The Japanese House
“I know I shouldn’t need it but I want affection / I know I shouldn’t want it but I need attention,” sings Amber Bain – AKA UK musician The Japanese House – on “Touching Yourself”, a sad and sexy pop-leaning earworm about desire and heartbreak. Much of second album In the End It Always Does is contradictory like this: beginnings and endings, obsession and mundanity, falling in love and falling apart. It’s the perfect circular portrait of a relationship – with others, with herself, with an experience – hence the simple, circular album cover.Written during a creative burst at the end of 2021, In the End It Always Does is primarily inspired by the events preceding it – including Bain’s first time moving to Margate, being in a throuple and the slow dissolution of those relationships. “[These two people] were together for six years and I met them and then we all fell in love at the same time – and then one of them left,” Bain’s remembers. “It was a ridiculously exciting start to a relationship. It was this high… And then suddenly I’m in this really domestic thing, and it’s not like there was other stuff going on – it was lockdown.”The album came together just as that chapter in her life was falling apart, with each song almost acting as a snapshot in time. From the dizzying swell of album opener “Spot Dog” (a rework of the 101 Dalmatians theme, her exes favourite film) to the emotional gut punch of “Over There” (an ode to relinquishing the throuple) and the sugar-sweet pop hooks of “Sunshine Baby” (a bright, bittersweet acceptance of the end), so much of In the End It Always Does glitters and shimmers with the mixed feelings of finally letting go. “Love was never the issue. I never wasn’t in love,” says Bain. “But I realised I wasn’t in love with myself. We broke up when the album was done.”Four years after her widely celebrated debut Good at Falling, this album sees Bain lean even further into the pop realm – with help from Matty Healy and George Daniel from The 1975, Katie Gavin from MUNA and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon among others. Bain credits Gavin especially with injecting her with creative energy and inspiration throughout. On the lush, lullaby-like “Morning Pages”, Gavin sings, “She’ll do that thing where she sits at your feet / And it used to be so hot, now it’s just sweet.” For Bain, these words gradually became her own. “She wrote a verse really quickly and sent it back, classic Katie-style,” Bain remembers. “At the time I was like, she’s writing about her relationship, and… I guess it became mine.”The album isn’t all heartbreak and lost love, though. On “Friends”, an upbeat, dance floor-ready song about threesomes, Bain sings in warped, auto tuned vocals, “Do I think about her more than you? Do I touch the way you want me to?” It was light relief to write about being one part of a three. “So many parts of being in a throuple is hilarious,” she says now, laughing. “It was one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. We’d go to a restaurant and be like ‘table for three’ and go to bed and be like ‘Good night, good night!’ It was very easy for me as a little unicorn to come in. And then suddenly I had two hot girlfriends.”Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify
Jordana and Dev Lemons
On her new EP, I’m Doing Well, Thanks For Asking, Jordana is getting to know herself again. Or more accurately: getting to know her selves.It’s fair to say the 22-year-old New York songwriter has shifted shape a few times in her short career. She got her start with homespun indie folk on Classical Notions of Happiness before jumping to the spindly bedroom pop of Something To Say To You. A year later, she was veering into the dreamy haze of her TV Girl collaboration Summer’s Over, before eventually giving way to the hi-gloss pop of Face The Wall. It’s the kind of omnivorous output the phrase something for everyone was invented for.Along the way she’s managed to make fans of Wallows, Local Natives & Remi Wolf, who’ve each taken her on the road in 2022, landing her in front of crowds that number in the thousands. In many ways, the magic carpet ride of touring that opened up post-pandemic hasn’t allowed Jordana the time to fully change forms again. Instead she’s synthesized a little bit of everything that came before on this new six song short-player. And while the overall sound pulls from each of her past releases, the songs themselves remain obsessed with love and neuroses, being left and leaving, pitying yourself and learning to stop.”SYT,” the EP’s lead single, is a soaring kiss-off from a jilted lover. “It channels the feelings of empowerment and emotional awareness after a tough breakup,” says Jordana. It wouldn’t sound out of place on Face The Wall, and certainly borrows from her most recent album’s logline advice of overcoming hardships.Elsewhere, on “You’re In The Way,” Jordana reaches back to the leathery indie pop of Something To Say To You’s “Reason” & “I Guess This Is Life.” It’s a song built around a simple drum loop, guitar strums and Jordana’s voice. “It’s about getting to know yourself again after seemingly wasting time investing in someone else,” says Jordana.Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | SoundcloudPennsylvania-born singer songwriter Dev Lemons straddles the line between R&B songstress and emo rocker, writing deeply personal bedroom pop songs designed to replicate a late night heart-to-heart chat with a close friend. Whether it’s touching on abandonment issues, toxic relationships, the fear of going to the dentist, or even tactics to deal with pampered nepotism babies, Lemons’ relatable music is about overcoming your demons and replacing them with the insulation of unhinged fun. A student of bands like Paramore, My Chemical Romance, and Bring Me The Horizon, Lemons shares a similar honesty in her songwriting and an innate ability to transform personal pain into galvanizing hooks ready to be chanted back by a crowd of fellow outsiders. Or, as she more succinctly puts it: “My music is about finding beauty amidst all of life’s chaos. By the end of a Dev Lemons song, you will feel somewhere in the middle of motion sickness, ecstasy, and maybe even a little itchy. Trust me!”Bandcamp | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud
Hotel Fiction / Trash Panda
HOTEL FICTIONHotel Fiction is an Athens, Georgia-based band composed of Jade Long and Jessica Thompson. Both women have been playing music for over ten years and began writing, performing, and playing together in January 2019. In August of that year, Hotel Fiction released their debut single “Astronaut Kids,” which received a warm welcome from the indie scene, and went on to amass over 2 million global streams. Hotel Fiction’s sound has often been described as genre-fluid, with indie, pop and rock influences. With Jade’s dynamic vocals and piano, and Jessica’s complementary lead guitar and harmonies, the two create a sound that invites listeners to settle in and stay a while. For Hotel Fiction, the no vacancy sign is never illuminated, everyone is accommodated here. During quarantine, the two finished recording their debut album, Soft Focus, which was released in the fall of 2021. The project was met with praise from Atwood Magazine, Early Rising, A1234, and We Are the Guard, and was placed on Spotify editorial lists Fresh Finds and Fresh Finds Rock, where it spent eight weeks straight. Most recently, Hotel Fiction has supported Beach Fossils, Adam Melchor, flipturn and The Brooke and The Bluff. The band released their new EP Enjoy Your Stay on October 28, 2022.TRASH PANDATrash Panda began in 2015 as the pet recording project of songwriter/producer/multi-instrumentalist Patrick Taylor (AKA Lazuli Vane), expanding into a duo then a trio in 2016. Pulling from influences as wide as neopsychedelia, soul, indie rock and pop music, the band considers themselves somewhat post-genre. Darlings of the indie scene, Trash Panda tapped into both the perils of modern dating and the existential questions of dark nights of the soul. Their 2016 EP “Off” features crowd-favorites “Aging Out of the 20th Century,” “Off,” and “Check Please.” Trash Panda’s 2018 album The Starclimber made a splash with tongue-in-cheek banger “Atlanta Girls” and the psychedelic groove of “Heartbreak Pulsar.”After the album, the band went on hiatus and pursued other projects, emerging four years later in 2022 with several new members, releasing four singles “Things Will Never Change,” “Doin’ Fine Today,” “STARHEART,” and “Made of Love,” which are quickly gaining attention, featured on more than 10 of Spotify’s editorial playlists. “Doin’ Fine Today” has seen radio play in France. In Trash Panda’s first wave, only two years of frenzied creativity, the band made a regional splash touring small and mid-sized venues. Then, during its four year hiatus, the band reached a certain level of worldwide cult status with passionate fans spanning the globe. Autumn of 2022 brought the band their first nationwide tour as support for Ceramic Animal. Trash Panda just released their second full-length album, PANDAMONIUM, coinciding with their first national headlining tour in the May and June.DYLAN INNESWebsite
School of Rock AllStars
The School of Rock AllStars are top teenage musicians from around the globe, touring North America and wowing crowds with classic and modern rock and roll hits. They are joined by School of Rock house bands that showcase the area’s local talent.Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Alexa Rose
