Browsing Tag

ray charles

The Stanford Family Band – On My Holiday: A Riotously Sunlit Escapade Through the Intersections of Indie, Garage Rock, and Motown

Posted on 13 March 2024

The Stanford Family Band, following their debut ‘Love Me A Bit‘, have returned with ‘On My Holiday‘, a single that radiates with the warmth of a supernova. This track, a part of their upcoming 6-track EP ‘For Your Listening Pleasure’, is a vibrant testament to the Brighton-based band’s endlessly euphoric sonic identity.

From the first note, ‘On My Holiday’ is an immersion in a riotously colourful explosion of kaleidoscopic fervency. The vintage production, reminiscent of Ray Charles’ ‘Mess Around’, is a masterful blend of bluesy piano grooves and Beach Boys-esque harmonies. The trailblazers could never be as pedestrian as solely nodding to the past; with this release, they reimagined the aural ecstasy of a bygone era, tailored for today’s indie and garage rock enthusiasts.

Frontman Elliot Stanford’s captivating lead vocals, coupled with the band’s commitment to complex four-part harmonies and memorable melodic hooks resulted in a quirky upbeat odyssey through a bittersweet vignette, which affirmed that in the death of winter, the sun is just around the corner.

Elliot’s approach to songwriting, as he describes, is an exercise in balancing musical joy with lyrical melancholy, a juxtaposition reminiscent of the Beach Boys circa 1965. ‘On My Holiday’ is the embodiment of this philosophy, musically exuberant yet lyrically introspective.

On My Holiday was released via Goo Records on February 27th and is now available to stream on Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

CHARI + The Howlin’ Truth have dropped their mould-shattering fiery feat of Alt Blues “Fight For Me”

Posted on 21 June 2020
https://soundcloud.com/user-491801268-798404379/fight-for-me/s-SVgq601kmxh

CHARI + The Howlin’ Truth shattered the Soul Blues mould with their fiery Alt Blues track “Fight for Me”. The adrenalizing hit has quickly garnered plenty of attention with Soul fans who quickly realised that there has always been a gap in the market for aggressive Soul.

If you’ve looked at the state of the world recently, you’ll realise that the fiery aggression is more than justified, it’s essential. It compels you to feel the artist’s boundless frustration with the lack of progress in a society where saying that black lives matter is still a controversial statement for some. The track was written as an ode for all the lives who have been wrongly taken too soon. It’s a promise that the fight will continue and an invitation to join in and be as bold and unapologetic as CHARI.

Fight for Me is crafted with roots-deep rhythms and other timeless elements of Blues. Yet with the high-octane energy which every element of the track was crafted with, it hits so hard you’ll never forget the first impact.

With mind-bending super-sonic instrumental breakdowns and sleek infusions of Hip Hop, Rap and kaleidoscopically distorted Psych, Fight for Me unravels like nothing I’ve ever heard. If you put Led Zeppelin, Skunk Anansie and Ray Charles in an aural blender, you may just get an idea of what is in store when you hit play.

Rapper, songwriter and vocalist CHARI has my undying respect, love and adoration after hearing Fight for Me. I can’t wait to hear where she takes her aural revolution next.

You can check out CHARI + The Howlin’ Truth’s second single Fight for Me for yourselves by heading over to SoundCloud.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Dream-Rap? Is That Even A Thing?

Posted on 2 December 2017

Even with the amount of new music being made every day, with sheer weight of collective imaginations, the genre splicing experiments, the fusing and fusion of styles Garrison Carver seems to be on to something new here. Yes, there is a trippy trap beat, a cool R&B vibe and a rap delivery but that is then cocooned in something totally unexpected. Around these more expected elements he wraps a dream-pop haze, chilled psychedelia and electronic washes.

It’s confusing, but experience tells us that is a good thing, expectations are made to be subverted, rules are made to be broken and new musical horizons are their to be explored and DD does all of those things and more. Blissed out hip-hop? Ethereal R&B? Dream-rap? Are those even a thing? The fact that you have to invent whole new genres to put the music in is an indication of just how original this music is and how singular and lateral Garrison Carver’s thinking is.



Tenderhooks Release Quirky Track ‘Yolena’

Posted on 16 September 2017

What you think Tenderhooks are all about depends on which thread you pick up on first. Pick up on their lyrical content and you will find the same strange characters that Ian Dury or perhaps Madness peopled their songs with, pick up on the back beats and you find a soulful Ray Charles vibe. The weird-pop quirk, which runs through the song, is pure Bowie and the strange New Wave edge is very talking Heads. It is pop heading into rock; quirky rhythm and blues doing a spot of Avant Gardening and the ghost of any number of Bonzo Dog Band members haunt the hidden corners of the song.

Normally journalists have a hard time finding a label for a band because it doesn’t sit that easily in existing genres. Tenderhooks present a different dilemma as they appear to spend some time in almost every genre you can think of and make up a few of their own along the way!