Inspired by a trip to Nashville, Malin Pettersen’s “Pause” is gorgeously sparse, featuring nothing more than the Norwegian singer’s voice and acoustic guitar.
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Grand Canyon’s “Yesterday’s News” Added to Songpickr’s Fresh Finds Playlist
Los Angeles-based supergroup Grand Canyon’s new track “Yesterday’s News” was added to Songpickr’s Fresh Finds playlist this week.
PopMatters Premieres Hanne Hukkelberg’s New Single
For the last 15 years, Hanne Hukkelberg has been crafting an eclectic catalog of music that has often subverted pop music norms. The Norwegian singer-songwriter veers into experimental territory, invoking a studied, yet offbeat musical versatility that she’s been cultivating since the age of three. Beyond the usual piano, guitar, and drums, Hukkelberg’s knack for innovation has seen her turning the unconventional into instrumentation?—ordinary kitchen utensils, for instance, become another layer to her music. Consistently melding and overturning genre standards into something new, this rare, self-driven flair for the unorthodox has garnered her continued acclaim.
Wide Open Country Premieres New Single from Sofia Talvik,”Blood Moon”
Swedish Americana singer-songwriter Sofia Talvik looks to the heavens on “Blood Moon,” the dreamy, steel-laden new single from her forthcoming 10-track album Paws of a Bear (out on September 27).
Nadia Marie
Nadia Marie
The twisting, fog-shrouded road to Nadia Marie’s autobiographical debut EP, Weekday Weekend, is the stuff of chilling memoirs and avant-garde art films—the EP it birthed an affecting mini epic of minimalist bedroom-recorded indie- and electro-pop inspired by a split-second decision, a terrible accident and a life forever changed.
Several years ago, while attending college for sculpture and fronting Atlanta art-punk band Curio Museum, Nadia Marie was riding her bike home from class when a pedestrian ran out in front of the car she was following. The driver slammed on the brakes, and Nadia instinctively swerved to avoid a crash. Her bike clipped the curb and she went flying through the air, striking her head upon impact. Dazed and bleeding but unaware of the seriousness of her injury, she walked away from the scene without seeking medical attention.
The resulting brain trauma led to a state of intense amnesia, ultimately wiping out three years of Nadia’s memory, the two years that led up to the accident, and the year that followed. Anyone she’d met during that time was now a stranger—acquaintances, new friends, her boyfriend. Random parts of her distant past were also erased from her memory banks, while her ability to create new memories was severely impaired. At first she could only recall what happened a few minutes prior, then, over time, an hour, a day, a week, a month until, finally, she could store new memories at a more-or-less normal clip. This whole recovery process played out over a confusing and psychologically draining year of bedrest. And there were other changes, too, unexpected changes her friends and family noticed in her personality and tastes.
“There was so much of me that didn’t come back, so much of me that I couldn’t ever find again,” Nadia says. “I had no idea how to sculpt anymore. It was just gone. None of my clothing felt like it was mine. I didn’t like spicy food before, and now I’m obsessed with it. I had to relearn how to speak, and my speech patterns have been different since the accident. It felt like being Parent Trapped. I’m definitely not who I was, and I’m not really sure how I know that. There are all these little things in your brain that can be altered that you don’t think about until those connections are gone and rewired in a totally different way.”
The one thing that offered a trail of breadcrumbs to her past—that bridged the gap between the delicate folds of her lost identity and the new person she’d become after emerging from the cocoon of amnesia—was her ability to create music. Weekday Weekend, recorded by Nadia Marie in her recovery bed using nothing but an iPad, Garageband and a pair of Apple headphones, is a document of this valiant excavation of the self.
“I was literally in bed working on these songs, just banging away on a computer keyboard in my underwear,” Nadia says. “I was working so hard on them it pushed my recovery back. My obsession with writing and recording them, the level of concentration it took—I was supposed to be resting, but I was fixated. The songs were pulling me.”
“I like how DIY and intimate each track sounds,” she continues. “It really reflected my bedroom-bound state. But they also have this texture that sounds like the digital era we’re living in—there’s something disconnected about them. I’m really into exploring how that plays into amnesia and a sense of self and space. With “Weekday Weekend,” there’s this part that loops for a really long time, and I didn’t realize at the time because my memory was so short. I love this because it’s subconsciously conceptual—that’s what it’s like to have amnesia. It’s just like a weird looping nightmare, but sweet sounding.”
While she recorded and mixed most of the EP on her own, writing all the music and playing all the parts, on a pair of tracks—“Two Things” and “Superstition”—Nadia Marie enlisted the help of friend and producer Mark Crowley, who has since been tapped by Moog to help create their new line of synthesizers. “I’ve never been more musically in tune or compatible with someone,” Nadia says. “Mark heard exactly what I was going for. I would sing a capella without any click track or music, and he would somehow build around it in a way that worked. I hummed a lot of instrumental parts to him, how I wanted them to go, but he pushed things so much further and was able to build the songs almost out of thin air. He’s honestly a musical genius.”
While it contains multitudes, at its core, Weekday Weekend has been a vehicle for Nadia Marie to rediscover her elusive past while awash in the tides of her new identity. It’s about coming to terms with a loss of self, overcoming circumstances beyond your control, and staring down the blank-slate possibility of a new beginning. Perhaps nothing represents the promise and terror of this better than the new video for the EP’s title track, a short horror film conceptualized, choreographed and directed by Nadia herself. In four-and-a-half hypnotic minutes, it sums up her debut release, cycling through the totality of her experience in a series of gorgeous and disorienting visuals that play out across a dreary, wooded Southern landscape as she grapples with love, fear, trust, madness and truth.
