The new wave of Americana influences in pop started not too long ago and has only gotten stronger in the last few years, and in 2024 it’s bringing forth an era in provocative alternative folk music that a lot of us simply didn’t see coming. Phoenix duo Dorsten’s cerebral folk sound is perhaps the perfect example of what the appropriated aesthetic can produce in ideal circumstances, and their new EP To the River is probably the best way to get introduced to it. To the River is a five-track amalgamation of emotionality as translated through superbly crafted melodies, the likes of which you just aren’t going to find a whole lot of when browsing around the top of the charts at the moment.

INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/dorstenmusic/

The lyrics come alive in “My Sweetheart,” and “Chewing Gum” not through the push of the vocal but through the fragile presentation of each verse, which initially seems to contrast with the construction of both songs but sounds perfectly paired by the time we finish either track. Dorsten does not have to be all that elaborate with their poetic statements in this record largely because they’re already communicating so much to us on the instrumental front that to have been more linguistically intense would have been to make their overall look in this EP one of cluttered insistence rather than clandestine strength. They know what they’re trying to make here, and that just can’t be said for every band in their position today.

The lead vocal here from Sophie Dorsten is perhaps reason enough to get lost in the depth of this EP’s best moments, and her masterful contribution helps to make the tonal charismas of “Losing It” and “Vernazza” specifically all the more compelling. There’s nothing wrong with inviting indulgence into the mix if you’re going to use it the right way, and in collaboration with her brother Alex, there isn’t a drop of chemistry that goes without its share of the spotlight by the time we conclude the tracklist here. Every good outing in Americana is one that’s built on the concept of balance, and this is something I find very hard to argue with when listening to a piece that feels and sounds as complete and straightforward as Dorsten’s To the River does.

It might be an aesthetical crossover that lacks some of the frills that other folk records dropping right now contain, but for my taste in indie pop, this is a five-track record that does its players justice. This isn’t just poppy Americana – it’s melodic poetry with a decidedly emotive center, and that’s not something I’m able to find a lot of in any corner of music these days. With the talent of these two players in their prime taken into consideration, there’s no getting around the potential that their style is going to have if cultivated in the right manner moving forward. They’re off to a great pace for 2024 in this set of performances, and I think you’re going to agree.

Mark Druery

You can’t ever accuse Universal Dice of aiming for the lowest common denominator. I believe songwriter Gerry Dantone and his cohorts merge thought provoking themes, adult subject matter, and beguiling musical settings better than many much more well-known contemporaries and are writing and recording music aglow with timeless attributes. Their new single “Curse” from the forthcoming album release Misfit Memoirs is an excellent example of this.

URL: https://universaldice.com/

It’s structured as a dialogue between a parent and a child. “Curse” pulls no lyrical punches and its conversational, yet unflinchingly direct language connects with listeners from the outset. You won’t need to play the song several times to grasp what’s going on. Nevertheless, the musical components of the track encourage multiple passes. It’s delivered in a straightforward fashion yet the near-orchestral construction of the song, incremental in its effects rather than showing all its cards at once, begs for listeners to revisit it in order to fully appreciate its merits.

The track opens with acoustic guitar and Dantone’s lightly double-tracked vocals. Lead guitarist Bob Barcus punctuates the opening with scattered flourishes that heighten the drama and the table is set for a gradual accumulation of instrumental touches. The song’s percussion sets a relaxed mid-tempo pace. Barcus continues exerting considerable influence over the song’s trajectory with additional lead guitar lines, albeit brief, positioned at key points in the song’s arrangement.

“Curse” certainly benefits from its strong vocal melody. There are several stretches of harmony vocals heard during the track, as well, and they complement the persistent jangle at the song’s heart. There’s an inherent melancholy defining this song, never mired in despair, but nonetheless strongly reflected in the song’s insistent questioning during the second half of its “dialogue”. It’s a deceptively simple tune in its instrumentation and length but still packs a sly emotional wallop that gathers over time rather than attempting to bulldoze listeners.

Dantone’s lead vocal exercises tremendous patience. He never rushes his performance and allows the music ample room to breathe rather than trying to fill every possible space with his singing. The gentle lilt of his voice helps sweeten an otherwise woeful “message” underlying the performance. You’re not going to hear any “holes” in this song – “Curse” provides listeners with a solid listening experience from its tentative opening through its conclusive finish. It covers all the bases.

