Hailing from Long Beach, California, Manuel the Band blurs the lines between rock, pop, and jam music, creating a warm, wide-ranging sound that’s every bit as diverse as the group’s Southern California stomping grounds. Rooted in the savvy songwriting of frontman Manuel Grajeda, it’s a sound that makes room for electric guitar, pedal steel, a two-piece horn section, and deep-set rhythms. A sound that aims not only for the head and the heart, but also for the dancing shoes.
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Brian Michael Henry – The Horror! The Horror!
When one thinks of horror movies, there are a few things that immediately come to mind—vampires, ghosts, knives, and blood-curdling screams. But for Brian Michael Henry, the genre carries with it a powerful romance, an outsider’s perspective on love, and a profound sense of longing. To explore the genre’s romantic facets, Henry created his latest EP, The Horror! The Horror!, a five-track collection of New Wave-inspired alt-pop tracks that examine love and desire from the perspective of classic horror characters.
The Horror! The Horror! may only be Henry’s second recorded release—following 2021’s Remote Work—but he’s no stranger to the stage, having made a career in opera and musical theater before diving head first into home recording at the height of the 2020 pandemic. “I’d never even really set out to record anything until the pandemic,” says Henry. “I just always did shows and performed other people’s stuff. I don’t really like to write songs about myself, but I started watching all these documentaries and horror movies during the pandemic and started writing as though I was one of the characters I’d been watching and then I became addicted to the recording process.”
While Remote Work was a collaborative effort between Henry and co-producer Colin Summers (aka Scrawnyman) and featured contributions from a handful of session musicians, The Horror! The Horror! is an entirely solo effort, a product of isolated late-night bedroom recording sessions, Henry’s self-described obsession, and a powerful drive to create something all his own. “I wanted to see what I could put out on my own without help,” says Henry. “On Remote Work, I hired a friend of mine to produce a lot of those, but for The Horror! The Horror! I was listening to a lot of Suicide, Depeche Mode, and Erasure and I just loved the idea that these bands were just two people or one person in a room doing it all themselves, and I wanted to do a full project that I did all myself.”
Throughout The Horror! The Horror!, Henry examines the humanity of monsters and the monstrosity of humans atop pulsing layers of cold electronic production that call to mind both John Carpenter’s signature synth scores and modern darkwave artists like Cold Cave in equal measure. Henry’s vocals, however, are reminiscent of Stephin Merritt’s signature croon and lend a notable warmth to each song, creating a more three-dimensional portrait of his characters and heightening the emotional resonance of the EP.
The Horror! The Horror! kicks off with “Waiting,” a dissection of obsession and stalking inspired by the films Single White Female and Fatal Attraction. At its core, “Waiting” is a love song and a pained exploration of longing, at once sympathetic towards its narrator, and acknowledging that her actions are immoral. From there, the EP continues with “Teenage Werewolf,” a thumping 80s synth ballad that utilizes werewolf lore as an allegory for addiction and alcoholism. “Ectoplasmic Love,” meanwhile, considers the loneliness that one may feel after exorcising a spirit from a haunted house, ridding the home of a constant companion and finding themselves truly alone.
Elsewhere on the EP, Henry engages in more playful fare, such as on “Vampire’s First Date” which molds the imagery and aesthetic of films like The Lost Boys and Interview With A Vampire into a bouncy song about immortality and flirtatious attraction. The EP closes with “Financial Serial Killer,” a twinkling, reflective track from the perspective of someone who falls victim to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and whose life is left in ruins, framing Madoff as a Michael Myers-esque slasher.
Although Henry’s background is in musical theater, his songwriting prowess and synth-heavy instrumentation throughout The Horror! The Horror! eschews any acute Broadway sensibility in favor of New Wave and post-punk influence, a recent development in Henry’s tenure as a writer and performer. “I used to hate the sound of synthesizers so much,” says Henry. “But as I’ve gotten older and listened to more synth music and film scores, it’s something I’ve grown to love. I don’t think these songs sound like a horror soundtrack, musically, but I wanted to capture some of those textures that synths provide.”
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Simona Smirnova – Bird Language (out April 8th, 2022)
Simona Smirnova wants to show you who she is. On her forthcoming LP, Bird Language, the Lithuania-born, New York-based vocalist/composer forgoes the fictional narrative elements that characterized her previous releases, instead crafting a sonic portrait of the artist and the world that has shaped her. “Both of my previous records were inspired by a fictional or historical figure,” says Smirnova. “For this third album, I wanted to represent myself as I am. Rather than shielding myself with a fictional character, this record is meant to expose me as a person and musician.”
