Sound Cloud Sunday – June 14, 2020
Sound Cloud Sunday June 14, 2020
Happy Sunday, y’all. Hope everyone is getting used to the new normal. I know I am, bringing you just an exceptional level of music each week that makes you wonder how deep is this damn well anyway? We’ve got some returning champions, some rookies and a whole bunch of intriguing new music this week on Sound Cloud Sunday on Laurel Canyon Radio. Hear the show live at 3pm PST, repeated at 11pm (or so) on Monday and then it lives forever right below this paragraph! Enjoy!
Dan Croll – So Dark
Hometown: Liverpool, England
Album: His third album “Grand Plan” is scheduled for August 21 release on Caroline Records.
Review Snippet: He cocoons himself in vibrant, Afrobeat-influenced sounds on From Nowhere and Compliment Your Soul, and steel drums also make an appearance in Home, adding a highlife kick to its sweet pop droopiness (Home also shows his mettle as a quirky lyricist: “If you ever come round to my house, take your shoes off at the door/ Cos it’s impolite not to, you’ll be damaging my floor”). It’s all wrapped in a leisurely vocal style that recalls Jack Johnson – in a good way, if you can believe that.
Website: https://www.dancroll.com/
Cosmos Sunshine – 20/20 Vision
Hometown: Brooklyn, Ny Via Connecticut
Album: His 4th album, 20/20 Vision is available directly from the artist on Bandcamp.
Review Snippet: Floating psychedelic melodies combine with a spacey rock groove.
Website: http://www.cosmossunshinemusic.com/
Allison Mossheart – It Ain’t Water
Hometown: Vero Beach, FL
Album: From the album “Home” out on Domino on July 31.
Review Snippet:
Website:
Shaky Feelin – Insider Mind
Hometown: Ventura, CA
Album: Their 3rd album “Insider Mind” was released May 1 on Funzalo Records.
Review Snippet:
Next Time in LA: August 14 at the Mint
Website: http://www.shakyfeelin.com/tour/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5kRT3w0Wq4
Brother Starling – The Air
Hometown: Philadelphia
Album: From the album “The Weight of Change” self-released in January.
Review Snippet: Drawing inspiration from rock and roll’s past and American roots music, Brother Starling takes you on a journey through Laurel Canyon with songs that capture the essence of artists such as Neil Young, Wilco, Fleetwood Mac, The Band, and Dawes.
Website: https://brotherstarling.com
Charley Crockett – Welcome To Hard Times
Hometown: San Benito, TX
Album: Title track from his new album out July 31 on Son Of Davy Records.
Review Snippet:
Website: http://www.charleycrockett.com/
Blanco White – Desert Days
Hometown: London
Album: The album is “On The Other Side” released June 5 on Yucatan Records.
Review Snippet: There’s a palpable wanderlust suffusing every second of On the Other Side, but for Josh Edwards—the British singer-songwriter behind the deeply unsubtle nom de plume of Blanco White—finding a home in unfamiliar landscapes is not necessarily anything new. Edwards left his native London to craft his sound from Spanish flamenco and Argentine bailecito and cueca, training in Cadiz and then Bolivia to hone his sound in the textures of Spain and Latin America. What results is an album that hits the ear like one long reverie, as Blanco White’s gentle, dreamlike folk washes over the listener in a wave. Each song strives to create a sense of place: not necessarily a real one, but reflections of the regions Edwards owes his craft to, ranging from South America to Somalia and back to the rural southern hills of his beloved Spain.
Website: http://www.blancowhite.info/
Sarah Jarosz – Orange And Blue
Hometown: Winberley, Texas
Album: “World On The Ground’ was released June 5 on Rounder. We love her so much!
Review Snippet: World on the Ground, though, is an act of looking inward, of keying into small details rather than grandiose ambitions. This is a smart idea. The album, Jarosz’s fifth, takes as its subject the space of central Texas, and the lives of the people there. (She hails from the Austin-orbit town of Wimberley, and currently resides in New York City.) In their unique ways, the ten songs that comprise World on the Ground feel like individual short stories, novelistic rather than journalistic in their detail. The perspective Jarosz takes in looking at her hometown the kind of view one gets of their home after spending many years away from it. Her mini-narratives reveal a deep love for her roots, a love that “burn[s] orange and blue” like a flame, as she puts it on second single “Orange and Blue”. These humane and sympathetic tales, like a good short story, paint a vivid picture from a small slice of life.
