Here’s a grinding, gritty, and sly track from Venu7 featuring some groovy old school guitars, a big slap-back reverb on the lead vocal and some handclaps that all contribute to this classic rock revival sound. The artist writes “This song is about empowering women through sexuality and against slutshaming and objetification [sic]”. Oh and it was mastered on an Ampex tape machine, which is pretty darn rock and roll.
Talking to Sophie give us their track Mairposa. I think the vocal melodies and guitar work really shine in the track and I would love to hear it taken just a step further with a more expressive production and cleaner mix, but nonetheless the song demonstrates some robust songwriting prowess.
Andromeda by Ventill8 (I swear we don’t have a number theme happening at the moment…) is a cosmic journey like no other. The artist’s description is so fantastic that I’m just going to quote it here:
It’s from an EP about a cat-stronaut’s journey through the galaxies. This particular song is when he enters the Andromeda Galaxy, hence the “welcome to the Andromeda Galaxy.”
Am I right?
It’s a glitzy glitched out synth track thats particularly enjoyable when taken as a whole with the entire EP.
Filled with pop culture references analogies, Finally Gonna Say gives us Archer Phan’s take on a song about finally revealing your true feelings, or at least working yourself up to do so. Phan ends on a slow repeated fade-out that leaves the audience wondering… so what happened?
Here’s Bed by Gato de Rua. The self-questioning lyrics serve to support the title lyric, “bed” as an icon of both depression and intimacy as we peer into the downward spiral of an excessive amount red wine in a gray room as we hear rain pour outside the window.
This is the second song Elly Deda has released since beginning her musical journey just last year. I particularly like the chorus melody and she’s accomplished a lot in a short amount of time in this track. Although I’d love to hear her get more personal in the lyrics and offer some more details about the nuances of the relationship she describes, her presentation of a broader arc of emotions rather than just a singular moment provide an interesting perspective to the song.
Paperclip give us Please Don’t Let Me Go a bedroom pop rock track featuring double tracked mumbly vocals and strummed guitar that put it somewhere in the realm of The Thermals. The sinewave arpeggios over the second verse and chorus give the song a melancholic “last day of school” kind of feeling that ties together the song well.
I really enjoy the sampled guitar and beat of Way Back by Hooperkd. The track meditates on the relationship between reputation and wealth, and how sometimes on begets the other. The artist seems to ruminate on how life feels like you’re taking steps forward, and other times backwards, but perhaps with a slight optimism that suggests maybe we’re still ultimately going in the right direction. Although expressed in more explicit terms than what I’m describing her, I truly think it strikes a chord about how we perceive wealth and prestige in our world today.