Smirnova has been creating Bird Language for the past three years, writing and arranging compositions at her piano, demoing and recording alongside a jazz quartet, reworking and performing the arrangements, and ultimately teaming up with co-producer Maksim Perepelica and engineer Mike Marciano at Samurai Hotel Recording Studio in Queens, NY to record the album. Though Smirnova is the core vocalist, composer and songwriter, her ensemble for Bird Language also includes saxophonist Berta Moreno, pianist Caili O’Doherty, drummer Maxime Cholley, violinists Adrianne Munden-Dixon and Caroline Drexler, violist Carrie Frey, cellist Julia Henderson, background vocalists Takuma Matsui and Harini “Rini” Raghavan, and Perepelica on bass. To put the finishing touches on Bird Language, Smirnova sent the album to Grammy Award winning mixing/mastering engineer Dave Darlington, best known for his work with Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, and on the HBO series Oz.
Although Bird Language is a more personal record than Smirnova’s previous LPs—2017’s A Hunger Artist and 2020’s Joan of Arc, For String Quartet—the new album doesn’t rely on purely confessional songwriting, but rather explores Smirnova’s relationship to the natural world, nature’s relationship with humanity, and humanity’s relationship with one another. “This whole album is nature themed,” says Smirnova. “I’ve always been very connected to nature and now in my daily life I advocate for the green movement, conscious living, and things like that, but I wanted to create music that shows an appreciation for nature from a deeper perspective.”
Bird Language kicks off with its title track, opening with fluttering avian vocalizations before developing into an avant-garde piece of Eastern European-tinged jazz/exotica that sets the stage for the remainder of the album and introduces Smirnova’s unique style and affection for the natural world. The following track, “Volcano Dreams,” channels groundbreaking artists like Bjork and Joanna Newsom while exploring the ways that humans are connected through the physical land beneath our feet. “Just like tectonic plates, people might be sometimes very close to each other but constantly shifting,” says Smirnova. “When plates collide, they form explosive volcanoes, and I always saw that as a good representation of people’s relationships to one another.”
Elsewhere on the album, the theatrical, piano-driven “Dandelion Time” celebrates the magic of Springtime, as well as resilience and the renewed sense of life following a harsh Winter. “Solstice,” meanwhile, is an ode to the Summer solstice and the celebratory festivals and traditions that surrounded Smirnova throughout her childhood in Lithuania, and interpolates melodies and harmonies from a traditional solstice folk song. The following track, “Intuition” is a mood-altering jazz track that defies straightforward interpretation. “Instrumental music is more abstract and open to interpretation,” says Smirnova. “Just like intuition itself, it’s not clearly defined, we just feel it in our bodies. So I wanted to capture that theme musically, and I thought a more abstract arrangement would aid that.”
Growing up in a small village in Lithuania, Smirnova took to music at an early age, attending music school and learning to play the zither when she was only six years old. In her teen years, she relocated to a bigger city, took up the guitar, and founded a punk festival when she was seventeen. She earned her BA in jazz vocal performance from the Lituanian Academy of Music and Theater before moving to Boston to attend Berklee College of Music with a focus in contemporary writing and production. Bird Language exists as a culmination of Smirnova’s eclectic background, an inventive jazz record combining Baltic folklore, theatrical and pop-influenced vocals, and chamber music into an exciting, unique sound all her own.
This is a very important and personal song to me. I wrote it years ago, but never recorded a proper version until now. I lived in Roanoke, VA for most of my twenties. It’s where I first started playing in serious bands, where I started touring, where I lived when I met so many people who still mean so much to me. This song is a love letter to that town and those times and just being young and dumb and full of hope. And then, I suppose, also the melancholy and the lessons you learn when those dreams don’t work out. – William Russell Wallace
NYC singer and songwriter Mimi Oz isn’t afraid to highlight vulnerability and personal struggle, as her brand new album ‘Growing Pains’ clearly illustrates.
A surreal new music video was recently released to promote lead single ‘Hate’, created as a collaboration with Oz and music video director Dylan Mars Greenberg.
It’s a couple of years since we last featured B. Knox on Tracks, and we’re glad to report that he has a new album coming out on 8th April 2022 called ‘Far From Folk’ from which this knock-out song comes from. It’s a song that quietly creeps up on you and then taps you on the musical shoulder and says, “yes, I’m all about death and legacy and maybe just a bit about the living that happens before that.”