I’m still not entirely sure what to make of this… any suggestions? Bizarrely catchy, going out of his way for comedy value in vocal delivery and if you’re going to jump around on my bed with your shoes on then you won’t get very far with me!
Mike Tyler’s upcoming album is called Erection and I’m very curious as to what on earth it will be like!
Benbrick is releasing an EP and this is the final track for it finished and in the can as they say. “They All Say” is beautiful and the video works really well too. Can’t wait for the EP to burst out to us all:
I normally cannot stand Jazz and along with rap, they remain the two genres I can happily leave any day of the week – however even I can tell a fantastic musical artist in those genres – especially when I can listen to it! Welcome Nat Osborn with your band – you may finally have given me entry point for jazzy music at long last. I can’t give a higher compliment than that!
The new album “The King and the Clown” is out Tuesday.
Derek Bishop whom released the fantastic “Resistance is Beautiful” back in 2011 kicks this years first Higher Plain MusiCast off in great style. In what is the most comprehensive and in-depth podcast I’ve had to date we spend an hour exploring what makes Derek tick, touring, looking back on an album coming up for its second birthday and how you then deal with writing and recording album number 2 which for artists and listeners alike, is the so-called difficult album to make.
Infact, it we were so busy talking I slightly forgot to do something, which as usual with the HPMC’s will form a mini bonus treat after the credits roll.
Download Episode 3 with Derek Bishop here.
Pop to the HPMC page to grab all the previous episodes to date.
Mark Mallman is a singer/songwriter that appears to be of the kitchen sink ilk – something I am really grooving with some of the more creative musicians out there. This is the single “Dirty Dishes” from his new LP Double Silhouette which is out now.
Imogen Heap’s latest video features time lapse so naturally I’m all over it like a rash. It’s also an exquisite piece full of so many movements and changes. Sublime.
We do love a bit of Bishop worship here at HPM and here’s Derek with his latest video for “Jackpot”. Cute piano on the ceiling FTW!
Sóley appears to be quite well known from the awesome musical country of Iceland but I’ve only just discovered her via this wonderful live set via KEX Radio. “We Sink” came out last year.
Some musicians are blessed with the talent to write simple ditties, others have a distinct voice that can carry them. Sunday Lane has both. Her début album “From Where You Are” sits firmly in the piano-pop genre and it feels assured, confident and dare I say…happy?
Opener “Get To You” has the kind of energy of Florence And the Machine and Vanessa Carlton with a curious mix of simple piano riffs, uplifting choruses and Sunday’s smoky vocals easily waxing over the melodies. You can’t have enough tuned percussion either! “A Little Too Young” is a mini anthem and is the perfect choice for a deceptively deep single. A football-esque chant for a coda and chirpy piano chords keep the pulse throbbing. A pulse that turns to a more country rock rolling stomp with “Let Me Go” which is recorded almost like it’s a live track. “Waiting For You” is the first slower track which reminds me of a Coldplay ballad. Even here though with a few minor chords thrown in, there’s a brightness to Lane’s vocals that lifts you and a bridge that’s still slightly smiling. “Painted Blue” is the first track is a real ballad with some underplayed string works beneath a piano /vocal track and this works beautifully. Sunday Lane’s voice has a curious flutter to it, almost a traditional Japanese flutter. It’s controlled and it isn’t always there but this is a wonderful demo of her voice.
“Light Up” again returns to the mid tempo rock genres with big choruses that you can sing along to whilst “Us Against Them” is more demure as it pushes towards McLachlan territory with its light rock guitars and excellent use of backing vocals to space out the melodies. “Waltzing With Fire” is a great track that builds and builds from a simple pop-ish track to a folksy rock eruption. Clearly wanting to then veer back to piano pop fun territory “Wait For Me” is a bouncy swinging Carlton-esque track. There’s a hint of a carnival in the up tempo tracks from this album. I wish there were brass sections sometimes, but that would detract from piano and vocal displays. “Want you Back” is a moody piece with minimal piano and echoed guitars and kick drums. The vocals are gritted up and the whole track has a completely different atmosphere and space than everything else here – a sign of a new direction to go perhaps? It works very well. The closing track “Slowly” is the token piano/vocal song and it works well as a bitter-sweet closer - wallowing in its simplicity and beauty.
“From Where You Are” is a very strong opener from Sunday Lane. It takes cues from some of the more popular piano based acts from the last ten years and embellishes it with a quite unique voice. Perfect for sunset drives after a great day out. This one is definitely a keeper.
