregon and began making music there, but pursued it more seriously after moving to Oakland. There, she played in a few bands, including Crimson Scarlet. “It was very fun and theatrical,” she says of the punk outfit.

After moving to Los Angeles seven years ago, Riki shifted her attention to her solo work. She says that the city has influenced her music in a few ways. “I have a little bit more of a routine here. I’m a little bit more secure and living a more adult kind of life. It’s less chaos, parties, let’s go wild,” she says. “I don’t go to as many shows as I used to before moving here, just because it’s a city that’s a little more expensive. I have to work, do all that, so a lot of my music listening has come more from getting recommendations from friends, not necessarily L.A.-based music.”

Since last summer, Riki has been able to perform again as well. “They’ve been, certainly, some of the best shows that I’ve ever played,” she says. “The energy of people coming out right now is all-in. It’s awesome.”

These gigs included her first solo show in New York, where she opened for Cold Cave at Webster Hall. “They have really wonderful people that listen to their music and are super supportive,” she says of Cold Cave. She also played her first ever shows in Florida, at Absolution Fest, and in Chicago, as part of Cold Waves Festival. “Those shows are three of my favorite shows that I’ve ever done,” she says.

Riki has also been gigging around L.A., with a stint opening for Cold Cave at The Wiltern, and sets at Los Angeles’ Cold Waves Festival in September. In 2022, she’ll be hitting the road for a U.S. tour with Choir Boy.

Follow Riki on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Dream Pop Trio Dianas Let Elegant Harmonies Shine on Third LP Little Glimmer

Melbourne-based Dianas began as a drunken conversation between friends Caitlin Moloney, Nathalie Pavlovic and Anetta Nevin in a Perth sharehouse, and from that wine-soaked beginning, complete with heartbreak and stolen gear, they’ve collected their individual and shared stories onto Little Glimmer, released November 26 via Heavy Machinery Records and Blossom Rot Records. The album is a tighter, more elegant evolution in their sound, though its hallmarks – their sophisticated, tearjerker harmonies – remain central to their phonic personality.

“As self-taught musicians, we sort of learned together and helped each other to learn, so our skill level has gotten better over the years,” says bassist Pavlovic. “I feel like with this album I don’t feel pressure to show off too much. There’s more of a refinement, I think.”

<a href="https://dianasband.bandcamp.com/album/little-glimmer">Little Glimmer by Dianas</a>

Nearly ten years ago, the trio took their DIY attitude, newly-learned instrumental skills, and a bunch of sketchy pop-rock songs to the world on EP #01. That 2013 release, in its endearing lack of polished sterility, drew the attention of local radio and Perth fans. EP #02 in 2014 cemented their popularity and sold-out headline shows ensued.

The super straight-forward album titles were not a middle finger to the industry, claims Pavlovic. “We are notoriously bad at naming things, so it was just laziness,” she says with a laugh. One particular track on EP #02 was proving a challenge to title. “Caitlin was like, if you don’t name it in five seconds, we’re calling it ‘Dicks!’ We ended up naming it ‘Dix,’ so it’s fine.”

Their debut self-titled album of 2015 is all shoegaze melodies, post-punk noodling, echoey guitar and feline, dreamily sweet layered harmonies. “Of A Time” and “1000 Years” epitomise their lo-fi charm, while “I’m With You” trails over a rambling piano journey into blush pink clouds.

Baby Baby, their second album, came out in May last year, mere months into Melbourne’s on-off lockdown scenario. It is jagged and fuzzy around the edges, but it sways and dances with melodic ease. Somewhere between wakefulness and dreams, their sound borders that lucid, transient state. Insistent, upward spiralling guitar punctures through swirling melody on “Weather Girl,” while distorted, menacing snarls of guitar build into a fearful hail of harmonised voices crying “Real Love!” just three tracks later.

There’s been a shift in energy on Little Glimmer. The drums barrel, their voices sound more resolute, and the overall sense is that their range has stretched. While the core of their band will always be the pillar of friendship, it feels like they’ve strayed beyond the confines of past albums and EPs, even just vocally. It is the sort of confidence that comes from working with people who have your back.