Nadia Marie’s Weekday Weekend is out now.
Slark Moan
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Superstition for the Consumer Romantic
When Nashville based singer/songwriter Mark Sloan records albums, he takes the word “solo” seriously…and literally. He’s a true Renaissance man, one who plays every instrument, pens the tunes, produces/engineers the proceedings and releases the results on his own imprint. Call him a one man band or the definitive do-it-yourselfer but Sloan—who goes by the barely concealed pseudonym of Slark Moan—gives new meaning to the concept of indie. He’s truly independent of many pressures generated by the music machine that other, often lesser talented artists, are subject to. All of which explains why the uniquely titled Superstition for the Consumer Romantic, his sophomore full length, took about a year and a half to craft.
The album was laid down in pieces as Sloan, who records at home, spends much of his time on the road touring as a hired gun for an assortment of alt-country/pop acts such as Kelsey Waldon, Margo Price, Sam Outlaw, Erin Rae and more. Thanks to understanding neighbors and his own demanding standards, he worked at home at his leisure, carefully casting each song by overdubbing guitar, drums, pedal steel, and keyboards until he felt comfortable with the finished product. “I had the vibe of the record in my head. The recording process was more about filling in color and sketching it out. Because the band is just me, I wasn’t able to play the songs live so it was all happening in my house,” he says.
The material emerged from a rather dark, deeply introspective time in Sloan’s life, largely informed by a sense of dissatisfaction caused by the cognitive dissonance between expectations and reality in our rapidly shifting culture. “Expectations are a product of our environment and largely the cultural mythology that inform our behavior,” he clarifies. “We live in a world that is a blending of romanticism and consumerism. The romantics in all of us seek meaning in experiences and those experiences theoretically validate our existence. In a post-industrial capitalist age, meaningful experiences have been commodified and existential fulfillment becomes another consumer good, thus purpose becomes determined by purchasing power.”
Sloan was traveling a lot before and during recording of these tracks, frustrated he was unable to explore his creative instincts working behind musicians who were exploring theirs. That may come as a surprise since Sloan’s music floats in a shimmering pool of dreamy, occasionally edgy pop. Often melancholy but never gloomy, it drifts and soars on sturdy melodies, effortlessly smooth vocals with instantly memorable hooks and choruses.
Its blend of sounds isn’t jazz, but rather inspired by Sloan’s study of that genre. “The way to be a jazz player is to put as many things in your toolbox as you can, then have the freedom to open that toolbox and use whatever you want,” he says. To that end, touches of whimsical, Technicolor psychedelia, Beach Boys-styled harmonies, Beatle/McCartney-esque dexterity and ELO-imbued layering yield songs practically demanding to be played with the convertible top down on a clear summer day. Names like Harry Nilsson, early Todd Rundgren and Emmit Rhodes may also echo as these ten tunes roll out anchored by Sloan’s honeyed voice and sweetly stinging guitar riffs.
Lyrically incisive views about death and dying (the swaying mid-tempo “When I Go Away”), regretting life decisions (“Hindsite is 20/20”), questioning the irony of the American Dream (some subdued Chuck Berry/T.Rex rocking in the comparatively humorous “American Middle Class Disaster,” complete with a twisty guitar solo), and trying to help a partner in a situation you have no control over (the Badfinger-goes-country inflected “Easy Fix”) don’t seem like natural topics for the relaxed flowing pop Sloan molds around them.
The beauty of the album is its exploration of where life throws lemons, encouraging and sometimes daring us to make lemonade. Hiding in plain sight behind these glorious, multi-layered compositions with ominous titles like “Neurotic and Tragic Antihero” (which Sloan explains “weighs the value of ontological truth versus a shared dogma that brings people together”) are concepts worthy of sparking discussions long after the last lovely chords fade away.
Sloan’s amiably innocent, some may say boyish, vocals beckon the listener into his pop-savvy world. For most that will be enough as many will simply revel in his candy-coated, melodically opulent compositions. But digging deeper into these nuggets is just as rewarding. Reflections on his life’s difficult moments infuse an edge only hinted at in their soothing sonic sheaths.
Looking for “a song that paints a picture of a faux democracy, where the populace is disenfranchised and the state is primarily concerned with protecting the interests of a wealthy elite, noting that the admirable ideals of liberty and equality are never fully realized because we are often faced with a dichotomy of poor choices”? Head over to “Anarcho-syndication” which does just that. Or, if you’d rather bask in pure, unadulterated Steely Dan inflected jazzy pop with interlocking overdubbed wordless vocals, well, you can find it in the same place. Want a fun rocker about “the absurdities of dating in a religious environment” revved up with some rollicking Eastern overdubbed twin guitar solos? “Come on Over (Get a Little Bit Closer)” is your ticket.
This isn’t Sloan’s debut, but to him it feels like it. For the first time he has the tools and gear to generate the music in his head. “I very much had a tonal aesthetic I was shooting for where I wanted it to sound gritty and analog but have a clear pop accessibility,” he summarizes. Mission accomplished as Superstition for the Consumer Romantic goes down easy but with plenty of bite. It’s the ultimate solo statement from an artist with the vision and talent to do what few others even try to achieve.
Superstition For The Consumer Romantic is out now via Slough Water Records.
“Melodic, piano-driven folk-rock in the vein of Aaron Lee Tasjan and Robert Ellis” – American Songwriter