Best of What’s New

Welcome to Best of What’s New, and I hope your Saturday is groovy. In this installment of my weekly new music revue, I decided to feature six tunes. The first five tracks are from releases that came out yesterday (April 14), while the final song appeared on April 7.

Kara Jackson/Pawnshop

Kara Jackson is a poet, published book author and singer-songwriter hailing from Oak Park, Ill. She was named the 2019 U.S. National Youth Poet Laureate. The title is awarded annually to a young person who, according to Wikipedia, demonstrates skill in the arts, particularly poetry and/or spoken word, is a strong leader, is committed to social justice, and is active in civic discourse and advocacy. In 2019, Jackson released her debut EP A Song for Every Chamber of the Heart. Now she’s out with her first full-length album Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? Here’s Pawnshop, a great tune co-written by Jackson, Kaina Castillo and Sen Morimoto.

Fruit Bats/Waking Up in Los Angeles

Fruit Bats are an indie folk rock band around singer-songwriter Eric D. Johnson. The group I first featured in a March 2021 Best of What’s New installment, was initially founded in 1997 in Chicago as a side project for Johnson who also led space rock group I Rowboat and played guitar in several other bands. Fruit Bats evolved into a band in 2001 when I Rowboat members  Dan Strack (guitar) and Brian Belval (drums) joined Johnson’s project. They released their debut album Echolocation in September that year. Since then, the group has had many lineup changes, with Johnson remaining as the only constant member. Waking Up in Los Angeles, penned by Johnson, is from Fruit Bats’ latest and 10th studio album A River Running to Your Heart – pretty catchy!

Brian Dunne/Bad Luck

Brian Dunne is a singer-songwriter based in New York City. From his website: Born and raised in Monroe, NY, Dunne learned to roll with the hits when he moved to NYC roughly a decade ago, barely scraping by at first as he forged his early career one hard-fought show at a time…In the years that followed, he would go on to release a trio of widely respected albums, share bills with everyone from Cat Power to Caroline Rose, and earn praise from the likes of Rolling Stone, who hailed “Chasing Down A Ghost” from his most recent album, 2020’s Selling Things, as “a stunner.” In 2021, Dunne landed an unexpected hit in the Netherlands with “New Tattoo,” a standalone single that reached #2 on the Spotify Viral 50 and landed him on a slew of Dutch national TV and radio programs. This brings me to Dunne’s new album Loser On the Ropes, which as his website puts it explores defeat and denial, fortune and faith, shame and redemption, all set against the backdrop of a world run by blowhards and bullshitters who manage to perpetually skate by without cost or consequence. Unlike its title may suggest, Bad Luck, written by Dunne, sounds pretty upbeat.

Hippo Campus/Moonshine

Hippo Campus are an indie rock band from Saint Paul, Minn. They were formed in 2013 by five students who met at Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists: Jake Luppen (lead vocals, guitar), Nathan Stocker (lead guitar, vocals), Zach Sutton (bass, keyboards) and Whistler Isaiah Allen (drums, vocals). After three EPs in 2013, 2014 and 2015, they released their first full-length studio album Landmark in February 2017. In addition to the co-founders, it featured DeCarlo Jackson (trumpet), who also had studied at SPCPA. Moonshine, credited to the group’s co-founders, Caleb Wright and Raffaella Meloni, is a pleasant pop rock tune from the band’s new EP Wasteland.

Danko Jones/Guess Who’s Back

Danko Jones are a hard rock trio formed in Toronto in 1996 by frontman Danko Jones (vocals, guitar), John ‘JC’ Calabrese (bass) and Michael Caricari (drums). Following a succession of various drummers that started in 1999, the band’s line-up has been stable since 2013 when Rich Knox joined. From a press release: Powered by a DIY punk rock spirit, and inspired by the good, great and grotesque of electrified rock ‘n’ roll, they have steadily built a colossal international fan base and become one of the most acclaimed live bands around, embraced by everyone from mainstream radio-rock fans to diehard metalheads. Along the way, they have released ten widely praised studio albums, generating a peerless repertoire of fists-in-the-air crowd-pleasers into the bargain. Now they announced their forthcoming 11th studio album Electric Sounds, scheduled to drop September 15 on German rock/metal label AFM Records, and released the first track, Guess Who’s Back. Co-written by Calabrese and Knox, it’s a pretty kickass tune from what the above-mentioned press release called “the undisputed kings of balls-out rock’n’roll.”

