MUSIC REVIEWS

When You Coming Home, the debut album from Ruark, doesn’t take very long to get us started with a righteous rhythm at all; in its opening title cut, we don’t have to wait for the wallop of gentle harmonies to come oozing out of the speakers at all – it …

A ghostly piano harmony follows every word Thomas Charlie Pedersen sings to us in the balladic “Green Plateau,” but as strong an impression as this song makes, it doesn’t dwarf the ensuing emotion we’ll soon embrace in the guitar-driven “The World is Not Your Oyster,” the tune that immediately follows …

“I need you / Like a bullet to the brain, just to see if I’m alive / I need you / Like an arrow to the heart, just to feel something inside” croons a seductive Morgan Mallory in his stunning new single “Bullet,” released this past January 23rd, with every …

2019 was a really awesome year for independent rock groups, with acts throughout the American and British underground making an impact worth writing home about. Stateside, New York/Florida-transplants Kings County issued a debut album that got a noteworthy reaction from critics and fans largely on the strength of star-caliber songs …

Exotic, surreal and subtly a driving force behind every stitch of audio that we’ll hear in the five minutes “Friend of Mine (Elton’s Epic),” the new single from Rob Alexander, will play, the piano keys that stretch their melodies out through our speakers in this second cut from Alexander’s Being Myself record …

“If you’re gonna run with the big dogs, you gotta get off of the porch” announce Flat River Band as the title track of their new album Every Dog Has Its Day starts to play. Blunt and free from the predictably enigmatic content that has become all too common among mainstream country …

Surreal and soft as silk in “The Flame (featuring Kerry Ironside),” robust and yet gentle in “Planet 8 (featuring Sharon Court),” the string play in Andy Michaels’ new album Incendiary Heart is a cornerstone of the record’s charisma, but don’t get me wrong – it’s but one component in the multifaceted splendor …

  In the last year, Ronnue’s music has been unmissable if you follow the American underground in any capacity. His single “Be Your Freak” jumped to #1 on the Hip Hop Add’s chart for the NACC (along with #11 on NumberOneMusic, #15 on the EIN – European Indie Network – …

Piano keys crash down from the heavens above. Jon Gonzalez’s voice penetrates the deluge of chaos with a sharply-defined melody undamaged by the adjacent discord. His words accumulate and form a cloud over the instrumentation in the foreground, and before we know it, they are as strong as any aural …

2019 was a landmark year for independent music on multiple fronts, and while there have been no shortage of intriguing trends to follow in the last twelve months, certain movements – surreal pop, the reprisal of melodic hip-hop and self-aware country music among them – were simply impossible to ignore. …