On her new album ‘Headwaters’…Headwaters are the source of a river. The furthest point from where water merges with something else. They are not mighty. Just a network of small tributaries, like a creek, not necessarily picturesque, but they’re the most important part of the river. Water is fluid and inconsistent and sacred and indifferent. You can be miles down a river, but you’re still at the origin. And in that way, water feels like it has transcended time. That’s how these songs found me—the way memories find you, in that slivering, elusive water. As quickly as you come across them, you bend in another direction.Headwaters is the sophomore album from Virginian indie folk singer Alexa Rose. A series of minutely-observed vignettes that feel intimate and expansive at the same time. It captures the sweetness of life without avoiding any of the pain, with songs about time and its constraints, peppered with precise details pulled from Rose’s own life that make universal themes seem personal, inviting the listener to make each song their own.A series of rivers, Headwaters is centered on the fluidity of time. After a year where time has seemed to ebb and flow inconsistently and all routine has been dismantled, I found myself writing in the medium of water, says Rose. When I was sitting alone in my room in the southern summer heat, windows open, humidity fuming, a song called Human poured out of me. It was August, and all summer there had been such a tremendous sense of humanity, revolution, justice coming up against division, misinformation, fear. Like most regular, feeling people, I had such a strange mixture of emotions: grief, excitement; solidarity with the ways people across the world were showing up to love and support one another. I wanted so badly to run outside and be a part of it all, right then and there in that moment. But I was stuck at home. And in that strange swelling of simultaneous loss and the richness of witnessing so much kindness, I remember laying on the bed with the guitar, staring at the ceiling, and just singing “I wanna go downtown and look some stranger in the face.” I would be happy to see anyone. I just really want to hug someone. To jump into some icy swimming hole. To feel the surge of aliveness. And I felt so imperfect and raw, but I knew so did everyone else.Recorded over five sessions in Memphis, Tennessee at Delta Sonic Studios, with Bruce Watson producing, with mixing by Matt Ross-Spang and Clay Jones. Rose would sometimes bring songs written the night before and record them the next day with an all-star band, including guitarist Will Sexton, bassist Mark Stuart, drummer George Sluppick, and Al Gamble on organ and piano. The immediacy of being in the studio with freshly-written songs and an excellent band allowed Rose to expand her music in new ways.I feel like this record is the first time I’ve ever let my whole self into the room, says Rose. The parts of me that are angry and wanting to stand up and the parts that want to be quiet. The parts that remember being a kid. Letting myself release all of that in the studio and having all these people back me up and make it work was a tremendous gift.When I turned 27 and felt the weight of a decade in a conversation, I envisioned my present and past self in the form of a frenetic, uneasy current slapping up against a steady boat. I imagined my great grandparents in their garden in the golden embers of some evening and the timeless sensation of change, the colorful sunsets I’ve seen through their own eyes, decades later.Website | Instagram | Facebook
Jeff Rosenstock
Jeff Rosenstock makes increasingly chaotic albums for an increasingly chaotic world. With each passing year, it feels like the temperature of the universe boils five degrees hotter, and with each new album, Rosenstock’s music grows more unwieldy and lawless. Louder, faster, more feral. Which brings us to 2023—a planet on fire, a mere 90 seconds to midnight on the doomsday clock, and the release of Rosenstock’s appropriately titled, anarchic record, HELLMODE (due 9/1 on Polyvinyl Records). “To me, the album feels like the chaos of being alive right now,” Rosenstock says of HELLMODE. “We’re experiencing all these things at the same time that trigger our senses, and emotions that make us feel terrible. We’re just feeling way too much all at once!” But for all its textured turmoil, there are also surprising glimpses of clarity and grace to be found in HELLMODE, when Rosenstock deliberately slows things down in places that are prettier and more delicate, rare moments of shelter in the storm. Which only makes it more rewarding when these moments unexpectedly unravel and spiral back into extreme, manic chaos, like abruptly being flung into a Nintendo game on level 99. HELLMODE marks the fifth studio album the prolific Rosenstock has released in the last ten years under his own name, following the dissolution of his beloved cult projects Bomb the Music Industry! and The Arrogant Sons of Bitches. Also tucked into his rapidly expanding catalog is a live record, a ska reimagining