We should expect no less from Dantone and company. The members of Universal Dice have worked together for some time now and their familiarity bears tasty fruit with the new single “Curse”. This is an artistic unit, without question, but they are likewise capable of giving listeners a satisfying entertainment experience without ever pandering for the audience’s attention.

It definitely will breed curiosity about the pending album release of Misfit Memoirs. It’s what a lead single is supposed to do; whet our appetites for the main course. Based on this single alone, the forthcoming Universal Dice offering promises to be their best effort yet and a sturdy ever-timely reminder that classic songwriting fundamentals are never out of style.

Mark Druery

URL: https://www.chrischitseymusic.com/

It’s a personality that likewise manifests itself with a solid presence, commanding your attention without ever pandering for it. You want to listen to what this guy has to say. He essays each line of the song with knowing wisdom that cuts through the music and has a magnetizing effect on listeners. Chitsey draws from a tradition in the genre that he knows well and hearing him interpret it for listeners is all the confirmation we need that, in the hands of performers such as this, the classic country style has continuing relevance in 2024.

The arrangement is cut from the same tradition, yes, but Chitsey spikes it with enough rough and ready rock and roll attitude that it packs more of a punch than you may suspect. It’s a by-product of Chitsey’s thorough education on the Texas honkytonk circuit mixed with a dollop of Southern rock. It’s a winning combination for me. In particular, the guitar work flexes a great deal of muscle throughout the arrangement but never overstates its presence.

There’s no wasting the listener’s time either. The song could scarcely be more succinct hitting the three-minute mark and eschewing any extended instrumental breaks. The one conceivably “flash” moment in the song, the bridge, is a moment that Chitsey handles artfully and with the same directness defining the remainder of the track. There’s no putting on airs with this song.

The same is true about the lyrics. Chitsey’s words communicate with listeners on an everyday level absent any pseudo-poetic flourishes that would otherwise undermine the composition. I admire how he can sing a song about the restorative powers of whiskey without ever once reducing the song to a lowest common denominator level. This isn’t a “hey, let’s get drunk” song. It isn’t high-flown, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s more a thoughtful lament than anything else.

It’s a fascinating song in many respects. It isn’t every performer, regardless of genre, who’s capable of making the every day resonate with audible substance. The musicianship is never ostentatious, but nonetheless deeply felt and even classy. “Life Is Hard, Whiskey Is Easy” reminds me of the life-affirming country songs that my father used to listen to on country radio circa 198- and, ultimately, I can hardly imagine greater praise than that. It’s a feeling that comes without imitation. Chris Chitsey’s music draws from a recognizable frame of reference, but he’s his own man, and this is his music.

Mark Druery

The new EP Dark Side from Indian-origin singer and musician Anjali Ray carries on the tradition of challenging, rewarding music sustaining her professional journey from the outset. She brings a wide breadth of musical knowledge to everything she touches without ever reducing her art to the level of an academic exercise. Instead, the songs included on Dark Side and her prior releases testify to the wealth of emotion informing her creativity and separates her from far more studied and, ultimately banal, peers and contemporaries. Credentials such as jazz piano, Hindustani vocal techniques, and classical piano aren’t skills you pick up in an offhanded fashion; Ray has cultivated her skillset from the first and the results of her hard work are evident throughout the entirety of Dark Side.

The first track “Leave Everyone Behind” is arguably the EP’s folkiest moment. Her vocal range has important differences, but keen-eared listeners may hear a generous heaping of Joni Mitchell in the way Ray tackles material such as this. It lacks many of the piercing highs common with Mitchell’s prime, but the similarities are real. She spins an excellent lyric, as well, that smacks of pure performed poetry more than any other song on this release.

Ray shows her ability to effortlessly shift gears with the EP’s second track. “California” has a quasi-classical structure that invokes the vast expanse of America’s Westernmost state without ever lapsing into ham-handed histrionics. It’s another of the EP’s more outright poetic moments, without question, yet Ray continues to temper her verbiage with an ear turned towards unity between the words and the accompanying music. One never overshadows the other.