Greta Van Fleet/Meeting the Master

This brings me to my last pick for this week, the first track from Greta Van Fleet’s upcoming third full-length studio album Starcatcher, scheduled for July 21. Greta Van Fleet, who I covered on various previous occasions, were formed in Frankenmuth, Mich. in 2012 by brothers Josh Kiszka (lead vocals), Jake Kiszka (guitars, backing vocals) and Sam Kiszka (bass, keyboards, backing vocals), along with Kyle Hauck (drums). Other than Hauck who was replaced by Danny Wagner in 2013, the band’s line-up hasn’t changed. Starcatcher, which follows April 2021’s The Battle at Garden’s Gate, was produced in Nashville by the band and Dave Cobb, who has worked with the likes of Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile, John Prine, Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell, The Highwomen and Rival Sons. “We had this idea that we wanted to tell these stories to build a universe,” Wagner said about what appears to be a concept album in a statement, as reported by NME. “We wanted to introduce characters and motifs and these ideas that would come about here and there throughout our careers through this world.” Here’s Meeting the Master, which appeared on April 7 – sounds pretty epic!

Last but not least, here’s a Spotify playlist of the above and a few additional tunes.

Sources: Wikipedia; Brian Dunne website; NME; YouTube; Spotify

Best of What’s New

Happy Saturday and welcome to another installment of my weekly new music revue. All featured songs are on albums that came out yesterday (October 21). Let’s get to it!

Arctic Monkeys/Hello You

Kicking things off today are British rock band Arctic Monkeys who were founded in Sheffield, England in 2002 by three 16-year-old friends, Alex Turner (lead vocals, guitar), Andy Nicholson (bass) and Matt Helders (drums, backing vocals), together with Jamie Cook (guitar, keyboards). After starting out as an instrumental band, Turner became their lead singer and frontman. Arctic Monkeys are regarded as one of the first bands who effectively used social media to boost their popularity. They also hold the distinction to have released the fastest-selling debut album in UK chart history, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, released in January 2006. The band has since released six additional studio albums, including their latest The Car. Turner, Cook and Helders remain in the current line-up that also includes Nick O’Malley who replaced Nicholson on bass in 2006. Here’s Hello You, which like most tunes was solely written by Turner.

Frankie Cosmos/Abigail

Frankie Cosmos are an indie pop rock band around singer-songwriter Greta Kline. From their AllMusic bio: Guided by the succinct, sweet, and self-conscious tendencies of singer/songwriter Greta Kline, indie pop group Frankie Cosmos started as a prolific home-based solo project in the early 2010s. As a young teen in the late 2000s, she tapped into the quirky vibes of New York’s SideWalk Cafe anti-folk scene, which had given birth to the Moldy Peaches early in the decade, as well as the D.I.Y. ethos of K Records. Her songs appeared mostly online in various albums, sometimes on a monthly basis. Growing in popularity and influence, Frankie Cosmos made her studio and label debut with Zentropy in 2014. Two years later, Next Thing was her first Top 40 independent album. Though Kline had been recording with a backing band since Zentropy, the project’s first official outing as a quartet was 2018’s Vessel. This brings me to Inner World Peace, the third Frankie Cosmos release as a band. Here’s the lovely opener Abigail penned by Kline.

Archers of Loaf/Breaking Even

Archers of Loaf are an indie rock band formed in Chapel Hill, N.C. in 1991. According to their AppleMusic profile, they “were darlings of the indie world in the early to mid-’90s, thanks to an off-kilter sound that was edgy and challenging, yet melodically accessible at the same time.” During their initial seven-year run, Archers of Loaf released four albums. They broke up in late 1998 after drummer Mark Price had been diagnosed with and subsequently underwent surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome. In 2011, the band reunited in its original formation, which in addition to Price also includes Eric Bachmann (vocals, guitar), Eric Johnson (guitar) and Matt Gentling (bass). After a summer tour that year, it doesn’t look like they were active thereafter until February 2020. That’s when the band released a single, Raleigh Days, their first new music since 1998. And now Archers of Loaf are back with Reason in Decline, their first new album in 24 years. Here’s Breaking Even. This nicely rocks!

Simple Minds/Who Killed Truth?

Until February 2018 when I came across their then-new album Walk Between Worlds, which I reviewed here, I essentially had forgotten about Scottish rock band Simple Minds. After a series of successful albums in the UK and other markets between the early ’80s and the mid-’90s, such as Sparkle in the Rain (1984), Once Upon a Time (1985) and Street Fighting Years (1989), the band’s popularity faded somewhat. Now they are out with their latest and 19th studio album Direction of the Heart. While the group has seen many line-up changes since they were founded in Glasgow in 1977, co-founders Jim Kerr (lead vocals) and Charlie Burchill (guitar, keyboards) are still around. Other current members include Ged Grimes (bass), Cherisse Osei (drums) and Sarah Brown (backing vocals). Let’s check out Who Killed Truth, co-written by Kerr and Burchill. While it may not be exactly Waterfront, Alive And Kicking, Belfast Child or Stand By Love, it doesn’t sound bad.

Last but not least, following is a Spotify playlist with the above and a few additional tunes by the featured artists.

Sources: Wikipedia; AllMusic; Apple Music; YouTube; Spotify