Best of What’s New

Happy Saturday and welcome to another installment of my weekly new music revue. Once again, I found myself with more songs than I was able to accommodate, a nice problem to have. Following are four I decided to feature, all from albums that came out yesterday (October 7).

Disq/This Time

My first pick are Wisconsin indie rock band Disq, who according to Apple Music were founded by two teenage childhood friends. Here’s more from their profile: The roots of Disq go back to the friendship of Isaac deBroux-Slone and Raina Bock. The two grew up together, and both were surrounded by creative, artistic families. After learning several instruments and exploring pop music foundations laid by bands like the Beatles and alternative rock starting points like Weezer, the two budding songwriters formed Disq when they were still in their early teens. With Bock on bass and backing vocals and deBroux-Slone on guitar and lead vocals, the duo self-produced and released the Disq I EP in 2016. Over the next several years, the band expanded to include additional guitarist Logan Severson, drummer Brendan Manley, and guitarist/keyboardist Shannon Connor. After signing with indie label Saddle Creek, Disq released their full-length debut album Collector in March 2020. This Time, written by DeBroux-Slone, is a track from the group’s sophomore album Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet. Great song!

Indigo Sparke/Pluto

This is the second time I’m including singer-songwriter Indigo Sparke in Best of What’s New after this installment from February 2021. According to a profile on the website of her record label Sacred Bones Records, Sparke writes with a rare and reflective power, creating music that builds and bursts as she examines love, loss, grief, and a newly realized rage. Born in Australia and now based in New York, Indigo worked as an actress before establishing herself in the Sydney music scene with her EP Night Bloom (2016). Over the next few years, she toured and collaborated extensively with Big Thief, released her single, “The Day I Drove the Car Around the Block,” to critical acclaim, had a song featured on the TV show Cloudy River, and performed across Australia and the U.S. Indigo signed with Sacred Bones in early 2021, and made her label debut shortly after with Echo [I previously featured the opener – CMM], which she co-produced with Adrianne Lenker (Big Thief), and Andrew Sarlo (producer of Big Thief, Nick Hakim, Bon Iver, and Hand Habits). This brings me to Hysteria, Sparke’s sophomore release, and Pluto, a beautiful song she wrote together with Aaron Dessner.

Surf Curse/Cathy

Next up is new music by Surf Curse, a music project by Nick Rattigan (drums, vocals) and Jacob Rubeck (guitar). From their AllMusic bio: A gritty and melodic Nevada-bred guitar-and-drum duo who later became a fixture of Los Angeles’ D.I.Y. garage and punk scenes, Surf Curse aligned themselves with the artist-run Danger Collective label where they released albums like 2017’s Nothing Yet and 2019’s Heaven Surrounds You. The sudden viral success of “Freaks,” a song they’d released years earlier, earned them a deal with Atlantic. That label has now issued Surf Curse’s fourth and new album Magic Hour. Here’s Cathy. I like their sound!

The Star Crumbles/Desperately Wanting

Before getting to the last pick, I have to call out fellow bloggers Jeff from Eclectic Music Lover and Marc Schuster from Abnominations, who brought the music project The Star Crumbles on my radar screen with recent posts here and here, respectively. The following is informed by these posts. Marc who is based in Philadelphia is actually a member of the project, which also includes his friend, Denton, Texas-based Brian Lambert. Both are longtime singer-songwriters and musicians. After they had met on Twitter, Lambert reached out to Schuster for some help with one of his songs earlier this year. Recognizing how well they worked with each other, they decided to form The Star Crumbles. Schuster and Lambert, among others, are both into ’80s music and bands like The Cure, Echo & the Bunnymen, New Order and Ultravox, which you can clearly hear on their first album The Ghost of Dancing Slow. They also came up with a fictitious story behind the band, which they captured in a hilarious mini-documentary. Here’s the remarkable thing from my perspective: While I used to dig much of ’80s music at the time, nowadays, I tend to be lukewarm about it. I definitely can’t say the same about The Star Crumbles and their tune Desperately Wanting, which pretty much grabbed me right away. Once again, this goes to show that at the end of the day, there are only types of music: Music you dig and music that doesn’t speak to you. Check this out!

The following Spotify playlist includes the above and a few additional tracks by the featured artists.

Sources: Wikipedia; Apple Music; Sacred Bones Records website; AllMusic; Eclectic Music Lover blog; Abnominations blog; YouTube; Spotify

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Best of What’s New

What do a folk-oriented singer-songwriter from Sydney, an indie rock band from New York, a power pop group from Toronto, and a multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter from Melbourne have in common? The first and the last are from Australia. Moreover, all of of these artists released new music yesterday (February 19), and they are featured in my new installment of Best of What’s New.

