Best of What’s New

It’s Saturday, and I’d like to welcome everybody to another installment of my weekly new music revue. According to my count, this is the 150th Best of What’s New post. All four highlighted tunes are on albums that were released yesterday (March 10).

The Nude Party/Word Gets Around

Kicking things off is a great tune from the third and latest studio album Rides On by The Nude Party. I first featured this North Carolina group in January 2022 when covering their eponymous debut from July 2018. As I wrote at the time: The Nude Party were formed in 2012 when freshman students at  Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. decided to start a band. Their members are Patton Magee (lead vocals, guitar, harmonica), Shaun Couture (guitar, vocals), Don Merrill (piano, vocals), Alexander Castillo (bass, vocals), Austin Brose  (percussion, vocals) and Connor Mikita (drums). At the end of their freshman year, they all moved together to a house outside of town and learned how to play their instruments. It still almost sounds a bit like a fairytale! What’s very real is Word Gets Around, a cool-sounding rocker with a ’60s vibe, credited to the entire band!

The War and Treaty/Lover’s Game

And we’re on to The War and Treaty, a hot-sounding husband and wife duo of Michael Trotter, Jr. and Tanya Blount – and I’m happy to say another act I featured before, in October 2020. Borrowing from that post: Apple Music describes their style as impassioned soul music that draws on traditional folk, country, R&B, and spirituals, often combining them all. Initially known as Trotter & Blount, they released their debut album Love Affair under that name in 2016. This was followed by the EP Down to the River in July 2017, their first music appearing as The War and Treaty. Healing Tide, the first full-fledged studio album under the current moniker, came out in August 2018. The record, which featured a guest appearance of Emmylou Harris, was well received and reached no. 11 on the Billboard Top Heatseekers Albums and no. 26 on the Independent Albums charts. Blount first became prominent in 1993, when she performed a duet with Lauryn Hill in the comedy picture Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. The following year, she released her solo debut album Natural Thing. This brings me to Lover’s Game, the smoking title track and opener of The War and Treaty’s third and new album. It’s credited to the duo and producer Dave Cobb who has also worked with the likes of Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile, John Prine, Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell, The Highwomen and Rival Sons.

Meet Me @ The Altar/Same Language

Meet Me @ The Altar is a pop punk trio who has been around since 2015. Initially, Téa Campbell (guitar, bass) and Ada Juarez (drums) met on YouTube and developed a bond that led to their decision to form a band. Following an online audition, Edith Victoria (vocals) joined them in 2017. Three years later after they had publically been endorsed by pop punk veterans Alex Gaskarth and Dan Campbell, of the bands All Time Low and The Wonder Years, respectively, Meet Me @ The Altar went viral and were signed by label Fueled by Ramen in October of the same year. Their debut EP Model Citizen appeared in August 2021. Now Meet Me @ The Altar are out with their first full-length album Past // Present // Future. Here’s Same Language, a catchy tune.

The Luka State/Bring Us Down

Wrapping up this week’s Best of What’s New are English indie rock group The Luka State. From their AllMusic bio: A British indie rock band with a solid guitar attack and urgent melodies that are both catchy and powerful, the Luka State burst out of the mining town of Winsford, Cheshire in 2013, scoring an early success with the song “30 Minute Break.” A change in drummers coincided with a shift in the Luka State’s creative approach, as synthesizer lines began winding their way into their guitar-based arrangements on their 2015 EP The Price of Education. A steady stream of tracks followed before the band scored another success with 2018 single “Feel It.” Fast forward to March 10, 2023, and the band’s sophomore album More Than This. Here’s the opener Bring Us Down, credited to all four members of the band: Conrad Ellis (lead vocals), Lewis Pusey (guitar), Sam Bell (bass, vocals) and Jake Barnabas (drums).

This post wouldn’t be complete without a Spotify playlist of the above tracks, as well as a few additional tunes by each of the featured artists.

