How are you? The festivities and parties have started, there's live music almost everywhere, and everyone is getting ready for Christmas and New Year. The atmosphere everywhere is becoming more light-hearted. Well, at least here in my place. I don't know how it's elsewhere.
But there is a lot of music, and today's #newtunes also presents some new songs that might be a suggestion for you to listen to over the weekend.
Otherwise, I have finally managed to do a great job. I've made four year-long playlists featuring all my #newtunes posts. You can see the links below.
Now, on to the well-known and lesser-known artists fighting for their little piece of musical heaven. If you don't like something you can just skip.
Music4life!
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One of the current music divas has re-released the song "Morning Elvis", which is featured on her album "Dance Fever" this year, but now in collaboration with Ethel Cain, a singer-songwriter known for her unusual sound, which mostly moves between dream pop, alternative rock, gospel and folk.
The song is about the pressure and mental exhaustion of touring, where in the end the desire to perform in front of an audience takes over. A song about the power of performance and transcendence.
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With the album "Dial N for Noize", the Croatian hardcore band from Zagreb, Deafness by Noise, celebrates three decades of work in the local hardcore punk scene. The album was recorded in pandemic conditions, 2020 - 2021, and features different genre phases of the band, from the raw punk rock style of the 70's, rock'n'roll to the hardcore thrash metal of the 90's.
This song, Overrun, is a fast paced hardcore bounce video made in the style of an 8-bit video game.
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APTBS or A Place To Bury Strangers, an American noise rock band from New York, was once proclaimed "the loudest band in the world". They started in 2002 with the aim of creating an atmospheric blend of psychedelic rock, shoegaze and space rock.
Well, I don't know if they're the loudest, but this year they released their sixth album "See Through You". The album opens with "Nice To Be There For Me" with a simple regular rhythm and psychedelic guitar that produces painfully dissonant tones in the solo part. Reminiscent of early The Cure, but in a new, modern guise with a touch of NIN or Bad Seeds.
I recommend listening to the whole album.
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The album "Liminal" by the English duo Petbrick can be imagined at a rave or a metal festival. I would place it somewhere in noise as a genre, although noise covers a spectrum of sub-genres such as power electronics, harsh noise, japanoise, etc. The guitar and club landscapes are changing, in fact, they often even merge into each other. DJs sampling some grindcore track, death metal bands using electronic rhythms and so on.
The duo consists of Wayne Adams (Cower, Death Pedals and Big Lad) and Igor Cavalera (drummer of Brazilian metal band Sepultura), and is active in many other projects.
They are quite good at experimenting with mixing genres, and you can hear it in the track Distorted Peace. Definitely interesting, and not only for the fans.
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Birds In Row is a French band, formed in 2009 as a kind of post-hardcore or scream-metal band, but over the years and the albums they have released, they have shifted and changed the genres in which they could be placed. "Gris Klein", their latest album, is a reference to the leading artist of the New Realism, Yves Klein, and his famous shade of royal blue. Here, gris is the French word for grey. The leading idea of the new album - a state of soullessness that sucks the colours of the world and replaces them with shades of grey - is packaged in technically sophisticated and highly danceable rhythms. The sound relies heavily on pedal effects to give the feeling of electronic production.
But even the greys don't manage to completely cover the turbulent musical palette that lies beneath. Highly recommended.
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The album "Cheat Codes", featuring the track "Belize", was co-written by rapper Black Thought and producer Danger Mouse. Black Thought, or Tariq Trotter, is the rapper of the famous soul-rap group The Roots, and Danger Mouse, or Brian Joseph Burton, is a New York producer who works with Gorillaz, and also in the band Broken Bells, whose last album I featured last week.
In this typical East Coast rapper's track, the multicultural musical tradition of New York is immediately apparent, with samples of classical, jazz and soul music complementing the impressionistic poetics that the two experienced musicians masterfully lead from nostalgia to the future.
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A band from Baltimore, USA, two guitarists and a drummer, usually they don't have a bass guitar, but now I heard and saw on YT that they do, formed in 2013. Released 4 albums, the last one "Dark Waves" this year.
Very well tuned stoner-doomer crew, in this song the guitars riff, howl and whine, the drums and bass rhythmically accompany this hypnosis. Cool.
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Billy Idol, the legendary pop-rock hero of the 1980s, is back with the four-song EP "Cage".
Is there anyone who hasn't heard of Billy Idol? Because the character is more than striking: with a blonde punk haircut smeared with glue, wearing a leather jacket with rivets and trousers with several chains, with an image that was once designed for him by no less than Andy Warhol himself.
Before his solo career, Billy was, for a short time, the lead singer of Generation X, with whom he recorded four studio albums. He had a string of hits over a four-decade career, but I think "Rebel Yell" from 1983 was the biggest. He's been less publicized in the last ten years, but he's always had a hit when he's been around. Classic rock, the guitar is flawless, perfect, with complex solos performed with incredible ease by Steven Stevens and Billy's voice is still strong and husky.
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As I mentioned before, dear readers and music lovers, I used to have links here to all the weekly #newtunes posts and since it was getting too opaque, I ( although it took a while), created Spotify playlists for the whole year.
So if you're interested in new sounds from the past four years, you can listen to them at these links:
Music4life!
Listen loud!
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