Author: Helena Lynch
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Loving Yourself Without Anyone Else’s Approval: CATLEA’s “Someone’s Got To”
Songs rarely appear right away. Some are written in an evening, others require time, pauses, and returns, until they finally coincide with what a person truly feels. With “Someone’s Got To”, CATLEA had it happen exactly like that. Perhaps that is why it sounds very sincere. “When I originally wrote the song,” CATLEA confessed, “it…
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“Those City Lights”: Love, BB’s Love Letter to New York After Dark
At the heart of Love, BB are original songs that sound like long-forgotten jazz standards. Recorded live to analog tape, the project’s music transports listeners to a world of late-night jazz clubs, romance, and showbiz mythology. “Those City Lights” grew out of an instrumental piece Michael Leviton wrote nearly fifteen years ago. The song is…
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Retro-Inspired and Vocally Refined: Ameliah Jayne’s “River”
“A broken heart is a wonderful leash, if you know which way to lead your ex,” – one of the greats would surely have said this, finishing their cold coffee. After all, romantic disappointment turned long ago from a personal tragedy into one of the most profitable storylines of the 21st century. But while some…
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Sound as Environment: Neolicious and the “Living” System of Coordinates in the Debut “”LET IT BE NIGHT””
They say that in the Universe nothing disappears without a trace – matter only chaotically dissipates in time and space, taking on new, sometimes bizarre forms. We consist of atoms of long-extinguished stars, and our thoughts – of echoes of random encounters and fragments of old melodies. But sometimes entropic noise crystallizes into something frighteningly…
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Meditative Neoclassicism of Alex Solely in the Album “Cascade”: Echo of Lived Days
There are emotions and memories that never find words. They remain living on the outskirts of consciousness – as a light shadow, an indistinct echo, an elusive feeling for which a form has not yet been invented. It is precisely this wordless sphere that Alex Solely – a neoclassical composer and pianist – explores in…
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Paul Stone & The Basement Collective’s Major New Beginning: “This Truly Feels Like the Start for Us”
To gather six cool musicians in a basement home studio, record a track for the series The Blacklist, receive praise from BBC Radio 2, and still remain a simple guy from Yorkshire – that, in brief, is the story of Paul Stone. He created the project The Basement Collective, where the main values are sincerity,…
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Love Doesn’t Break Alone: JB Elwood with His New Single “Who We Are”
“Rarely is only one besieger guilty of the destruction of a common castle – the cracks are laid together.” A breakup is rarely an explosion. More often, it is the slow crumbling of plaster, behind which it is easier to hide than to admit one’s own share of the blame. But what happens when the…
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Stand Tall and Keep Going: Rusty Shackle on Resilience, Friendship, and Hope
Sometimes all you need in a difficult moment is someone’s voice quietly saying, “You’ll make it.” There are days when you hold on thanks to inner strength and the presence of someone who believes in you. Usually, you think about this later – when you surface from routine, get through it as best you can…
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Seaside Gothic and Inner Collapse: Velour On Tap’s Debut
“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. This is how Leonard Cohen once subtly formulated the main wisdom of North American poetry: true beauty is rarely monolithic. It manifests itself where the familiar world develops a crack. Geography is made up of a set of coordinates on a map, but…
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Tim Corpus: “One Day I’d Love to Write a Soundtrack for a Modern Science Fiction Game”
Falling asleep isn’t easy: thoughts going in circles, the phone winking with notifications, and silence feeling too loud. Composer Tim Corpus, it seems, has found a solution – and recorded it. For ten years he has been writing music for film, stage, and media projects: his works have sounded in Carnegie Hall, performed by the…
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