Sources: Wikipedia; Apple Music; AllMusic; The Luka State website; YouTube; Spotify

Advertisement

If I Could Only Take One

I can’t believe it’s Wednesday again and we’re almost in July! This would be the perfect time for a summer vacation, and a beautiful tropical island sounds like an attractive proposition. But wait, before I can leave on yet another imaginary trip to some remote island in the sun, once again, I have to pick one song to take with me.

In case you’re a first-time visitor, there are a few rules that limit my options, which make the exercise both challenging and interesting at the same time. My pick cannot be a tune by a music act I’ve frequently written about. Ideally, it should be a band or artist I haven’t covered yet. It can only be one track, not an entire album. And picks must be in alphabetical order.

This week I’m up to “r.” Bands and artists (last names) starting with that letter include Radiohead, Bonnie Raitt, Ramones, R.E.M., Red Hot Chili Peppers, Otis Redding, Lou Reed, Keith Richards, The Rolling Stones, Linda Ronstadt and Roxy Music, among others.

Based on the above criteria, Bonnie Raitt, The Rolling Stones and Linda Ronstadt were immediately excluded from further consideration. For some of the other artists, sadly, I had to search my own blog to refresh my memory to what extent I had covered them before. At the end, it came down to picking Radiohead or Roxy Music, and I decided to go with the latter and More Than This.

More Than This, written by Bryan Ferry, first appeared in April 1982 as the lead single of Roxy Music’s eighth and final studio album Avalon, released the following month. It’s just a gorgeous pop tune I’ve loved from the very first moment I heard the band playing it on the radio at the time it came out.

More Than This was popular, reaching no. 6 in each the UK and Australia, but it wasn’t the group’s biggest hit. The latter was their great cover of John Lennon’s Jealous Guy, which they recorded and released as a non-album single in February 1981 to honor the ex-Beatle who had been senselessly killed by a deranged individual in New York in December 1980.

Art and pop rock group Roxy Music were founded by Ferry, the band’s lead vocalist and main songwriter, and bassist Graham Simpson in England in 1970. While they have been on and off ever since, their active recording period spanned 1972 to 1982. During these 10 years, Roxy Music released eight studio albums, three of which topped the UK charts: Stranded (1973), Flesh and Blood (1980) and the above-noted Avalon.

In 1982, at the height of their commercial success, Ferry who at that time was the only original member together with Andy Mackay (saxophone, oboe, keyboards, backing vocals), decided to dissolve Roxy Music and focus on his solo career, which he had launched in parallel to the group in 1973.

Roxy Music have since reunited several times for tours and are currently gearing up to be on the road again starting in September to celebrate their 50th anniversary. In addition to co-founders Ferry and Mackay, this includes Phil Manzanera  (guitar) and Paul Thompson (drums), who were all part of the group’s lineup that recorded Roxy Music’s 1972 eponymous debut album. The schedule of the five-week tour, which includes dates in Canada, the U.S. and the UK, is here.

Following are a few additional tidbits on More Than This from Songfacts:

Written by lead singer Bryan Ferry, this song is about a love affair that fell apart. Asked in 2014 by Entertainment Weekly why the song endures, Ferry replied, “For some reason, there’s something in the combination of the melody and the lyric that works for people.”

…In America, this song got some traction when it featured in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost In Translation in a scene where Bill Murray sings it in a Tokyo karaoke bar. When the song was first released, however, it had little impact on the charts, bubbling under at just #102 on the Hot 100. Many college radio stations played the song, but commercial stations stayed away for the most part.

Roxy Music occupied just a small niche in America, where they hit the Top 40 just once (“Love Is the Drug” – #30 in 1975), but they were far more successful in the UK.

…Ferry told The Mail on Sunday June 28, 2009 about the Avalon album: “I started writing the songs while on the west coast of Ireland, and I like to think that some of the dark melancholy of the album comes from that place.”

10,000 Maniacs covered this in 1997 on their album Love Among The Ruins. Mary Ramsey sang lead, as original Maniacs lead singer Natalie Merchant had just left the band to go solo.

Sources: Wikipedia; Roxy Music website; Songfacts; YouTube