“We’ve been friends for twelve years and it’s definitely gone into that sister-friendship,” Pavlovic says. “We don’t bicker or anything, but we don’t have to talk a lot. We get a bit annoyed with each other but it’s never a real annoyance. It passes pretty instantly, then we move onto the next thing. I have no doubt in my mind that [we] will always be friends. We have a weird bond, but it’s a bond nonetheless. We can go a long time without speaking, but we’ll always be playing music together as well.”

“Maybe it’s just that we met at the right time of our lives, that special time when you’re 19…” Pavlovic adds. “It feels like so long ago… like a whole other life. It was definitely a twist of fate moving in together.”

Pavlovic turned 30 during the pandemic. It wasn’t the flashy, big party she’d envisioned but she reflects that she’s happy about where she’s at. Perhaps the invitation to make an album with generous funding was better than a party; the band was contacted by the organisers of State Government and City of Melbourne funding initiative Flash Forward at the beginning of 2021, which ultimately brought Little Glimmer into focus.

“It was an amazing opportunity but the catch was that we had to do it really quickly,” Pavlovic reveals. “We had about six songs ready to go – we were planning on just doing an EP and calling it Little Sixer… [but we figured] we’ve got the support behind us, we may as well just go in and try to do an album, just really push ourselves because we usually take ages to do stuff. It was five years between our last two.”

They took a pragmatic attitude, drawing up a schedule and heading off to James Cecil’s Super Melody World studio in the Macedon Ranges, in regional Victoria (Cecil is on a roll, having just hosted Georgia State Line, too). Fortunately, between Melbourne lockdowns, they’d been able to get together and demo the songs so that they knew the direction of the album before arriving in studio.

“We planned to do it all in one sitting, but then we blew up the amp on the third day. So we had to break it up into two little lots with a little break in between,” Pavlovic says, noting that overall, recording took just under a week – longer than they’d planned, but not by much.

Pavlovic does sound production on the side, and had recorded and mixed Baby Baby, so studying Cecil at work on Little Glimmer was of personal interest for her. She immediately recognised their very different approach. “He found some really cool sounds, especially in the mixing,” she says. “I wish I could have watched him mix, because it did sound good when we were recording but when it was mixed it was really, really great.”

One song proved to be a challenge to wield into a human-sized song.

“’One and Only’ was really hard…we knew it needed a funky bassline, for want of a better word, but it just kept sounding really epic,” Pavlovic remembers. “The lyrics are quite emotional and quite hard hitting, so we needed to keep it light with the music so it didn’t sound like a real big, epic score of a movie: really devastating, you know? The bass made it a lot better… finding that right combination of three different types of keyboards – a vibraphone, some organ – that combination made it sound less epic than just the piano, which was the original plan.”

The original six tracks have blossomed into eleven and there’s no “Dix,” no indication an amp exploded and no cinematic excursions into the ethereal. It’s a definitive, distinguished Dianas album.

“We put so much time and effort into creating the album. It all happened so quickly, I can’t believe it’s out,” Pavlovic admits. “That’s a little bit overwhelming!”

Follow Dianas on Facebook for ongoing updates.

MUSIQUE BOUTIQUE: Abba, Joni Mitchell, Body Unltd

Welcome to Audiofemme’s monthly record review column, Musique Boutique, written by music journo vet Gillian G. Gaar. Every fourth Monday, Musique Boutique offers a cross-section of noteworthy reissues and new releases guaranteed to perk up your ears.

The songs of ABBA are like comfort food — and that’s meant as a compliment. On the one hand, you can say it’s safe and predictable. But on the other hand, it leaves you so happy and satisfied. That’s probably partially why ABBA’s return with a new album, Voyage (Capitol) — their first in 40 years — was greeted with such rapture; after the past two years of uncertainty and stress, anything delivering a dose of feel-good familiarity is most welcome.

ABBA never officially announced they were breaking up after the release of The Visitors in 1981, but as the years passed they gave no indication had any desire to release new music. What changed that was their involvement in a high-tech live show, opening next year, where they’ll be recreated as “Abbatars.” They so enjoyed recording new songs for the show it was easy to make the decision — why not release a whole album?

