BrandsForBands

Jess Penner is a cheerful and cheeky, creatively ADD artist from Los Angeles. She's opened for FUN., toured near and far, and her whimsical indie pop songs have been featured in media all over Gods green earth. Raised on a banana farm on Kauai, HI; Jess is also a dinner party throwing, hen raising, people loving, thrift store shopping, self professed tomboy who hates musicals and tilapia but secretly loves painfully slow BBC miniseries and booty dancing alone in her bedroom.

WELSHLY ARMS combines their love of blues with rhythm and soul & good ol’ rock and roll, to create a fresh throwback sound that represents their Midwestern roots. Comprised of Sam Getz (vocals/guitar), Brett Lindemann (keys/vocals), Jimmy Weaver (bass/vocals), and Mikey Gould (drums), Cleveland-based WELSHLY ARMS pays homage to many of their collective musical influences. Listen to “The Touch” or “Two Seconds Too Late” from their debut E.P. Welcome, and you just might hear a little Jimi Hendrix, The Temptations, Otis Redding, or Howlin Wolf.

Launched in early 2013, the band debuted their video single for “Two Seconds Too Late” and garnered over 25,000 views on its first day of release. With buzz quickly building WELSHLY ARMS rocked their first headline show to a sold-out crowd at the Beachland Tavern, capturing the attention of many Clevelanders including fellow musicians and local press. Throughout the year, WELSHLY ARMS continued to establish a reputation for strong, spontaneous, and explosive live performances, from SXSW 2013 in Austin, TX to Los Angeles’ Hotel Café to House of Blues Cleveland, among many others.

In the fall of 2013, WELSHLY ARMS expanded their reach when three of five tracks from their debut E.P. were placed in promotional spots on television’s CW Network, including “The Touch” on Vampire Diaries and “That Voodoo” on The Originals. Following the success of their first E.P., WELSHLY ARMS recorded a 6-song Covers E.P. that released in late February 2014, giving a fresh spin to songs such as Sam and Dave’s “Hold On I’m Comin” & Roy Orbison’s “You Got It”.

WELSHLY ARMS is currently hunkered down at a house on Lake Erie about an hour outside of Cleveland to write and record their first full-length record, due out later this year. When not consumed by all things Welshly, you can find any of these four Clevelanders at a local dive bar throwing darts, drinking Great Lakes brews, and listening to their favorite tunes.

Playing their distinctive brand of reverb drenched garage, Jet Trash was named one of San Francisco's best up and coming bands of 2014 by Deli Magazine. Combining vintage sounds of Sixties Pop, Surf, and Lo-Fi with a modern D.I.Y. aesthetic, Jet Trash has begun to attract a fervent crowd in the City of Fog. “There’s about a million garage bands running around San Francisco these days, which makes it really difficult to separate the cream from the crop at times. Luckily, San Francisco’s Jet Trash somehow showed some promise and rose to the top of the mountain.” says Russell Jelinik, editor of The Bay Bridged. With spirited live performances throughout the Bay Area, Jet Trash has quickly generated a buzz culminating with a performance at this year’s Noise Pop festival in San Francisco.

The group was spawned from their desire to re-create raw & wild sounds like legendary west coast stalwarts The Sonics. Keith Shughrou (lead guitar) and Paul Kemp (rhythm guitar & vocals) provide a lively twin guitar attack that at times feels like a tidal wave crashing down on the beach. Marshall Fassino (bass & vocals) and Robby Justesen (drums) smooth out the sands beneath with their solid and infectious rhythm section grooves, all the while the vocals striking a perfect balance between sweet and razor-sharp.

After posting a handful of self-recorded demos online, Jet Trash caught the attention of veteran producer and engineer Andy Freeman (Eisley, Max Bemis of Say Anything) who was impressed with their unabashed use of melody and pop hooks. “They have well crafted songs; a lot of strong musical themes which I don’t typically hear in many garage acts.” Soon, the band and Freeman found themselves encamped at San Francisco’s legendary Coast Recorders. The result is a debut EP both unique in its approach to retro rock and decidedly confident as a first artistic statement, one that the band plans to take on the road for their first West Coast tour this summer in support of the new record.

The 11-songs that make up Gross Ghost's Brer Rabbit are the culmination of two years packed full with disconnected phone lines, unreliable transportation/gear, lost jobs, friends and family members and yet, some undeniably fun times for the band. The album is a collection of previously released tracks from the bands first two EPs, all remixed and remastered, in addition to a handful of new songs. Over the last couple of years in the lives of Mike and Tre, the duo behind Gross Ghost, these songs were written during found hours, in between tireless jobs and sketchy paychecks. A vessel for an escape of any kind was what brought these songs to life. It's been a long time coming, but we hope you find something to take from their scant retelling of how they saw the sights around them.

Libraries is the collective faults of Tommy Kitrick and Justin Chillington, 2 young bros who can Bruce Willis a beat and use it to blow the roof off a skyscraper. Their shared music tastes resulted in them forming a duo as they partied and bullshitted their way through 2010. Almost 2 years later, Libraries are wired to smash like global-warming fueled Wilmington waves. Their talents run the full gamut for modern electronic musicians: producing and recording original tracks, remixing other artists, and banging out powerful live performances.

RBTS WIN's music is many-faceted, both dark and ephemeral, tough and tender, scary and comforting. It's a fantastic study of electronica, pop, rock, chillwave and trip hop that transcends all of those elements and surfaces in a new place. Lush, rhythmic, star-lit, cool and expansive it manages to both suck the air from the room and breathe into space.

Leave Jeb Brinkley to his own devices between the hours of midnight and five a.m. and something’s bound to happen. With a little whiskey and a guitar lying around, the Chapel Hillian— originally from Irmo, South Carolina — is prone to wax poetic on every shade of heartbreak. From Appalachian folk ballads to the Mississippi Delta Blues, Brinkley channels it all in concise, foot-stomping iterations of old-time sounds. Listen to Bevel Summers and you’ll hear what it’s like to be a twenty-something reared on Jim Croce and Roger Miller cassettes playing in the car on the way to school, and a mother's homemade rendition of The Beatles as a lullaby before bed.

After forming in Chicago in 2009, Stepdad (then roommates ultramark and Ryan McCarthy) soon moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan in order to write and record their debut offering Ordinaire EP. After tremendous local response, the band grew to four members in order to perform their avant brand of electro-pop live. With the help of bassist Alex Fives and drummer Jeremy Malvin, the band gained popularity on tour and catching the attention of critics and fans alike.

"Jungles" starts off this album with a sense of dark optimism in the face of ruin, finding ultramark intoning "we don't belong to ourselves/they've been planning their attack/we belong to places/strong and brave, courageous our tired faces." The following nine cuts, however, promote a poise of lightheartedness that's sometimes hard to find in the world of modern electronic music. "My Leather, My Fur, My Nails" is perhaps a whimsical take on an overbearing relationships, in which one half of the couple wishes to wear the other around like a coat. And why not? If "My Leather, My Fur, My Nails" should be one extreme, then the following track, "Cutie Boots," is at the opposite end of the same spectrum of love, complete with a heartwarming jangle of acoustic guitar, xylophone-esque synth lines and hushed vocals. Stepdad's original version of Ordinaire EP could easily stand alone, but in the addition of bonus tracks "Fine Love" and "Magic Stones" we're seeing a sure sign of good things to come, leaving the listener with a want for what's next in store for this talented quartet of musicians.