Entrain

Reprise - A Phish Experience

Crush - A Dave Matthews Tribute Band

Twen

“In ten tracks Twen charts a course across the sound waves of trans-Atlantic pop on their second LP One Stop Shop. Story has it, the band’s been #vanlife-ing since the pandemic, writing songs as they navigate their way through a society on the edge of collapse. The urgency of the moment percolates throughout the album, as does a healthy dose of classic FM radio. One Stop Shop is a love letter written to what gets left behind when you hit the road. Melancholic, with half an eye on the rearview mirror, whilst brimming with energy and excitement about the adventure ahead…   The Twen Towers in terms of songwriting are Jane Fitzsimmons and Ian Jones. The pair demonstrates a keen affinity for turn of the millennium Britpop. Shades of Oasis, which comes with its own rearview mirror agenda. Like those Manchester strumhounds, Twen imbues what might have been ordinary pop ditties with an improbable sense of the epic – and they do it primarily by means of the six-string. The sound of One Stop Shop is determined by that era’s commitment to the guitar (all types: jangly! reedy! sparkly! reverby! tinny! meaty! buzzy! and more…) as the main vehicle for communicating structure, feeling, mood, texture.   “Brooklyn Bridge” is a winsome jammer. An electric guitar introduces a descending hook that wilts like a week-old sunflower. The song transitions from electric to acoustic guitar, as a more coffeehouse chord progression takes over on the verses. Twen deftly blends both textures of the six-string into a single world of sound as well as any band you’ve heard lately. Like their Britpop influences, Twen buries itself into influences to pull out something new. “HaHaHome” plays out like a pop raga from yesteryear. It’s hard to believe there’s not a sitar buried in the mix. The vocals reverberate over a drone-y bass in long, sweeping verses that brush up against the chorus like waves washing up on shore.   Twen takes pain to distance itself from the kind of band trying to prey on your “rock-n-roll nostalgia,” and they’re right to. But you’d be committing a critical oversight not to draw a connection between songs like “HaHaHome” and the raga rock of the ’60s and ‘70s. Extra points for the tripped out, artfully layered production on the background vocals that would feel right at home on a late Beatles track.   Fitzsimmon’s own voice ranks as a close second in terms of the most signature Twen instrument: without her range and preternatural feel for rock-n-roll permutations, the album couldn’t have been half as ambitious.   “Long Throat” is a throaty vocal for the singer, a prime example of her use of voice breaks (a kind of yodel vibe) to move the mood of songs into more exotic regions. The ‘voice break’ is like a vocal purist’s version of stepping on the effects pedal, catapulting the singer up and down the scale to stratospheric heights or infernal depths in a split second. Vocal aliens like Björk practically live full time in these strange regions. Fitzsimmons, and most human vocal cord-havers, just visit from time to time.   “Automation” leans hard into the Anglophiliac vocal accents. Is the lead singer British? Available biographical information suggests that Twen cut its teeth in New England, not England. This isn’t a call out for authenticity – it’s just a question from a writer trying to hash out lines of influence. If an abiding love of Britpop was the only reason Fitzsimmons flexed the accent, that would be reason enough. Is that the reason? Twen includes a few tracks in One Stop Shop that will make your dance party playlist. “Feeling In Love (From the Waist Down)” is a straight up club track, albeit one from an era when people still danced to rock n roll. It’s hard to hear the song (maybe the whole album) without seeing visions of a Paul Thomas Anderson period piece in your mind’s eye. The piece in question… maybe Licorice Pizza or Boogie Nights? The parenthetical wink at the listener (From the Waist Down) is too earnestly awkward to count as tawdry. It’s the kind of quip you’d make at a teen disco.   “Fortune 500” and “Bore U” pick up the baton from “Feeling In Love…” The former is a sparkly and danceable janglefest. Shades of Stone Roses – the percussion has bounce and the guitar lick has that thin, reedy quality and hardly any meat on the bone. If Jane Fitzsimmons’ vocals had a color, the color would be Burnt Sienna. Deep, powerful, earthy, a little damaged. The latter “Bore U” drives even deeper into the late disco domain, with Fitzsimmons’ vocals riding on top of the beat like a more ballsy, less breathy Blondie.   The social and political messages in One Stop Shop are not lost on the listener. It would be hard to drive around the highways and byways of America during the pandemic and not translate that panorama of social disintegration into your songwriting. Twen’s message is more “live your truth,” delivered in the lingo of pop lyrics, than any particular dogma. What is communicated above all is a longing for a sense of place – whether that means feeling comfortable in your own skin or having a bed without four wheels – coupled with a creeping suspicion that anything worth knowing or doing is accomplished along the way, rather than at the final destination. The album celebrates life on the road, but also hints at the exhaustion that comes with the relentless grind of the proverbial #vanlife. For some of us, one circuit around the country sucking down meals at roadside diners is enough adventure for a lifetime. One Stop Shop is written for those blessed and cursed souls, who love a homecoming, but just can’t wait to get back on the road again.” - Mike Gutierrez   On July 22, DIYers twen self-released their 2nd LP ‘One Stop Shop’; a collection of 10 songs that finds the band writing, producing, mixing, directing, designing, booking and managing their own project. In an age of mediocre songs with pristine studio-production, One Stop Shop provides an antidote with 10 hook-laden compositions, chock-full of purposeful, inspired rock songs about modern life in 2022. Half-written tunes, downloaded beats, multi-producer records, stylists and PR teams should run for the hills.   Throughout the pandemic, Jane Fitzsimmons & Ian Jones self-converted their Dodge Promaster Tour-Van into a full-time, doomsday mobile-home; complete with solar power, carpentry, plumbing, propane, and refrigeration, all with their own four hands. Living in it full-time since February of 2021, 20 songs were written; 15 recorded, and 10 chosen for their post-pandemic proclamation. The songs are beautifully evocative, political without being patronizing or pandering, and widespread in their diversity of sounds & emotions. Title track “One Stop Shop (For A Fading Revolution)” is a propulsive overture for the end times, while “HaHaHome”, the album’s lead single- is an ode to brit-pop with a Stone-roses-esque bassline that could even make Paul McCartney jealous. “Brooklyn Bridge” showcases the duo’s ability to craft metaphorically complex lyrics that are simultaneously immediate because of the heartfelt prosody of Fitzsimmons’ vocals- vocals that until now, would’ve seemed out of twen’s former wheelhouse as “indie-psych-rockers”. On “Feeling In Love (From the Waist Down)” and “Sweet Dreams (In the Parking Lot)” they make good on their promise to ‘never write the same song twice’. Important; considering how many bands in the cultural sphere get by as one-trick ponies.   In addition, twen have solidified a 5 piece line-up, consisting of Merideth Hanscom on bass guitar, Asher Horton on guitar, and Luke Fedorko on drums. To show it all off, the band will be headlining 2 NYC shows at TV EYE & Mercury Lounge, before embarking on their biggest break yeta 24 city North American Tour supporting Rainbow Kitten Surprise. (All of this without an agent, management, or PR team)   When you take it all in, twen are proving to be among the most original, hardworking and authentic American rock bands today. Not because they are tiktok viral, or posing in decades-cosplay and attempting to draw you in by preying on your rock-n-roll nostalgia, but because they are writing great songs, traveling the country in a van they built themselves, self-producing their own art, screenprinting their own merch, and doing it their way, all against the backdrop of the apocalypse. That image can’t be crafted by a team, and just as has always been the case, that freedom is what rock n’ roll really feels like.