Voyage (Capitol) picks up where The Visitors left off, at least in sound. But it’s an older and wiser Agnetha Fältskog and Anna-Frid Lynstad singing the songs; a bit bruised by life perhaps, but with ABBA’s trademark optimism nonetheless intact. It’s something nicely summarized by the line “I’m not the one you knew/I’m now and then combined” (“Don’t Shut Me Down”). Or consider “Keep an Eye on Dan.” If this was ’70s ABBA, the title might make you think of a boyfriend with a wandering eye. But on Voyage, it turns out to be Fältskog’s instruction to her ex-husband as she drops their son off for the weekend.

In short, don’t expect the giddy spirits of “Bang-A-Boomerang” or “Take a Chance on Me.” This is a more reflective ABBA. The lush “I Still Have Faith in You” can be viewed as a song of two people overcoming adversity, or an assessment of ABBA’s own legacy. “Bumblebee” is a quietly restrained song about climate change. The Gaelic-flavored “When You Dance With Me” takes a relationship that failed to take off as a means of contemplating the passage of time.

The music (all songs written by the “Bs” in ABBA, Benny Anderson and Björn Ulvaeus) are as toe-tappingly catchy as ever. And if some think the sentiments get mushy at times (e.g. the Christmas song “Little Things”), the album closes with the yearning “Ode to Freedom,” a prayer of hope for the future. As ever, ABBA, thank you for the music.

Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 2: The Reprise Years (1968-1971) (Rhino) takes a deep dive into Mitchell’s breakthrough period as a recording artist. The first volume in the Archives series covered the years 1963-1967, before Mitchell made her first record. The new set offers a look at the work that went into creating her first four albums: Song to a Seagull, Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon, and Blue.

Though a number of tracks are outtakes from studio sessions, most of the songs are drawn from other sources: home demos, radio sessions, and live performances. She’s heard putting together the track listing for Clouds at the New York City apartment of her friend Jane Lurie; “Instead of being such a personal album, this isn’t nearly as personal an album as the last one,” she observes, as she reminds herself to add “Both Sides Now” to the album.

While there are alternate versions of songs that were later released — such as a lovely version of “Ladies of the Canyon” with cellos — it’s especially interesting to hear the songs that might have been. Like poignant ballad “Jesus,” another demo recorded at Lurie’s apartment, Mitchell accompanying herself on piano. Or “Midnight Cowboy,” a melancholy portrait of the would-be hustler Joe Buck, written but not ultimately used for the film of the same name.

Among the live recordings is a March 19, 1968 performance at the Le Hibou Coffee House in Ottawa, Ontario recorded by an unlikely tape operator — Jimi Hendrix. A big fan of Mitchell, Hendrix had arrived at the club after his own gig in the city, bearing a reel-to-reel tape deck and asking if he could record her. She agreed. As a result, 53 years later we can delight in hearing Mitchell promoting her soon-to-be-released debut album, and the poetry of “Michael from Mountains,” “The Pirate of Penance,” and “Sisotowbell Lane.” Archives Vol. 2 is a fascinating look at a songwriter in the midst of her artistic development.

Genevieve (self-released) is the debut offering from self-described queer electro-noir twosome, Body Unltd (Irene Barber and Vox Mod). The six-track release has the clean, crisp sound of electronic devices pulsating like a metronome. But the warmth of the human voice tempers the chill, singing of desire, of the need to make a connection.

The songs evolved with Mod first creating the instrumentals, then sending them to Barber who added further music and lyrics. The words of “Coasts” touch on the isolation we’ve all felt during in recent times: “How was the long weekend?/Was it with friends, or you alone?/Is it okay I’m doing very well?” It’s not surprising that desire results from all that pent up emotion. “Where You Want to Go” is a seductive invitation to push past all your boundaries (“I give you all that I am/I got soft hands….”), but are you being taken for a trip or for a ride?

The vocals are beguiling, luring you in on “Pathways” and “Arrival.” There’s a sly humor at work too, on “Helluva Light,” an encounter with Lucifer’s daughter, who doesn’t seem that menacing; she’s just looking to have a good time. And ageless “Genevieve,” a shining star inviting you to join in the celebration and dancing until dawn.