Jillette Johnson took me a couple of listens to really sink into. Maybe I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. I came back to her this evening and the song “Cameron” from her new digital EP “Whiskey & Frosting” jumped out and took me places. Guess sometimes you’ve just got to open your ears:
Alex Wong’s solo monkier A City On A Lake makes his début with his self entitled album and my goodness me – its absolutely stunning.
“The Lake, Part One” is an ambience piece that I’m assuming is the life going on around the lake we’re at as it gives way to “Are You Listening” which is a warming piano, organ and vocal track. Alex’s vocal’s are delicate and clean. The song itself then starts to build with percussion and all kinds of motif trickery slowly seeping into the track as it grows and develops into something quite rousing with all the vocal collages and the simple song structure being given room to breathe. “Never Look Back” sees things growing again with its childlike verses and freeforming choruses. Again there is a certain warming feeling to everything and it’s like a Christmas song without all the jingles. There’s some lovely crisp production throughout and here’s a place where it really shines.
“Oceanside” which features Ximena Sarinaña is the lead single and takes things to melancholy guitar front with its absolutely heartbreaking melody. By using a lot of little noises and percussive edges or open strings the audio palette is filled to the brim without every overcoming the emotion of the main melody. It’s a certain gift that A City On A Lake has throughout and its somewhat of his trademark. “Twenty Faces” is an interesting pop rock track with a tripping beat and an affinity for going for different chords so as to not be normal. Coupled with Alex’s quiet vocals and lots of xylophone love, it’s a cutely understated track.
“The Lake, Part Two” is a very short harmonium track like a demo which falls away to “We Will Surrender” which is by far the most uptempo track on the album so far and its also one of the most sparse. The piano only chimes the chords and its left to the vocals and token keyboard synth waves to carry the track. It’s an unusual juxtaposition that then bursts into a big middle eight before the final run through but again, it’s these production choices that hallmark the album all the way through. “The Fighter” again is a simple song that is given unusual production values. The drums are muted to a single clash and there’s a lot of warped twinkling flurries of keyboards. It’s as if the goal of the song is to change where each instrument would normally sit on the audio spectrum. I love it when artists play with things like that.
“Always Something Better” is more traditional with catchy hooks and is a fantastic place to start withif you’re new to A City On A Lake. Its delicate but dramatic and showcases all the sides of the album and artist in one track. “Patiently” is an acoustic guitar and vocal led track for the most part and is again understated in its beauty and almost warm to the touch. Alex’s simple vocals suit this type of music best and finishes things off nicely before the bizarre “Album Credits” where Alex basically reads the linear notes over background ambience of a fair. A unique idea!
A City On A Lake is a clever album from a clever artist. While the songs themselves are very simple, the production behind them is anything but. It raises the entire thing up a level and suddenly you have a really special album that you want to take time investigating and working its craft on you. Very highly recommended.
Little is known about Larissa Jaye as her main site is currently under construction but I do think this song is beautiful and is currently part of Ariel Publicity’s Hope After Tragedy campaign.
Sarah Slean’s 3rd single from her double album Land & Sea, which is still on for a review here in the near future, is called “Society Song”. Nice to see Sarah back on the angrier side of things again!
The long awaited release of PS Vita’s “Project Diva F” comes in a few weeks (I cannot wait for the PS3 version next year) and here’s the lead single from the big song “Odds & Ends”. Such an anthemic chorus as usual
Sunday Lane is a uniquely voiced singer/songwriter whose been recently credited in a hot 100 unsigned artists column in Music Connection magazine. I would write a huge blurb but quite frankly that adorable music music coupled with the sheer warmth and joy of Sunday’s vocals and anthemic rousing bridges will hook you enough. We’re looking forward to hearing much more from this piano jangling lady in the near future.
Ah Fiona Apple and your album titles. Not quite out doing When the Pawn…, this time we’re going just for (deep breath) “The Idler Wheel is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do”. Exhale.
This time Fiona is very stripped back. Opener single “Every Single Night” showcases the fact that just simple instruments like a Celeste can utterly fill a speaker system with Fiona’s distinctive vocal delivery, packed with a lot of words and flex in between. The chorus line “I just wanna feel everything” is so sparsely given that when everything else still has that guttural angst, it’s simply disarming. “Daredevil” has a honky-tonk feel to it as the percussive playing and various drum loops take over for a stodgy march. Again its an exercise in only playing what’s needed and everything has much more impact for it. “Valentine” returns to the saucy minx turns that Apple can do, as well as her penchant for throwing in a random chord change in a fun place. It’s fresh, welcome and full of passion.