Website: https://www.sarahjarosz.com/
Andrew Hibbard – Changes
Hometown: Hamilton, OH
Album: Eponymous album released May 8 on SOF Aburn.
Review Snippet: Andrew Hibbard is a musician, songwriter, singer and writer of poetry. Born in Hamilton, Ohio in the late months of 1995, he began playing guitar at the age of 6 when his father showed him some basic chords. Since high school he’s been picking and roaming, following the paths cut by his musical forebears — Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Neil Young, Hank Williams, Chet Atkins and Lightnin’ Hopkins..
Website: http://www.sofaburn.com/andrewhibbard
Barricades Rise – Wide Eyes
Hometown: Midland, UK
Album: From the album “Two Mile Tapes” (sort of) available on Bandcamp
Review Snippet:
Website: https://barricadesrise.bandcamp.com/
Peter Holsapple And Chris Stamey – Today Could Be The Day
Hometown: Winston Salem, NC
Album: From the album “Our Back Pages” released in April on Omnivore.
Review Snippet: New arrangements of songs by the dB’s as a digital release to benefit the MusiCares COVID-19 Relief Fund.
The Recording Academy’s charitable foundation provides a safety net of critical assistance for music people in time of need.
Our Back Pages is a digital-only release of dB’s music re-imagined by the band’s Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey. The collection, featuring new acoustic versions of some of the duo’s favorite dB’s songs, will benefit the Recording Academy’s MusiCares COVID-19 Relief Fund.
Stamey explains, “Over the years, Peter and I have evolved acoustic versions of a number of our songs from our days together in The dB’s. While working on a duo project in my studio a decade ago, we took some time to lay down some of these arrangements, which are often quite different from the normal electric presentations. We are both always more concerned with making new music than with looking back, so it stayed in the archives. But it seemed like the time was right, so we finally completed and mixed it all over the last two weeks, just for this. We’d like to offer it now as a small contribution, a little bit of light in these dark days.”
Signature dB’s songs, including “Black And White,” “Big Brown Eyes,” and “Happenstance,” are ably propelled here by lyric and guitar energy alone, and the hooks remain—it’s easy to find one’s self singing along. Tunes such as “Dynamite” and “From a Window to a Screen” are revealed as precursors to the music the two made together later, as they feature “dual lead,” close-harmony vocals as essential elements. Others, such as Peter’s “Today Could Be The Day” and “Molly Says,” were originally recorded by the band after Stamey’s departure, so this marks the first time he’s gone on record with them. When going through the material in preparation for mastering, they even discovered a forgotten track, “Depth Of Field,” and completed it for this release; although a version had appeared on a Stamey solo record, it fits in here because it was originally written and rehearsed contemporaneously with the rest for The dB’s’ second album, Repercussion.
Another song, “Picture Sleeve,” is both old and new. A song by this title was in the band’s sets circa 1978, but all that anyone could remember, years later, were the first few lines, some chords, and the subject matter. Using those elements as a jumping-off point, it was rewritten for a Record Store Day single release three decades later, and a duo version is part of this release. Peter’s classic ballad “Nothing Is Wrong,” a staple of their live duo sets, was overlooked during the original sessions and sadly missed. Fortunately, it’s included on this new collection in a version The dB’s themselves recorded during a rehearsal in Hoboken, New Jersey in 2006.
“We’re still proud of the electric versions of the songs,” Stamey insists, “but a sturdy song should be able to handle a bit of reinvention from time to time, and it was fun to get under the hood and see what was there even without the charm and power of Will Rigby’s explosive drums and Gene Holder’s nimble bass runs. In most cases, it’s a trip back in time to the songs’ origins of being written on acoustic guitars in apartments or hotels, then strummed to the others in much the same way these recordings sound now.” Peter adds, “These stripped-down versions add a credence to our belief that a truly good song can stand up without a lot of bells and whistles.”
A few special guests joined Holsapple and Stamey on the sessions: John Teer (Chatham County Line) and Libby Rodenbough (Mipso) both contribute violin, and Andy Burton (Little Steven, John Mayer, Cyndi Lauper) plays keys on “Nothing Is Wrong” with, of course, Rigby (drums) and Holder (bass). The mastering by Greg Calbi and Steve Fallone at Sterling Sound is a homecoming of sorts as legendary mastering engineer Calbi had previously mastered the pair’s influential Mavericks outing as well as Falling Off the Sky, the last dB’s album. For the most part, it’s Peter and Chris around the campfire at Modern Recording in Chapel Hill, N.C., grabbing whatever was in the room at the time: a toy piano, a ukulele, a banjo, a harmonium, an upright or an old Silvertone bass, and of course, guitars, guitars, guitars.