The Barr Brothers

The Barr Brothers - Queens of the Breakers   "You just try to see the thingfor what it isand what it isisa heartbreaking,soulshaking,overwhelmingexhalation." - "Defibrillation" To begin their third album, The Barr Brothers had to make some noise together. No plans or distractions, no preconceptions. No friends or strangers, label reps or engineers, no cellphone trills or city sound. No partners. No children. Not even any notebooks of lyrics - verses, choruses, chords preconsidered and plotted out. For the first time the band's three members - namesake siblings Brad and Andrew Barr, harpist Sarah Pagé - would go songless into studio. Empty-handed, whole-hearted, down miles of snowy road to a cabin on a frozen lake, a place full of windows and microphones and starlight and sunshine, with amplifiers in the bedrooms, their volumes turned up loud. They spent a whole week playing. These were improvisations lasting hours at a time - noons and midnights, dusks and dawns, a chance to remember who they were and who they were becoming. Some of this was groove: patterns inspired by India, West Africa and 808 drum machines, deeper and heavier than what they'd tried before. Some of it came from Pagé's new inventions: humbuckers, Kleenex-box signal-splitters, hacks to make her harp into a versatile, sub-bass-booming noisemaker. But there was also plain old guitar - songs opened up by that big electric sound. Brad had asked, "How do we make music when there is no song?" The answer was this roaming, three-dimensional music, filled with nostalgia and experiments and rolling space, found on the fringes of Saint Zenon, Québec (pop. 1,1150). The stakes felt high. The success of 2014's Sleeping Operator had taken the band from Montreal to Nashville to Milan, from the Newport Folk Festival to The Late Show with David Letterman. By now everyone knew the story of the American brothers who had decamped for Canada; how they had discovered Pagé by hearing her harp through a shared apartment wall. LP3 would be brought into a world where Trump was president. Where both Barrs were fathers. And where thousands of fans were waiting for the band's next volley. Queens of the Breakers was born in three sessions at that cabin in the country, a place called the Wild Studio. Brad took those first free sounds and distilled them into tidal, seeking songs - stories of the way lovers and companions fall in and out of sync. More recording followed at Studio Mixart, in Montreal, and at the group's own boiler-room of a practice space. The result is this: 11 tracks of blazing courage and failing resolve; music suffused with low grooves and darting melodies, subtle breakages, the Barr Brothers' wide-open sense of the blues.  Some of this album takes place in the past. "Song That I Heard", with its memories of Brad's arrival in Montreal, the different ways he fell in love. Or Queens' title track, which revisits the Barrs' misspent youth - a gang of friends rambling through Rhode Island mansions, dressed in their mothers' dresses, wreaking small havocs. How many of our old friends do we still see? How many of those dreams came true? At times the sound's all twinkling, the score for a lost John Hughes film; at other times it's whetted, searching, like the stuff of Lhasa de Sela or Led Zeppelin's III. The rawest reminder of Queens' first jams appears on "Kompromat", which bristles with rattle and riff, Pagé's kora-like harp. "I think we're in love with your abuse," Brad snarls at his homeland. "You got one hand on the driver's wheel / in the other a noose." On Queens of the Breakers' magnificent opening cut, "Defibrillation", the reckoning is softer - but not necessarily kinder. "Defibrillation" was built atop a drumbeat, something Andrew found at a hospital one Christmas night. Sitting with his mother, holding her hand - she had fallen, needed stitches - he observed a pair of heart monitors, each connected to a different, unseen person's pulse. They were beating together, then not, and not: parting and crisscrossing. He tried to memorize the pattern. Later, at home, he learned to play it on bass-drum and snare and tom. When he sent the beat to his brother, Brad sent back the beginnings of this: a song like a letter from a father to his son. "I just thought I'd save you some time," he offers, "straighten it out here / make it rhyme." Still, the singer's not peddling fake wisdom . For all its striving, "Defibrillation" is a letter without answers, a gesture into space, a lament for the dither that exists between every human being.  It's this tension, this dither, that lives at the centre of Queens of the Breakers. Three players - friends, comrades, music-makers, all of them trying to play in sync. Three bandmates - each of them fumbling, remembering, trying to invent something together. A band still playing, even occasionally reimagining, their rock'n'roll.

Max Creek

Gubbulidis

Infinity Song

Infinity Song is a Soft Rock band based in New York City, comprised of 4 siblings: Abraham, Angel, Israel, and Momo Boyd. With a blend of tight vocal harmonies, dreamy lyricism, and sublime guitar riffs, the band creates a transcendent experience for the audience on every stage and in their recorded music. Homeschooled academically and musically, along with their 5 other brothers and sisters, by parents who founded the Boys & Girls Choirs of Detroit, the siblings have been performing in front of audiences since Pre-K. Raised on classical, gospel, and jazz, they draw inspiration from artists like Pat Methany, Marvin Gaye, and The Winans Family. Infinity Song’s journey began in 2006 when the Boyd patriarch, John Boyd, moved the family from Detroit to New York. The group performed all over the city, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Times Square, with Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain becoming their primary stage for the next 12 years. Over time, they turned casual park visitors into loyal fans, eventually being introduced to JAY-Z. In 2016, the band was signed to Roc Nation by JAY-Z, who encouraged them to stay true to their unique sound. In 2020, they made a giant splash with their debut album Mad Love, which, combined with several viral videos, amassed millions of views and earned the attention of Hollywood's biggest names. Infinity Song's recent success marks a bold chapter in their musical evolution, which they’ve described as their Metamorphosis. Their expanded sound, blending elements of soft rock, pop, and soulful melodies, has captured the attention of a global audience. The band’s breakout moment came with the viral success of Hater’s Anthem, a track that has been endorsed by Pop star Doja Cat and shared by millions of people worldwide. Leading many listeners to compare the band to legendary 70s groups such as Fifth Dimension, The Mamas and The Papas, and ABBA. But their journey didn’t stop there. Slow Burn and Sinking Boat, two additional singles from their Metamorphosis era, also became viral sensations, fueling their rise to new heights and captivating even more fans. In 2024, the band embarked on a successful world tour, playing sold-out shows in Los Angeles, Toronto, London, Manchester, Brussels, Berlin, Paris, and more. They also graced the stages of major festivals such as Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, and Pitchfork Paris - further solidifying their place in the global music scene. The band’s latest achievement, a LIVE album, captures the magic of their dynamic performances and continues to fuel excitement for their upcoming tour & singles. With the momentum building, Infinity Song is poised to make an even bigger mark in the year to come.     