“Jonathan” reminds me a lot of her previous album. It’s all very glitzy and cabaret yet broken down at the same time. Fiona’s vocal’s are particularly venomous here before it leads you to the awesome “Left Alone”. The track starts off with a fun drum solo before letting loose with a fun but insanely catchy piano riff. Fiona waxes lyrical almost at hyperspeed before reaching for the higher register for the swing out chorus. It’s a perfect example of why we happily wait years between album for this amount of energy.
“Werewolf” proclaims “nothing wrong with a song that ends in a minor key” and we quite frankly agree with that wholeheartedly. “Periphery” has some inventive percussive loops over its purposely clumsy piano production. It’s the Apple equivalent of the comedy in a drama. Of course the whole the track is drama but you can’t help but smile with the simple fun of the riff. “Regret” continues the interesting play on looping percussion over a more downcast track. It slowly broods and sparks until Fiona literally explodes into an angry spewing mass across the speakers in the chorus.
The final two tracks are wonderous. “Anything We Want” is such a warm reprise. It’s full of plunks and clomps and the kitchen sink as Fiona manages to bend her voice to whatever slightly off key notes she fancies bending to. It’s also the most single material the album really gets to. The closer “Hot Knife” is unlike anything else as a backup punnet of Apples sing a clever little ditty while a foreground Apple sings over the top of it. How she makes something that should sound cheesy sounds so fantastic is down to pure talent and hard work.
“The Idler Wheel” is all about being visceral with the least amount of fuss as possible, whilst still pushing boundaries. Those boundaries may be vocal styles or may be using instruments in unusual ways. It may just be pushing all the emotional buttons. Mostly though, it’s brutally honest and that’s why listen after listen, more of your heart sinks into the album and the more you fall in love with it. Timeless.
Wow! Fiona Apple’s new album “The Idler Wheel” is now available to stream in full over at NPR. I’m am trying so hard to not click and listen away. I’ve only caved into the music video today and my word – what a music video it is. That octopus needs to have its own monster movie – preferably vs MegaSquid or something!
I’m trying to wait until release day… it may be a futile effort!
Lauren Edman’s debut solo CD “It’s Always the Quiet One” is quite fantastic – as we’ve said below. We got the chance to chat to Lauren about her first solo album and the processes and thoughts behind it…
Firstly, congratulations on the fantastic album “It’s Always the Quiet One”! How do you feel now your baby is out for public to enjoy?
Thank you! It actually feels really weird. I’m glad it’s out, but it is a strange feeling. These songs were kicking around in my head for so long, and for so long I was the only one who’d ever heard them. I’m a private person, but this is a really personal album, so coming to terms with that has been interesting for me. It’s weird also to think that these songs are finally “done” after so long, and that when I get to making my next album, I will be working on an entire set of completely different songs! I probably sound silly saying that because it’s just… obvious, but there it is, that’s how I feel.
Reading up on your bio, most of the album seemed to be conceived in the early hours of morning – did that have an overall impact on the sound designs and writing as a whole? I would describe it as a secretly nocturnal album!
There was a period of about three years during which I got the impression that my best creative time was at 3AM. I was awake past then every night due to my late work hours – I slept until noon every day – and the music ideas would just kind of flow around 3AM. I would say my most sprawling, somewhat dark songs were written during that time: “Charge,” “Be the Light,” “Slate.” I don’t know if that was a coincidence or not. About half of the songs on this album were written then. I guess generally I do prefer writing songs when it’s dark outside, though now that’s more likely to be around 9 or 10PM.
You’ve had such a diverse musical backgrounds previously with bands – how do you narrow down your sound for a specific album when you cover so many genres in general?
It’s really difficult to do that, actually. I naturally write in a wide variety of styles – it’s just whatever I’m in the mood to write, and I’ve been like that as long as I’ve been writing songs. I like doing that too much to want to try to limit the genres I write in. So the music itself is all over the place, and any kind of production that gets applied to those songs has to fit both with the song itself as well as in the context of the album as a whole. I had more songs I wanted to put on this album, songs I really like, but style-wise they were just too far removed from everything else to work here. I chose these ten songs because not only could I make them work as part of a whole in terms of the direction of the sound, but I was able to tell a story with them.
