BrandsForBands

The music of Cotton Jones speaks of transition: the passage from one form, state of mind, style or place to another. Songs become doorways to the past, or windows that open on some unnamed future, where innocence can still exist and perfection is thrown to the wind.

The Glowstream is a place centered between North and South Cumberland. It's not really called the Glowstream – just a stream that rolls to a dead end by the train tracks downtown. A place to sit, undisturbed in the cool shade, and see the interstate bend around glowing steeples, as cars and trucks break their speed – it's beautiful – how the city materializes, an oasis, after driving many miles through the mountains along I-68 – to this private spot, where it's possible to witness all the paces change.

Michael Nau & Whitney McGraw skipped town months ago, leaving the old haunts in Cumberland behind... To sift through the old noise, they walked off the edge of their world... To sound the depths, the songwriters relocated, to Georgia, far south of the Glowstream.

"We spent a lot of time on the bank of that stream – alone, together, gathered like a flock of birds, examining the next move," said Nau. "Many of the tunes on this record feel like Cumberland to me. When I'm there, it's like a dream – all familiar sound and light, where the factories and birds sing the same song."

The duo settled fast after the move, halted their incessant touring and festival appearances, and began the process of selecting a new cycle of songs to follow their acclaimed Suicide Squeeze debut, "Paranoid Cocoon."

Cotton Jones, as always, rests in arms of Nau and McGraw. "Tall Hours in the Glowstream,'" is the title of their new album. Some of the songs that made the final cut were tracked in northern States, while the majority were recorded and mixed in Winterville, Georgia, as a revolving cast of players, thinkers, and singers were invited to hang in the band's living-room studio.

The resulting sounds are both rich and charmingly lo-fi, full of vivid imagery and more gorgeous vocal harmony. Hard-asking tracks like "Somehow To Keep It Going" and "More Songs For Margaret" prove the promise in this music, the feeling of something better to come if only you can hold tight a little longer...

"Always the mornings keep coming..." And what a beautiful thing that is...

"Love Stinks... yeah, yeah"

Heartbreak is a strange and complicated enough thing to deal with on its own. There are a bevy of raw emotions it brings tumbling forth. It sends even the most level-headed among us down some strange paths - towards some odd decisions. All that happens in the aftermath seems magnified to the nth degree.

So, what to do when your ex forms a band with someone else's ex?

Naturally, you call that 'someone else' up... and form a new band of your own.

Well, that's how it started anyhow. Alicia Gbur and Christian Doble traded post-breakup wallowing for an outlet of creative productivity by joining forces with friends Matt Rickle and Mike Spence - as well as each other - in a time they usually would have reserved for sleepless nights and regrettable text messages. And thus, FAWN was born a band not necessarily defined by heartbreak, but undeniably inspired by it.

From the heart of the ever-budding Detroit Music Scene, the band's members are no strangers to rock-as-release endeavors - having had prominent roles in such diverse acts as Kiddo, The Von Bondies, Thunderbirds are Now!, Javelins, and Those Transatlantics. They come bearing gifts of day-dreams-in-ripped-jeans anthems alongside spunky, angular beats and boy/girl harmonies sung with poise and fervor. While referential lines may be drawn from FAWN to slew of 90's touchstones (The Jesus & Mary Chain, The Breeders, Juliana Hatfielt) or the modern day slacker-rock of Yuck or Surfer Blood, it is not simply an exercise in brooding nostalgia.

The quartet evokes a certain undeniable positivity even when the cadence of the melodies start to go to a more somber place. It's the kind of music to blast with your car windows open immediately after quitting your job at the mall. FAWN masters the art of mature indie-pop while still winking and letting you know everything is going to be okay; it's is an express elevator out of 'the dumps.'