<a href="https://bodyunltd.bandcamp.com/album/genevieve">Genevieve by Body Unltd</a>

Soft Cell Forged the Foundation of Synthpop Forty Years Ago with Debut LP Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret

The author’s own copy of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. (Pic: Liz Ohanesian)

Recently, I was inside a downtown Los Angeles restaurant, staring at the food photos while waiting for my own order when “Tainted Love” came on the radio. Within the first few immediately recognizable bars of the song, the employee behind the counter— someone who appeared to be much younger than Soft Cell’s 1981 single— looked up and related a personal anecdote about the song. We laughed, sharing a quick moment of bonding between strangers over a song that seems to be a perennial part of the sound of this city.

About a week later, as I was writing this essay, I took a break and headed to a friend’s indie dance party. When he dropped “Tainted Love” sometime in the middle of the night, I noticed the crowd on an already busy dance floor fill up more. I don’t know how it is anywhere else in the world, but here in L.A., “Tainted Love” is that rare jam whose popularity has persisted for decades, as much a conversation-starter and dance floor filler now as the contemporary pop hits of any given era since the 1980s.

But, this essay isn’t about “Tainted Love.”

Just a few months after Soft Cell unleashed what would become their biggest hit, the duo formed by Marc Almond and Dave Ball dropped their debut full-length Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. Released on November 27, 1981, the album was, and still is, a perfect mix of contradictions. It’s punk rock raw and disco slick. It was driven by new and innovative instruments, but the album’s backbone is its reliance on classic pop song structures. It’s incredibly accessible and also really fucking weird.

Even “Tainted Love,” the song that everyone and their grandma knows, was unusual for its time. For those of us who grew up with the song in the ether, it can be hard to recognize that. The song was originally recorded by Gloria Jones in the mid-1960s and became a cult hit years later when DJs in the U.K. northern soul party scene picked up on it. Meanwhile, electronic music was still novel in the early 1980s. In fusing the sound of the future with a song from the past, Soft Cell helped forge the foundation of synthpop.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Soft Cell was part of the steady stream of music floating through the airwaves of my own youth. KROQ, the alternative radio station that set so much of the city’s collective musical taste in the ‘80s and ‘90s, clung to “Tainted Love” years after its release. “Sex Dwarf” was also a big hit on the radio station; I probably knew all the lyrics (and sound effects) in that song before I could fathom what they meant. Yet, it wasn’t until high school – in the midst of the grunge era – that, for reasons I can no longer recall, I picked up a Soft Cell and Marc Almond compilation on CD, which led me to Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret.

I kept listening, over and over again, until I knew every line and memorized every electronic sound on that album. The purr of a synth that creates a seamless segue between “Youth” and “Sex Dwarf” makes me want to run to a dance floor every time I hear it. The subtle shift in the beat between “Entertain Me” and “Chips on My Shoulder” has kept me dancing at home without so much as a pause to catch my breath so many times.

I still remember how enthralled I was with Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret on first listen. It was like marathoning a TV series. Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret is a dance album, but the beats essentially pump up a series of narrative-centric songs (on a recent installment of Tim’s Twitter Listening Party, Soft Cell shared the backstory behind some of the songs on the album).

It opens with a stuttered cry of “frustration!” that heads toward a bouncy beat backing up Almond’s declarations of the world’s most ordinary man. (“I was born/One day I’ll die/There was something in between/I don’t know what or why.”) “Frustration” made a character so normal so intriguing. That sucked me into the album and the stories that followed kept me listening.

“Seedy Films” painted a picture of an encounter inside an adult theater vivid enough for my teen brain to fill in the blanks and giggle. “Bedsitter,” broke my heart, thinking about someone hiding their loneliness in public, even though I thought “bedsit land,” meant, literally, staying in bed. “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye,” the album’s closer, plays out like a particularly vicious breakup scene in a movie.

Even today, after years of regularly listening to what is one of my favorite albums of all time, I still have difficulty focusing on anything but Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret when it’s playing. Between its lyrical strength and off-the-wall production style that still feels forward-minded four decades on, the album is endlessly captivating. It’s an essential album for anyone remotely interested in electronic music and one that still has a lot to teach listeners.