MUSIC REVIEWS

A strong harmony is often at the foundation of a great pop song, and though it’s up for debate whether or not the new single from Taydem Shoesmith, “Are You Clapping?,” is as legendary as some of its predecessors (and clear forerunners) in the pop genre have been, there’s denying …

The guitars grow into beasts as we waltz through the opening bars of “Retold,” one of ten tracks to be discovered in Ralph Nix & the Guilt Birds’ Good Ingredients, but this won’t be the only time that they exert their dominance over everything else in this awesome new album from …

With a bold percussive beat and stirring but noisy guitar melodies, somehow an inviting harmony forms somewhere in the eye of the storm. For Matt Soren’s The One Tonic, breaking a lot of the traditional rock n’ roll rules comes standard with the territory that is the recording studio, and …

While they’re entirely organic and available to us in a litany of successful singles found across the country music spectrum in 2022, the string elements of the main melody in “Dandelion,” the new single from Justine Sletten, are some of the warmest I’ve heard all year long. The guitar parts …

Metal doesn’t have to be filled with a lot of excesses to win the attention of hardcore fans, but when it’s progressively stylized and given a powerful nucleus, there’s no debating how full-bodied a sound this genre’s best players can produce. In their new record Duality, rockers Suite Clarity aren’t pulling …

The contemporary singer/songwriter movement has brought us a lot of different forms of magic in the past few years, but there hasn’t been nearly as much humility coming out of its underground as one might expect there should be. URL: https://www.donmerckle.com/ In a generation that has been as equally focused …

From the moment the gargantuan riffage starts to come through our speakers with the opening track “Throw,” it’s more than obvious that we’re in for a thrashy rock n’ roll throw-down in the new album A Force Rising from Rising Force. Although there’s been some discussion of metal being somewhat irrelevant to …

Some of the most iconic songs of our generation are Christmas songs; just ask Mariah Carey, who makes, I’m guessing, 95% of her net worth double every single December as “All I Want For Christmas” controls the airwaves for thirty-one days straight. URL: https://haleydreismusic.com/ There’s something incredibly lucrative about being …

Daniel Andrews is cut from a different cloth than the plethora of country performers you hear today. The Houston, Texas native has scored big with the single “You Make Loving Me Look Easy” and his follow-up “Dirt Road Memories” promises to further expand his growing audience. It’s the sort of …

Sometimes a solo outing is the only way to get something off of your chest as a creative, and I think this is partly what led Chris McCooey to issue a masterpiece of a one-man effort in his new album Missing Pieces this December. McCooey’s melodic moxie is as powerful as ever …