Ignoring the cliched trappings of antiqued rural fetish that seem to make tired the modern folk movement, and the urban love-fest which holds the majority of indie-culture enwrapt, Frontier Ruckus instead celebrates and insulates itself within a world that is obsessively suburban- childhoods realistic and recent enough to remain vividly smoldering with intense memory and graphic personal mythology. The world of oversized 90s obsolescence, pinning down weighty love and familial weirdness-elephantine copy machines in the home offices of the briefly affluent parents of grade-school friends, VHS cassettes rotting sun-bleached on early bedroom shelves, tragic birthday parties, aggressive soccer coaches, grandmothers' oxygen tanks and daytime-TV-time crosswords, porn stashes found behind Taco Bells.

50s Spook Garage. Joshua Tree. Psychedelia, Lore from the days of old. Folk from all corners of the earth.

A vulnerable and honest voice, Fate Under Fire grabs your ear quickly with alternative pop vibes. David James created the Sacramento, CA quartet from his home studio. Always evolving and making no apologies, the sonic landscape has transformed from driving guitars to sweeping synths, touching leads and big drums.

California rock & roll with a 60's tone. A true pearl pulled from the depths of a psychedelic time warp. Powered by a mixture of psychedelia, garage and R&b. Fueled and fronted by a wild man's haunted soul!

Ben Braden and Sarah Parson began writing and singing music together in the winter of 2009 in Minneapolis, MN. Within a few months they were playing shows in Minneapolis, Chicago and other Midwestern venues, and before summer they had finished recording their first release, the critically praised EP “Everywhere To Go.” Following the release of “Everywhere To Go,” Ben and Sarah headed west, relocating The Lower 48 to Portland, OR. Playing regularly on the West Coast, they developed a more mature sound and wrote a host of new songs. In the summer of 2010, Nicholas Sadler, another Minneapolis native relocated to Portland, and joined the band as percussionist. Soon after The Lower 48 began recording their first full-length album. Titled “Where All Maps End,” this record reveals the band’s collaboration to portray the pain, pleasure and uncertainty of being young and making one’s way in the world. Finding it's strongest influence in music from the 1960’s, "Where All Maps End" will prove The Lower 48 to be a quintessential organic band in the digital age.

It’s like this: New Beat Fund is more than just a band.

Yeah, the four sun-bleached, good time boys from LA with the colorful hair and the funky clothes play music, travel the country, have a new album called Sponge Fingerz, and are best friends and brothers as well (half of them by blood), but this thing they ride with is way deeper than any of that. It’s who they are, what they think, how they dress; it’s where they come from, and how they live their lives. And, even if you didn’t already know it, New Beat Fund is who you are, and how you live your life, too. But we’ll get to that part.

New Beat Fund birthed when a piggy bank with the words "New Beat Fund" encrypted on it was catapulted into the facade of a corporate building. No joke. Jeff Laliberte, his brother Paul, Shelby and Michael have been at it for a couple years now, releasing an EP Coinz, and touring with the likes of blink-182 and 3OH!3, but they go way deeper than that. They trust each other on a supreme level, and even though their business is that of getting you hyped up, helping you chill, setting the mood to lay back with your girl or guy, or just letting you be you, they take that business seriously. “That’s the whole point and the reason that we’re in this,” says Paul, “to grow with a culture. And to also influence that culture rather than just hit at a surface level.”

“When people meet us, they say, ‘You guys are weird, but it’s fun!’” says Michael. “We want people to be cool with being weird, and thinking about things differently. The name of our record is Sponge Fingerz. What the fuck is that? It’s what we are as a band, there’s no definition—we’re able to be free. We wrote the record in Topanga Canyon—the freest place ever—we live in Southern California…that’s the whole vibe of our band. Just being weird and free.”

That freedom is the first thing you notice when listening to Sponge Fingerz, which was co-produced by Matt Wallace (Faith No More, Maroon 5) at LA’s legendary Sound City Studios and mixed by Tony Hoffer (Foster the People, Beck.) The band finds inspiration across the musical spectrum, shoving it all in a blender to cook up a colorful mash-up they call “G-Punk.” The vibe jumps from track to track—sometimes within the same song, or even the same verse—covering all the band’s favorite bases, like if you drew a huge baseball diamond over SoCal and swung for the fences. First base might be the surf-rock and dub-heavy vibes of the coastline, while rounding second brings up the hip-hop beats of South Central. Sprint over to third and pick up on the arty, indie hip and punk stuff from the city’s downtown heart. Finally, slide headfirst into the garage pop and heartfelt jams of Ventura County and the Valley, the band’s true home.