of his 2020 album NO DREAM, and various dumps of stray songs and loose singles. And somewhere on the side, he has found time to score the Emmy-nominated animated series Craig of the Creek. Rosenstock’s rising profile and critical acclaim over the last decade have been something of an anomaly. He’s a proud torchbearer of the punk sonics, aesthetics, and ethos of his youth, leaning into pop punk and ska sensibilities that were deemed Decidedly Uncool by the gatekeepers of the time. (On any given day at a big outdoor music festival, he is likely the only musician who will bust out a saxophone solo.) But when Rosenstock celebrates these styles, he somehow ends up getting praise from tastemakers and landing on prominent year-end lists. Maybe it’s because his appreciation doesn’t feel like cheap nostalgia or surface-level cosplay. Everything he does is just so damned sincere. That success is something Rosenstock has been conflicted about, and fuels some of the anxiety that runs through HELLMODE. “It’s weird feeling success at the worst possible time, while the world falls apart,” he says.To record HELLMODE in summer 2022, Rosenstock once again enlisted his longtime studio collaborator, Jack Shirley, the Grammy-nominated master of heaviness who has recorded all of Rosenstock’s studio albums. But this time, they took a slightly more ambitious approach, booking time at the legendary EastWest Studios in Hollywood. They recorded to tape in Studio 2, the same hallowed ground where System of a Down recorded Toxicity, and where Whitney Houston laid down vocal tracks for The Bodyguard soundtrack. The newfound studio resources produced the biggest and most expansive Jeff Rosenstock record to date. Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
AJJ
AJJ frontman Sean Bonnette can summarize the band’s new album, Good Luck Everybody, in a single sentence: “Sonically, it’s our least punk record, and lyrically, it’s our most punk record.”And indeed, Good Luck Everybody (January 17, 2020), the Arizona band’s seventh album, stands out in their already diverse catalog. While still rooted in the folk-punk sound AJJ has become known for, the album is unafraid to delve into new territories that test the limits of what the band is capable of.“I think it explores some of the weirder sides of AJJ, the more experimental leanings that we’ve had in the past,” says bassist Ben Gallaty. Good Luck Everybody draws from a wealth of sonic inspirations, from Laurel Canyon folk-rock of the 60s and 70s to avant garde artists like Suicide, as well as some orchestral pop. There is even a piano ballad, the tragic “No Justice, No Peace, No Hope.”Lyrically, Good Luck Everybody is a change of pace from the idiosyncratic songwriting style Bonnette has honed over more than 15 years fronting AJJ. It still features his wonderfully weird turns of phrase and oddball word pairings, but this time, his thematic lens is more directly focused on the inescapable atrocities of the world around him. Longtime fans will recognize the album’s social commentary as a return to their 2011 release, Knife Man, but this time it’s fueled by a more radical urgency.“I usually try for a timeless effect in songwriting, so that you can hear a song and generally not think about the context under which it was written,” says Bonnette. “But for this one, I was trying to write, and all the bad political shit just kept invading my brain and preventing me from writing that way. So I decided to fully embrace it and exorcise that demon.”Much like Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs pulled their songs straight from newspaper headlines, Good Luck Everybody feels like a long scroll through social media feeds on a particularly volatile day.The song “Mega Guillotine 2020,” for example, came directly from Twitter. It was influenced by Twitter funnyperson @leyawn’s popular tweet depicting a mockup of a French Revolution-style guillotine with one blade and enough headrests for 15 Congress members. Bonnette says the idea inspired him to press record and start playing, and when he did, the entire song came out of his brain fully formed. The final version also features backing vocals by Kimya Dawson.“There’s something that comes along with scrolling through your phone on Twitter or Instagram and seeing a puppy, and then a joke from a comedian, and then a young black person being shot by police, and then another puppy, and then your friends announcing a tour, and then children in cages,” says Bonnette. “There’s something in that that fucks your brain up. I don’t know if it’s made me more of a passionate arguer or just made me confused and numb.”On “Normalization Blues,” Bonnette laments what this never ending deluge of atrocities has done to our humanity: “I can feel my brain a’changin’, acclimating to the madness / I can feel my outrage shift into a dull, despondent sadness / I can feel a crust growing over my eyes like a falcon hood / I’ve got the normalization blues, this isn’t normal, this isn’t good.”Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
