Music Review: Christian Cohle, Aditya Shukla, and Golda May

While promoting The Forever Now songs, I inevitably end up stumbling across a lot of great music that slips through the cracks of big music blogs, playlisters, and radio, but deserve a bigger audience. I’ve started The Forever Now blog to share some of the discoveries I’ve made along the way that I think should have a little more attention.

The song opens with some minimal synth arpeggios that might recall artists such as Philip Glass, develops with some powerful vocals, and slowly transforms as dark synth sweeps as washy sound effects emphasize vocal lines. The song takes a surprising turn and resolves in abstract instrumental sweeps that fade out into oblivion.

Aditya Shukla’s Endure isn’t his latest track, but it’s one of my favourites. It opens up with some light piano work that evokes the likes of Max Richter, then resolves into a wonderfully lush string finale. I love a good mid-song change up and Endure delivers. We ended up connecting on our Instagram, and you can hear his work on the mix of our latest The Forever Now single as well, the A.I. Generated Christmas Carol.

Lastly, we have Golda May’s Hear Me Out. Delicate vocals over a chimey-drone, gentle guitars, and a sputtering drum machine that edges a bit on the side of The National’s latest work. Suddenly the song stops and an impressively high vocal ‘oo’ rings out carrying into the next section with a new combination of effects, plucked guitar and increased vocal intensity and fragility. Unafraid of experimentation, the song breaks again with a new section that layers sampled bird sounds, guitar harmonics, vocals, and sampled breaths. It’s a great song that wasn’t afraid of taking risks along the way, and paid off.