Sometimes the production of one song was guided by the song that came before it – “Red Wings” had to somehow form a bridge between “Sweet Girl” and “Desperate Times.” I didn’t start work on the production to that song until both of the surrounding songs were complete, and I let the feel of “Sweet Girl” guide the way I wanted “Red Wings” to come in, and what tempo it should be. “Red Wings” was actually much slower when I made my original demo of it, very ambient and washed out with the vocal harmonies. I felt that if I were to leave it in that style for this album, I would need more songs that sounded like that because otherwise it just sounded too out of place.
I’ve also read about how you came across the banjo which is an excellent read from your behind the scenes posts you place on your website. Do you have any other stories of discovery about the album you could share with us?
The slide guitar sound in “Sweet Girl” has been mentioned a little, but I’ll go into more detail about that. I’ve had a thing for the lap/pedal steel sound for a while now. I wasn’t sure how I wanted it to fit in my album, but I was thinking I wanted it on there somehow. I went to Craigslist looking for a lap steel player and got a few responses, but I didn’t know what exactly I would want an actual player of the instrument to do, so I never did anything with them. I got out my acoustic guitar to tinker around with it somehow, seeing if I could make convincing sliding sounds with anything I already owned. I tried a bunch of devices as a slide: a ceramic shot glass, an empty beer bottle, some sort of metallic item that I can’t remember (no, not a beer can). But this one glass makeup bottle I had – makeup that I don’t even use but still had – actually sounded pretty good. I put maybe five different effects on it to stretch out the notes as much as possible. While it’s not lap steel, I got the sort of effect I was going for.
One thing that stands out on the album is your vocal harmonies. How do you manage to create such a beautiful collage of voices?
In some cases I write specific harmonies, but other times I just go through and improvise harmonies along with the track and record whatever comes out. Some of it inevitably sounds terrible because I have no idea what note I’ll be singing next (I chop out the terrible notes), but I like doing it that way because I end up coming out with really interesting harmonies that I wouldn’t have thought of if I’d actually been thinking about it. Usually I have an idea of what I’m going for – tone, mood, vocal range/register – but not the specific notes planned ahead of time before I start recording. I like the ethereal, angelic stuff, so that is usually the vibe I go for with harmonies- but sometimes I want more of an epic sound, sometimes a happy sound, sometimes a little weird or discomforting. For example, all of the vocal harmonies in “Be the Light” were improvised except for the ones in the bridge, which I had planned specifically. I really wanted that song to sound pretty but also a little creepy at the same time, especially at the very end where all the odd vocal parts start coming in.
Any plans to do some live shows to support the new album?
Yes! I’m working on writing live arrangements of the songs. I won’t be trying to replicate my album’s sound. I like having “live versions” of songs, as opposed to just playing it exactly the way it sounds on the album. So I’m going to have a group of instrumentalists playing with me, and we’ll see how that sounds.
As an instrument enthusiast, are there any new instruments you’d like to include or learn for future projects?
I’d really love to learn bass, but if that doesn’t work out well for me I’ll definitely involve a bass player on my next album. Electric guitar, too. I’ve got songs that need those sounds. I’ve got a plucked psaltery hanging around that I didn’t use on this album, so it would be nice to find a place for that in the future also.
Do you have anything you enjoy to get up to as a break from recording / song writing?
Yeah, sometimes I would get up in the middle of mixing a song and bake a quickbread or cookies or something. Cooking was generally my distraction during the process. I’ve actually been cooking less extensively since finishing the album, which I find strange.
Lastly, as a truly independent artist, do you have any advice on any other artists wishing to get their music out there and how valuable is the internet as a tool for your musical adventures?
I haven’t exactly mastered this arena – I have a hard time reaching out to people for the purpose of promoting myself, and I always feel awkward doing it – so I’m not sure I’m a good person to offer advice on this! I do think it’s still important to have an actual, decent looking website with general information on it as opposed to just relying on a social networking page. And I personally think it’s cool for that website to have interesting content on it, related to the music, that isn’t already posted on Facebook or Twitter, etc. to give people something to really latch onto. Beyond that… I guess try to be less shy about it than I generally am, and try to have someone other than yourself promote your music for at least a little while if you can.
Thank you very much Lauren – best of luck with the excellent album that you can grab on iTunes and Lauren’s website.
Kim Edwards is a singer/songwriter whom branches off into various styles of music although more of it is underpinned by guitar and piano. Her voice is beautiful and her brass marching single “The Show” is wonderfully whimsy.
Note to self – don’t get on Derek’s bad side! Reminds me of War of the Roses – “Where’s Benny?”
