Category: New Music Reviews

Want a fat, cynical, perfect pop song, filled with bits of Weezer, Gwen Stefani, and vintage Madonna that will immediately take up residence in your head for the rest of the day, and maybe longer ? Yeah you do…

Belfast singer/songwriter Aislinn Logan has a transcendently stunning voice, and this track, off her debut EP “Lost or Gone”, showcases it to perfect effect. A simple circular melody, bookended with the hollow, faceless sounds of a train station, the mood is weary and sad, and the whole thing is pretty damn beautiful.

Welcome to the weird, woozy, and wonderful world of Warik, where you are perpetually  dizzy, and high, and everything is the color of rainbows. Quirky, and melodic, occasionally sounding as if they were recorded underwater, both of these tracks are culled from his new “In My Lens” EP, and are unquestionably a drug in, and of themselves. Thank you Warik.

I kept waiting for this song to start, you know, in the same way you wait for a Cure song to start i.e. couple of minutes of instrumental intro build-up, and then boom, Robert Smith dramatically crashes in, and gives you a bear hug. Anyway, it never started. It just moved forward in a subdued, straight Krautrock line until nearly 4 minutes had gone by. Played it again to see if I’d missed anything. Then again. And now thinking there may be a subliminal message in there somewhere, because before I knew it, it had played 10x in a row, so something is unquestionably happening here, and it’s something good.

Yes, that guitar riff is a little “Song 2” by Blur, but make no mistake, this song is it’s own man, all nasal vocals, and swagger, and world weariness. The featured lyric says it all: “people always wanna know about the trips to the bathroom, people always said that you had a strange aura about you”. That’s this one in a nutshell, and it’s mighty fine.

Patricia is the brainchild of multi-media artist Jacolby Satterwhite, and this is not so much a song, as it is a meandering sketch, which I mean in the best possible way. It’s a beautiful one, truly evoking an air of lonely, nighttime streets in downtown NYC, in the eighties. Part of what creates that specific feeling, is the incorporation, of the hook line from Taana Gardner’s 1981 dance/club classic “Heartbeat”, in the most delicate, and desolate fashion. This is “Quiet Storm” for solitary space aliens.

There are so many beautiful things about this loving nod to the Beach Boys, and Big Star, it’s hard to know where to begin, but we’ll keep it simple. Gorgeous tune. Swoon-worthy vocal hook. Beauteous guitar crescendo in the bridge. To summarize, it’s the living embodiment of a California sunset, and nearly impossible to take off repeat.

Like a pop-infused “Heaven or Las Vegas”, the first single from Swimming Girls, is one lush, and heavenly wall of sound, with a languorous, and handsome little chorus that is nearly impossible to evict from your head once you’ve heard it.

Can’t remember how I stumbled upon Asha Lorenz a couple of years ago, but no matter, she’s been a pretty staggering discovery in these parts. For the past year, I’ve had her songs both solo, and with her band Fish (now known as Sorry, I believe), bookended in a playlist with Au Pairs, X-Ray Spex, Poly Styrene solo stuff, as well as some Shara Nelson, and Martina Topley-Bird …don’t know why, she just sounds so right surrounded by those straight to the heart, intense, moody, and sometimes screamy beauties. There’s a DIY quality, to both her solo work, and her band stuff, and a genuine timelessness: it’s all pretty exceptional. The tracks above are an overview of old, and more recent things, and there’s loads more to explore on her Soundcloud page, so definitely encourage you to check it all out.