Indigo Sparke/Colourblind

Indigo Sparke is a singer-songwriter from Sydney, Australia. According to a profile on the website of her record label Scared Bones Records, her parents, a jazz singer and a musician, named her after the Duke Ellington song “Mood Indigo,” and her childhood was spent serenaded by a rich soundtrack of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. From a young age Indigo felt called to the stage, attending a performing arts high school, and followed it with three years in an acting school, working as an actress before embedding herself and heeding the call to the path of music. Indigo taught herself to play guitar in her early twenties. Over the next few years, she established herself on the Australian music scene, and released her EP Night Bloom in 2016. Indigo’s career continually bloomed, opening for Big Thief on the Australian dates of their 2017/2018 tour, and then was invited to play at South by Southwest 2019. Colourblind, written by Sparke, is the nice opener of her first full-fledged studio album Echo.

The Hold Steady/Lanyards

The Hold Steady are an indie rock band from Brooklyn, New York, formed in 2003. The current lineup includes co-founders Craig Finn (lead vocals, guitar), Tad Kubler (lead guitar, backing vocals) and Galen Polivka (bass), along with Steve Selvidge (rhythm guitar, backing vocals), Franz Nicolay (piano, keyboards, accordion, harmonica, backing vocals) and Bobby Drake (drums, percussion). Wikipedia notes the band is known for their “lyrically dense storytelling”, “classic rock influences” and “narrative-based songs [that] frequently address themes, such as drug addiction, religion and redemption, and often feature recurring characters within the city of Minneapolis.” The Hold Steady released their debut album Almost Killed Me in 2004. Boys and Girls in America, the band’s third album from October 2006, brought greater prominence. It was ranked no. 8 on Rolling Stone’s Best Albums of 2006 list. Lanyards, co-written by Finn and Kubler, is a track from The Hold Steady’s new album Open Door Policy, their eighth studio release. At first, I wasn’t too wild about Finn’s vocals, which oftentimes are more speaking than singing, but his style does work well with the songs.

Sam Coffey & The Iron Lungs/What This City Needs

Sam Coffey & The Iron Lungs are a power pop band from Canada. According to their Apple Music profile, Emerging out of Toronto’s punk scene, [the band is] a sextet of Ontario natives whose combined efforts result in a freewheeling, ’70s-indebted power pop sound. Originating out of Kitchener, Ontario, Coffey debuted the project in 2011 with the self-released Bedroom Rock EP, followed later that year by the band’s eponymous debut album. After a handful of D.I.Y. singles, they signed with California punk/garage indie Southpaw Records to release 2014’s Gates of Hell LP. Shows with Redd Kross, Flamin Groovies, and the Black Lips followed as their reputation grew throughout North America. Eschewing some of their more lo-fi leanings, they worked with producer Alex Bonenfant (METZ, Crystal Castles) in 2017, releasing their self-titled third full-length, this time via American indie Burger Records and Canadian punk staple Dine Alone Records. Here’s What This City Needs, a nice rocker from the band’s new and fourth studio album Real One.

Tash Sultana/Coma

Let’s wrap up this Best of What’s New installment with another artist from down under: Tash Sultana, a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from Melbourne. According to her website, she is an explosive global producer and artist who has commanded attention world wide since homemade videos went viral on YouTube. ‘Tash’ was soon selling out major arenas, a string of sold out world tours and headlining the world’s biggest festivals – no mean feat for an artist who just a year before was recording songs on a go pro in a bedroom back in 2016. Since Tash’s grandfather gifted a guitar at the age of three, the artist developed a love for self teaching an array of different instruments…Tash plays over 12 instruments (guitar, bass, drums/ percussion, piano/ keyboard/ synth/ Oud, trumpet, saxophone, flutes, Pan pipes, Sitar, harmonica, beat production) with guitar as their main love, a self trained vocal range spanning 6 octaves (From C2-A7 on piano) and a live show that needs to be seen to be believed. The one-person powerhouse started out playing open mic nights at age 13 with the help of a fake ID. Soon to finish school with the reluctance to get a ‘real’ job, took to the streets to busk every day of the week on Melbournes famous Bourke St back in 2009-2015. Coma is a tune from Sultana’s new sophomore album Terra Firma.

Sources: Wikipedia; Sacred Bones Records website; Apple Music; Tash Sultana website; YouTube