Megasound is the rock and roll progeny of three indie pop friends. Kerry Alexander has fronted Bad Bad Hats with Chris Hoge for more than a decade, and the duo have known Elana Carroll (aka Party Nails) even longer. While on tour together in 2018, Carroll joined Bad Bad Hats on stage for an encore performance. It was a cover of “Pretend to Be Nice”, hit single of comic book band Josie & the Pussycats, written by Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger for the 2001 live action movie. This swirling musical cauldron produced a bubble of an idea: a new band. Elana on lead vocals, Kerry on guitar, Chris on drums. Songs inspired by early 2000s rock, the music of their collective youths. A fresh watch of Josie & the Pussycats sealed the deal. Megasound was officially born.
Tag Archive: Don Giovanni
Kiss Big is an album about the end of a long-term relationship (classic, really) and the disorienting aftermath of losing the person you built a life around. It explores feeling untethered from them, yourself, who you thought you were and the world. As well as how, with time, everything rearranges and restarts. The cyclical nature of love and endings. The way we keep beginning again, regardless of how we say we won’t.
Ailbhe Reddy is a Dublin-born songwriter whose music captures the quiet intensity of life’s in-between moments. Her third album Kiss Big is a breakup record – but not in the traditional sense. It explores what happens after the fallout: the numbness, the confusion, the brief flashes of clarity. How identity slips, rearranges…
Minneapolis-based folk rockers, The Pines, have always been led by the insightful songwriting of David Huckfelt. On I Was Born, But…, we don’t get his songwriting; instead, we get inspired interpretations of mostly lesser-known works by a wide range of North American songwriters. In some respects, the album reads much like Dylan’s Self-Portrait. In fact, both have a version of Gordon Lightfoot’s classic “Early Morning Rain.” That, along with George Jones’s “The Race Is On,’ and Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love?” are by far the most recognizable in this group of fifteen. And speaking of Dylan, I find similarities to the Duluth bard’s vocals with Huckfelt, which is rather interesting, considering I had never made such an observation through Huckfelt’s work with The Pines…
Though they were part of the same scene that gave rise to some of the most important alternative groups of their time, Boston band Salem 66 flew largely under the radar while some of their peers went on to lasting, worldwide fame. Led by songwriters Judy Grunwald and Elisabeth Kaplan, the band burned through the ‘80s, playing gigs with Flipper, the Butthole Surfers, and Dinosaur Jr. (in a version so early they were still just Dinosaur), and releasing multiple albums on Homestead, the same indie label that served as an early home to Sonic Youth and Daniel Johnston. Salem 66 disbanded in 1989, shortly before the release of their final album, and they left behind a small but bountiful catalog of minimal, jangly rock. Decades after the band faded into the ether…
Coinciding with Mourning [A] BLKstar‘s tenth anniversary, Flowers for the Living is billed as the Cleveland collective’s first album since 2020’s The Cycle. MAB continuously moved forward between that release and this one, performing on their own and touring as Lonnie Holley’s backing band, and issuing intermediary studio projects like Celestial Bodies and Ancient//Future. Founding members LaToya Kent and RA Washington also worked together on a solo tape by the former and their Me:You duo recording Field Tapes in der Trash. On this edifying set, MAB recommence what they call their “spirit work” while further melding soul, blues, gospel, jazz, hip-hop, house, and experimental electronic music in a way that is both avant-garde and accessible. In the past,…
Laura Glipin’s powerful poem “Two-Headed Calf” inspired Rodeo Boys’ first single from Junior, a raucous heartbreaker of an album that has staked a claim for one of my favorite albums of the year. The Lansing, Michigan-based band self-describes as “the sound of a quiet rebellion of a queer, blue-collar heart” and “what happens when the Miller High Life gets legs and starts walking around”, and this is apt. Junior‘s bending of blue-collar rock to its own will is fresh and thrilling. Fans of Mannequin Pussy, Wednesday, Destroy Boys, and the Hold Steady take note. Junior could be your new favorite record.
Lead singer Tiff Hannay’s got a classic rock front-person voice. Their vocals tie this collection of songs together beautifully. Every crack of…