“Apple of My Eye” flashes her pop chops for the first time. Daniel Galindo’s production enhances songs such as this without ever pulling the spotlight from Ray’s all-important role. His emphasis on providing Ray’s material with an unimpeachable percussive foundation helps anchor each of the EP’s six songs and the pop echoes rife throughout this cut never dilute the emotional authority of her songwriting or singing.

The EP’s final two cuts are much more reliant on modern pop sounds than Ray’s penchant for folkie textures. The first “Tesla” is a song of leave-taking, the end of a relationship and what that looks like for her, and features some of her best writing on the release. She’s covering familiar territory for pop songs with this one, but Ray’s talent with the English language makes it an idiosyncratic highlight.

The final track “Middle of the Night” is certainly befitting a collection entitled Dark Side. This unflinching slice of emotional autobiography never leaves listeners embarrassed or wallowing in obscurity as anyone over a certain age will relate to its primal doubts and adult concerns. Anjali Ray’s new EP is easily rated as her most mature and evolved effort yet, but she’s far from a finished product. Her writing deepens with each new release, and she keeps broadening her musical identity with an eye cast toward posterity rather than transient popularity. She’s making music of our time for all time.

Mark Druery

No Signal’s second album Distorted Reality serves notice that this Boulder, Colorado headquartered trio has their eyes on big game. They could have written and recorded the customary sophomore effort featuring ten to twelve solid, well-written standalone songs and walked away smiling. Riley Schmelzer and his bandmates, however, went bigger. Instead, the sixteen-song magnum opus they’ve released positions these young musicians are generational talents, particularly Schmelzer, who are shaking themselves free of their intoxicating influences and striking out in an unique, idiosyncratic creative direction.

INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/4no3signal2/?hl=en

Schmelzer began No Signal as a fourteen-year-old and, now twenty-one, has exponentially grown as a songwriter, guitarist, and singer during those intervening years. The growth is obvious in the structuring of this collection. Opening “entropele”, the album’s first track, with windswept electronic contributions sets a definite mood for the release that the following fifteen tracks sustain. It’s a short introduction, however, before the band comes in. The song’s shifting arrangement sets a template for the other songs as well – very little settles in one place for long on this album.

“Jane” is kind of an exception to that statement. It flashes another side of the band’s character that they deliver with fevered conviction, crushing hard rock, but wavers between steamrolling listeners and art/alternative rock passages that are much leaner in comparison. Several songs on Distorted Reality are brief musical interludes rather than full-fledged compositions. The first of those is “euclidean sunrise”, a restrained and brooding minimalist tune distinguished by Schmelzer’s reflective vocals and his application of post-production effects to the singing. The latter aspect further enhances its meditative demeanor.

“Embers” takes their experimentation with sound and arrangement a step further. There’s a decidedly futuristic, quasi sci-fi tilt to the song that won’t appeal to everyone – you’ll either find it engrossing or else dismiss it entirely. It’s a great example, however, of how resolutely No Signal avoids self-indulgence. Even relatively alien compositions such as this, far removed from mainstream songcraft, nonetheless conform to the strictures of popular song without compromising their individuality.

One of the truly unique moments on the album arrives with the track “Prelude”. A spoken word vocal with ample effects unreels the words over a tempered electronic swell. It’s followed by another of the album’s short musical interludes entitled “Transition A”, running less than a minute, and setting up the following track. “Phosphenes” is a long centerpiece moment on Distorted Reality that stretches the band’s playing skills and compositional talents further than ever before. Extending past the eleven-minute mark, No Signal sweeps listeners through a multi-part epic that’s one-half electronic rock, another ferocious hard rock, and an acoustic final part that concludes the track with emotion and style.

“P S D” features piano, one of the album’s most underrated musical components, and an impassioned vocal that carries listeners through to the song’s conclusion. The evocatively titled “???” is another journey along the cutting edge opening with an assortment of ambient sounds, a strangely melodic guitar motif, and a patient rhythm section performance. The first eight plus minutes of the title song and album finale devotes itself to another furious and challenging hard rock attack. It has everything you want from a climatic effort and the eventual segue into a lighter conclusion feels natural. No Signal’s Distorted Reality redefines the band’s potential in dramatic fashion, and they’ve pulled off a serious, substantive work that will be difficult to match or surpass with future releases. They have the talent, however, to keep pushing further in the future and let’s hope they do.