Old 97's

"Rock and roll's been very very good to me," Rhett Miller sings on "Longer Than You've Been Alive," an epic six-minute stream-of-consciousness meditation on his life in music. It's a rare moment of pulling back the curtain, on both the excesses and tedium of the world of a touring musician, and it's the perfect way to open the Old 97's new album, 'Most Messed Up.' "I wrote that song very quickly and didn’t rewrite one word of it," Miller explains.  "It's sort of a thesis statement not just for this record, but for my life's work." To say that rock and roll has been good to the Old 97's (guitarist/vocalist Miller, bassist/vocalist Murry Hammond, guitarist Ken Bethea, and drummer Philip Peeples) would be an understatement. The band emerged from Dallas twenty years ago at the forefront of a musical movement blending rootsy, country-influenced songwriting with punk rock energy and delivery. The New York Times has described their major label debut, 'Too Far To Care,' as "a cornerstone of the 'alternative country' movement…[that] leaned more toward the Clash than the Carter Family." They've released a slew of records since then, garnering praise from NPR and Billboard to SPIN and Rolling Stone, who hailed the band as "four Texans raised on the Beatles and Johnny Cash in equal measures, whose shiny melodies, and fatalistic character studies, do their forefathers proud." The band performed on television from Letterman to Austin City Limits and had their music appear in countless film and TV soundtracks (they appeared as themselves in the Vince Vaughn/Jennifer Aniston movie 'The Break Up'). Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan told The Hollywood Reporter that he put the band on a continuous loop on his iPod while writing the show's final scene. 'Most Messed Up' finds the Old 97's at their raucous, boozy best, all swagger and heart. Titles like "Wasted," "Intervention," "Wheels Off," "Let's Get Drunk And Get It On," and "Most Messed Up" hint at the kind of narrators Miller likes to inhabit, men who possess an appetite for indulgence and won't let a few bad decisions get in the way of a good story. "A few people in my life said, 'You can't sing 'Let's get drunk and get it on,'" Miller remembers. "I said, 'What do you mean? I've been singing that sentiment for 20 years! I was just never so straightforward about it.'" It was a trip to Music City that inspired Miller to throw away his inhibitions as songwriter and cut right to the heart of things. "For me, this record really started in Nashville on a co-write session with John McElroy," he says. "I really admired his wheels off approach to songwriting, And I liked the idea he had for how he thought I should interact with my audience. He said, 'I think your fans want you to walk up to the mic and say fuck.' It was liberating." It reminded me that I don’t have to be too serious or too sincere or heartfelt. I just have to have fun and be honest. I felt like I kind of had free reign to go ahead and write these songs that were bawdier and more adult-themed." The magic in Miller's songwriting lies in the depth that he lends his characters. Upon closer inspection, the hard partying and endless pursuit of a good time often reveals itself to be a band-aid covering up deeper wounds and emotional scars. "There's a lot of darkness hidden in this record," he explains. "One of the big Old 97's tricks is when we write about something kind of dark and depressing, it works best when it's a fun sounding song. So it's not until the third or fourth listen that you realize the narrator of this song is a complete disaster." If that description calls to mind The Replacements, it's no coincidence. Miller is a fan of the Minneapolis cult heroes, and now counts Tommy Stinson among his own friends and fans. Best known as bassist for the Mats and more recently Guns 'n' Roses, Stinson joined the Old 97's in the studio in Austin, Texas, to lay down electric guitar on ## tracks, elevating the sense of reckless musical abandon to new heights and lending the album an air of the Rolling Stones' double-guitar attack. It's a collaboration Miller never would have even imagined in 1994 when the band released their debut. "We didn’t think we'd last until the year 1997," Miller laughs. "We thought the name would get a little weird when it became 1997, but we decided none of our bands had ever lasted that long, so let's not even worry about it. But as it all started to unfold, we realized we could maybe make a living doing this, and we were all really conscious of wanting to be a career band. It was way more important to us to maintain a really high level of quality, at the expense, perhaps, of having hit singles or fitting in with the trends of the time, and I'm glad we did that." Twenty years on, it's safe to say rock and roll has indeed been very, very good to the Old 97's.