In addition to 1991’s Mavericks (RNA Records), Holsapple and Stamey also paired up for 2009’s hERE & nOW (Bar/None). For more insight into the genesis of some of these songs, see A Spy In The House Of Loud: New York Songs And Stories (University of Texas Press), Stamey’s 2018 “songwriting memoir.” Be on the lookout for A Brand-New Shade of Blue, Chris’s new audio-and-songbook collection, currently slated for a summer 2020 release.
From Omnivore Recordings’ Cheryl Pawelski: “Omnivore is grateful to the mastering engineers, graphic artists, photographers, and all who enthusiastically gave of their time and talent to help realize these projects. MusiCares has always been an important safety net for our music community, perhaps never more so than now. We are fortunate to call Chris, Peter our friends, and proud to assist them in getting this music released in support of the MusiCares COVID–19 Relief Fund.”
Website: http://omnivorerecordings.com/shop/our-back-pages/
Moira Bren – Afraid Of Your Heart
Hometown: Nova Scotia Canada
Album: Second single released on May 15! Tres bien!
Review Snippet: Moira Bren obviously knows how to work a strong juxtaposition. Her latest single, “Afraid of Your Heart,” combines a bubbly pop-beat, harmonies, along with the inexhaustible effervescence of ukulele, with something of a much darker nature. As Bren puts it, the lyrics of “Afraid of your Heart” describe an individual’s intense fear of someone in their life.
Website: https://moirabren.bandcamp.com/
The Two Tracks – Beautiful
Hometown: Sheridan, WY
Album: From the album “Ambience Driver” released June 5 on Small Pond Recordings.
Review Snippet: “Vibrant harmonies and a knack for writing eager, infectious melodies guarantee them an ability to lock on to their listeners without any hesitation whatsoever…The Two Tracks’ music serves as a reminder that the ability to tap tradition can pay off with a sound that’s still contemporary in its delivery and insightful in its conception.”
Website: https://www.thetwotracks.com/
:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e7ZuTwJrRo
Chuck Prophet – Marathon
Hometown: Northern California
Album: From the album “The Land That Time Forgot” out August 21 on Yep Roc (originally May 15).
Review Snippet: The female vocalist on this track on Stephanie Finch (his wife pictured above).
Website: http://www.chuckprophet.com/
Bernie Barlow – Back To Being Me
Hometown: LA via London
Album: From the album “Redeemed” out July 24 on
Review Snippet: “I wanted to make a recod the way Shelby Lynne or Carole King or Bonnie Raitt made a record “Barlow said. “Something you can put on and listen to over and over. Something you can put on ten years from now and still like it”.
Website: https://www.berniebarlow.com/
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Brian Campeau – Garden Song
Hometown: Sydney, Australia
Album: From the album “Ambience Driver” released June 5 on Small Pond Recordings.
Review Snippet: One of the great hidden treasures of Australia’s music scene, Campeau’s music cannot be summed up into a single genre. His combination of experimental sampling, sublime vocals and intricate guitar patterning paints him as a virtuoso by any right. Campeau draws influence from Dirty Projectors, Perfume Genius, Fever Ray, and Sufjan Stevens and more, manifesting in tracks that flaunt elements of minimalism, indie-pop, folk and boisterous composition, all at different times. With so many flavours on offer, the first listen of Ambience Driver immediately sets it as a true feast for the ears.
Website: https://brian-campeau.bandcamp.com/
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David Bromberg Band – Standing In the Need Of Prayer
Hometown: Philadelphia
Album: “Big Road” was released April on Red House Records.
Review Snippet: Bromberg combines the blues singling style of B.B. King with the lyrical sensibility of Tom Lehrer. Back in the day, Bromberg was famous for his musical virtuosity, sometimes playing a half-dozen different instruments in a single set. His dobro and banjo were apparently left at home for this tour, so the packed audience at The Dakota had to be satisfied with some virtuoso work on the electric guitar, acoustic guitar, and mandolin. The artists was backed by an excellent supporting band, with particularly outstanding performances by Mark Cosgrove (guitar and mandolin) and Nate Grower (fiddle and mandolin), plus solid support from Suavek Zaniesienko on bass and Josh Kanusky on drums. Clearly displayed on the quartet’s faces was the joy of making great music together.
Website: https://davidbromberg.net/
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