The Milk Carton Kids
Completing their seventh studio album was a hard-won victory for The Milk Carton Kids, but I Only See the Moon was worth the effort for Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan. What started as a three-week recording session in the fall of 2021, with Pattengale producing the contemporary folk duo himself for the first time, stretched into a months- long project that found the pair digging deeper into their craft than ever before. With a new studio of their own in Los Angeles and the realization that they were in no hurry, The Milk Carton Kids took the time they needed to be fully satisfied with I Only See the Moon. The three-time Grammy nominees sound refreshed on 10 new songs distilled to the essence of The Milk Carton Kids: two voices blended together in spellbinding harmony, accompanied by subtly perfect acoustic instrumentation. Turns out that’s a tough sound to get just right, but I Only See the Moon shows just how much Pattengale and Ryan were willing to work for it.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
Eric Sommer and the Fabulous Piedmonts
Eric Sommer and The Fabulous Piedmonts are a roots rock powder keg wrapped around a burrowing bass clef. Huh? Yeah, one that’s headin’ down to 96 octaves below absolute zero. It hit Miami, turned around on a dime, and came back on a red eye.The Fabulous Piedmonts are a unique musical force. Ok, everybody says that, but this is one amazing combination of influences. So much so, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher just trying to describe it… but here goes:It’s like being on a bus driven by Amy Winehouse, with Ray Charles as the Tour Director. Ron Carter and Jacko Pastorius are hanging out the back window smoking cigarettes & Stevie Ray Vaughan is the bartender. David Bromberg and Steve Howe as Tour Managers with Johnny Cash and Dwight Yokum loading baggage and William Shakespeare taking Tickets while acting as Road Poet and Scribe…See what I mean? It’s hard to put this into words that make any sense. But the bottom line is this: gotta hear them live!More than the Sum of it’s PartsIt’s a high-octane mix of rock-steady percussion supplied by Amanda Sycamore, mixed with the bottom-driven bass gymnastics of Jimmy Hauer and the guitar-laced lines of lead singer and songwriter Eric Sommer.Amanda can’t remember a time when she wasn’t playing music. She is the newest addition to The Fabulous Piedmonts, while Bryant takes some time off. She holds both a BA and an MA in Percussion Performance, and has an impressive string of credits, performing with Drum Corps International, Busch Gardens Entertainment and an amazingly diverse list of touring acts like The Irish Tenors, Paul Anka and Kenny G.When not punching above her weight as the rocking’ groove engine of The Fabulous Piedmonts, she is the Principle Percussionist for the Salisbury Symphony!The Fabulous Piedmonts have a few extended acoustic landscapes that feature bass lines wrapped around acoustic stylings in an open-tuning setting… using lap-slap. slide guitar and on-the-fly variations… breathtaking!But this simple collection of words is nothing like seeing this show live.… when the rhythm section kicks in a few bars later, if you are not up and moving around or swinging from the stage lights, check your pulse. You might be dead…or in a state of transitory deprivation while you travel from this world through a sound portal on the nights Plutonian shore…Right off the bat, the slide guitar that opens “Red Dress” will grab you in mid-sentence, and when the rhythm section kicks in a few bars later, if you are not up and moving around or swinging from the stage lights, check your pulse. You might be comatose…A Little Gem in HillsboroughThe band has had a residency in Hillsboro, NC at The Hot Tin Roof which has been extended into January 2023. There is usually a local singer or solo artist in front of the show at 7pm and then things start rocking at 8pm or so.As the engine keeps revving up, The Piedmonts’ musical wall of sound starts to hit you like the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist: a combination of punk, power pop, Motown ballads, Muscle Shoals and blues-based Charlie Musslewhite-type grooves that pick you up, bounce you across the room, put you up on the ceiling and then ease you down slowly while you try to pick your jaw back up.Don’t take anyone’s word for it. Go see for yourself!Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Soundcloud
Teeyum Smith Album Release Show
* Opening set by John Saylor* Jon Shain and FJ Ventre* Jim Roberts* Eileen Regan* Orange County Allstars* “Thee” Tim Smith and the Will Play for Teeyum Horns* Other Special Guests Facebook