Mark Druery

Name Sayers’ Joyboys in the Grindhouse has broad utility. Its varied uses as a synth-pop, cumbia, psych-rock, and hip-hop collection give the eleven-track release a staying power that few other modern releases share. Devin James Fry and his three bandmates cast a hip and intelligent eye toward posterity without ever succumbing to pretentiousness. Joyboys in the Grindhouse is a wildly entertaining outing. Collaborating with diverse guest talents such as Brooklyn rapper Chris Conde, his Orlando rap counterpart E-Turn, and The MC5’s legendary guitarist and solo artist Wayne Kramer peppers the release with inspired contributions certain to garner even greater audience appeal. Darkness and a quirky sensibility permeate these songs, but the pop pedigree of the songs ensures a level of unquestionable accessibility.

URL: https://www.namesayers.com/

Grammy-nominated producer Grant Eppley helps frame the songs in the proper sonic light. There are a lot of bases to cover. The band’s penchant for rich and rewarding arrangements announces itself from the first with “We Multiply”. It’s a song that’s far from content pursuing a single line of musical inquiry and branches off in a multitude of directions without losing its raison d’etre. “Receiving Evil” is a synthesizer Grand Guignol of sorts, practically abusing the listener at points, particularly near its conclusion. Bass player Grant Himmler stands out during this performance and his chemistry with drummer Marc Henry is undeniable.

You don’t often hear hooks like they serve up. “Reaper” confirms this with its deceptively light touch during the introduction, but Name Sayers can’t help but twist those initial intentions in darker directions. They incorporate synthesizers with such endless variety that you can’t wait to hear what detours they will take next. “Standing Wave” veers into lush quasi-balladry, or what would qualify as such for this band, and builds to its final effects rather than showing all of its cards at once. It’s definitely one of the album’s more melancholy moments.

The collaborations with outside talents are among the album’s high water marks. “Gravedancer” catches fire from the beginning, but Chris Corde’s added touch raises the temperature even more. Limited imaginations might balk at a synthesis of dark synth-pop with hip-hop on first impression, but Name Sayers will make believers out of the naysayers. “Three Will Grow Back” will as well. Orlando’s E-Turn and Corde dominate much of this tune and never disappoint. They throw themselves into the track with unbridled enthusiasm and Wayne Kramer’s guitar cuts like a razor through the dense yet powerful arrangement.

Eppley’s production gets a great drum sound for Henry to open “2 Go Missing”. Henry continues to impress listeners throughout the track with his muscular and spot-on percussion. Positioning this track near the end of the album is a shrewd move as it rates among the best songs the band recorded for this release. There isn’t a miss among the eleven cuts. Name Sayers put their best artistic foot forward with Joyboys in the Grindhouse and carve out a space in the indie music landscape that no one else occupies. It’s well worth your time to seek this one out.

Mark Druery

Bob Dylan wrote in his Blonde on Blonde track “Absolutely Sweet Marie” that “…to live outside the law, you must be honest” and I think Marc Miner agrees with that sentiment. He populates his new album Last Heroes with assorted renegades, outcasts, criminals, and the heartbroken. It picks up where his 2020 debut Smile When You’re Wasted left off and expands on the former’s thematic range while never losing sight of Miner’s core artistic values. He embraces Americana music, particularly blues and country, as naturally as breathing rather than straining to achieve effects. It makes each of the album’s eleven songs an unequivocal winner.

URL: https://marcminer.com/

“Sweet Revenge” begins the album in a big way. It’s a tale of two people, a man and a woman, and the consequences of their bloody pairing. Miner’s prior work has vital storytelling attributes, but he’s developed those skills even more since 2020 and Miner treats us to a jarring, yet completely coherent tale rife with vengeance at any price. The reverb-spiked electric guitar gives the song an added vocal quality and a smattering of echo applied to Miner’s voice enhances the track’s atmospherics.

He toughens the presentation with the second track “Girl Gone Bad”. The bluesy riffing that opens the cut expands into a stomping chorus where Miner unleashes his best rock voice. He’s wide-open, embodying all of the throwing caution to the wind craven lust built into the song’s lyrics. “Nicki & Bob” pulls back on the reins. He foregoes the bluesy firepower of the preceding song in favor of gritty yet comparatively nuanced country rock. It’s the best example of his storytelling prowess thus far on the album and Miner brings the song’s central characters to life in artful fashion.