“It’s not just punk rock, or indie, or weird ass psychedelic art. We were all exposed to different things growing up, so we didn’t choose to only go in one direction,” says Shelby.

“We don’t claim any certain scene,” adds Michael, “and that’s kind of what we represent as a band, especially for kids who are figuring out who they are and where they fit in this weird ass world. We can hang with all of it and show people that’s OK to do. Let’s play how we play as individual musicians, and let’s write about our lives and go in that direction and not think about it too much. And this is what came out.”

The album blasts off with “Any Day,” a funky breakup anthem about finding your footing. The song itself was an early demo that was cast aside, but finally found its own groove at the last minute during pre-production when the band bought some dancehall albums for 50 cents at a nearby head shop. “The dancehall groove just laid the song out in front of us,” says Jeff. “It’s about when you’re right at that post-breakup thick of it, that moment where you look back and you finally see what it is. That switch when you’re done, you’re not lingering.”

In contrast, “It’s Cool” came together quickly. The song’s creation serves as a blueprint for how the band works best. “At the time, we were in a bedroom so we didn’t have the opportunity to jam it out, and we were fucking around with sampling and just had this mood and started writing to it,” says Jeff. “We all usually come together and build tracks like that. We start pretty simple, lyrics or melodies or beat, and we all color in the picture. If you had a sketch or a pencil drawing, we all come in with colors or additives and finish the painting, and then there’s the song.”

“Sikka Taking the Hard Way” shines, too, with its with its funky dub breakdown and noodling electric guitars, and its celebration of overcoming whatever obstacles life can throw at you: “I tell myself that it’s alright/it’s OK/there’s no way/I’m stumbling back now/I’ll figure it out.”

Then there’s “Halloween Birthdaze,” with its Red Hot Chili Peppers-worthy chorus, and the catchy, stoner shrugs of “Friends in High Places,” which showcases the band’s love of hip-hop. “It paints a picture of someone who is less fortunate but has the support system that they can find happiness in,” says Paul, before his brother finishes his thought: “When you got nothing but you have everything.”

Jeff sums it up like this: “We want everyone to be into our music. The word ‘pretentious’ is the worst fucking word I have ever heard. We want people to feel at home when they come to our shows, like they can do whatever they want at a New Beat Fund show. We want to be an unpretentious band that makes people feel honest emotions. Come to our show and join an experience and let you just be you. Have a good time and relate to our music.”

Yeah, it’s like that.

Ki:Theory (a.k.a. Joel Burleson) is a recording artist and producer who specializes in genres of electronic and alternative rock. He and his band have toured nationwide US, Canada, Japan and Korea including a performance at the Bonnaroo Music Festival. He's done remixes for Daft Punk/Tron Legacy, Kings of Leon, Queens of the Stone Age, Kasabian, MuteMath, Ladytron, Sasha, UNKLE and Brazilian Girls among others. His original music and scoring work has been featured on television including C.S.I., National Geographic Channel, in ads including Converse, Billabong, Audi and in numerous films and videos games. He continues to make music that he likes to hear in hopes of creating something that others might like to hear. The newest Ki:Theory release, Arms For Legs is available as a free download at kitheory.com.

Wild arctic nature. Big city pulse. Fearless synthesizers, miles and miles of reverb, and delicate rhythms. Delicious swedish indietronica from Stockholm by way of San Francisco and the cold northern regions of Sweden. Long nights of dancing and long hikes in the mountains. Single "UR Road" feels like a long fun summer distilled into four minutes of sweet electropop with bouncy hooks and lush vocals. There's even some whistling in there as well. Sameblod is one of Swedens most promising and exciting new acts - Frederick and Mikael in Sameblod have received lots of blog-attention, even more plays on Soundcloud and hopefully this is just the beginning.