He’s working even more so in a country vein with the fifth song “Hero of Laredo”. Miner ladens the song with numerous concrete details that help give listeners not just a keen sense of place but delineate character in a way only a handful of modern songwriters are capable of achieving. Dollops of pedal steel scattered throughout the track deepen its tragic mood without ever overshadowing other elements of the performance. There’s a welcome twist in the album’s instrumentation that comes with “Warrior Princess” absent from the other songs. He continues planting his flag in the classic country music camp, but his idiosyncratic subject matter and skillful use of language separate him from the pack.

PURCHASE LINK: https://linktr.ee/marc.miner.music

“Bible & Rifle”, the album’s latest single, will light listeners up thanks to its potent guitar playing and a passionate Miner vocal. He embraces his anger with this song, but it never steamrolls listeners; it’s enough that we get peeks at that emotion. It peppers the music with a distinctly different flavor. Its pace may strike some as a little too plodding, but others will relish its muscular nature. There’s enough on Last Heroes to please any hardened country or blues music fan and even rock music lovers will get off on Marc Miner’s songwriting. Last Heroes gives us a lot to think about and consider as well. This album isn’t perfect, but it’s a success by any measure.

Mark Druery

Recording in the right setting always has an effect on the artist in charge of the project, and in virtually all cases, the aesthetics of the content they’re recording. While Taylor Jules is more known for her straightforward pop harmonies than she is for any form of soul-laden poeticisms, her new single “Adickted” definitely takes something away from the mood in which it was recorded – and arguably expands the reach of its singer as well.

INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/iamtaylorjules/

Driven by an optimistic melody and verses belted out with tremendous oomph on the part of Jules, “Adickted” is as bold an entry to her upstart discography as any other, greatly due to the inventiveness of its origins.

Though it’s subtle, the almost bluesy edge in this material isn’t unnoticeable to the untrained ear at all – it’s buried in the soul of the piano parts as they’re thrust upon us from the start. The tempo driving “Adickted” isn’t overdone, but it sports a more obvious pop componentry in its stylization than the actual music does by itself. When the polish in the video joins forces with the literal accent over the strings, we get something that seems equally appealing to R&B buffs and more traditional pop fans, both of which have been receptive to crossovers for the better part of 2023.

The piano comes through for Jules with some superb indentations over the arrangement, but the keys’ role in this performance does not account for the majority of the fireworks in the mix. There’s chemistry popping off between all of the players in this piece, and because of the clarity with which everything has been produced for the pleasure of critics and casual listeners the same, we’re never robbed of a raw moment in favor of spotlighting pointless excess. These musicians are smarter than that, and they’re working for someone too meticulous to allow for such flagrancy in this single (or any other that she’s recorded in her career so far, for that matter).

Jules’ vocal is strong even without the assistance of the backing band, and I think it could even be said that her words wouldn’t have the same comforting vibe they do here were they coming to us from a different source. She has such a personable demeanor in this performance that picturing someone else with the mic in their hands is rather difficult, if not impossible outright. Personality isn’t everything in the American pop music scene, but it’s the cornerstone of success in any genre on the international level.

There’s a lot of unexplored potential within Taylor Jules’ sound that I want her to focus on a bit more than she has in the last couple of songs her discography has welcomed into the public sphere, but overall I think she’s still one of the best bets for indie pop fans this summer. Her single “Adickted” doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know about her music beforehand but instead puts her best qualities at the forefront of our attention. She’s always had it in her to step into different genres and take from them what she will, but here, she’s realizing her complex versatility before our very ears.

Mark Druery

When you get the energy flowing with as much panache and efficiency as indie syndicate Cedars does in their new single “Empire,” it’s a decent likelihood you play alternative rock the right way. The frills, the fluff, and the ridiculously fat tones that we used to get away with some ten years ago have no place in the genre now; instead, the tightness and efficiency of first-gen punk rock are here to stay, and this band has no problem living up to that standard. “Empire” plays and sounds like something out of the late rock n’ roll handbook in the sense that it’s comprised of as little as possible, and yet packing so much intensity it could put the competition out of business.

INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/cedarstheband/?hl=en

This chorus is arguably too heavy on the beat to sound light and poppy to audiences, but its structure is absolutely something ripped from the classic American songbook. Again, efficiency is the name of the game in “Empire,” and I don’t think that Cedars would have been able to make this song happen without rejecting the conventionality of indulgence so common among their peers. The guitar parts get a little excessive towards the climax of the song, but all in all the instrumental framing is almost as straightforward and unremarkable as the lyrics and vocal delivery are, which is far more a compliment than anything else. This band makes recording look like a real passion project instead of something all of the well-to-do are engaging with these days.

Production quality can’t save a bad song from itself, but it can certainly bolster the details of a good one in the best-case scenario, and the latter is true of “Empire.” Though polished like a pop single, this is a song that doesn’t have the natural shine a lot of mainstream content does, thus making its dirtier elements some of the most well-spotlighted of any in this mix. There’s no denying that Cedars take every step of the recording process seriously, and if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have put the work into this single that they did, especially given the way the market has been treating most of the puritan rock music to have emerged from the underground in recent times.

You don’t have to be a rocker to appreciate “Empire” and the heavy musicality it’s offering anyone who gives it a spin this summer, but those of us who have been listening to punk and alternative music for ages can enjoy a real gem in this single for sure. Cedars are playing a style that has become the epitome of its title once more, and while indie rock is never going to fade from public interest completely, this is a band living on the outside of the mainstream bubble and killing it every step of the way. Rock needs this fringe element to stay dangerous, and without the likes of Cedars keeping the torch lit, I can’t say the future of this genre would look as bright as it does right now.

Mark Druery

Ambitiousness doesn’t always equate to indulgence, and Mainland Break does a pretty awesome job reminding us all of this in their new album One Way Ticket to Midnight. In this latest affair to bear their name in the byline, One Way Ticket to Midnight lives up to the experimental premise of Mainland Break’s previous work rather marvelously, but if you were expecting this band to make a copy of their first effort in this piece, you’re in for quite a surprise with its ten-song tracklist. This is a record profoundly more progressive and gripping than its predecessor, taking elements of indie rock and left-field pop to a more melodic place than a lot of critics will be anticipating.

FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/mainlandbreak/

The vocal presence is the embodiment of emotion in “Portland” and the casual “Replacements,” but this isn’t solely because of the role our singer is given in the arrangement of these two songs alone. There’s no denying the volume of his voice in both instances, but the breakable tone of the strings in the backdrop is made to be intentionally brittle, emphasizing the potency of this crooning naturally. This is a fat-free indie outfit, and you can tell as much just in a cursory listening session with One Way Ticket to Midnight.

Eclectic song structures don’t do much to hinder the poetic value in the detailed “Lucky Miles,” “Memory Fades,” as well as “Split Time” or even “One Way Ticket to Midnight” itself. A minor segue in “The Ranger” would have come off as over the top had it not been afforded the same gruff cosmetic finish everything else here sports, and to my great pleasure, the tracks flow into one another without ever skipping a beat. It’s implied that we’re supposed to hear One Way Ticket to Midnight as a complete album, but with producing like this, it’s even harder to get up from it once you get started.

The fluidity between the players in Mainland Break is something that could leave a lot of the competition green with envy, and given how unforced they relate to each other in performances of “All Night” and “Calling After,” I’m surprised they haven’t been spotlighted more for this specific reason. Anyone can assemble a group of smart musicians for some shared time in the recording studio, but getting artists who can read each other as proficiently as this bunch can take more of a divine action than most of us are willing to acknowledge. It’s epic, and it’s unsullied by robotic bells and whistles in this album.

There’s just no doubt about it – One Way Ticket to Midnight is one of the most moving and multilayered works I’ve heard in the alternative genre this month, and probably a solid contender for album of the year among plenty of circles outside of my own. The best part about this tracklist is how it grips us into sitting through every song intently from start to finish while also inviting the cherry-picking often reserved more for Best-of compilations and the sort. Mainland Break is on top of their game, and in One Way Ticket to Midnight, make a case for global exposure I have to endorse.

Mark Druery