Tag Archives: alternative

THE REAL GONE SINGLES BAR #14

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Welcome back to the Real Gone Singles Bar, the place where we explore some of the individual MP3s that have landed in our inbox over the previous few weeks. As usual, we’ve been spoilt for choice when it comes to submissions, and we’ve enjoyed exploring a whole world of recent music – often from unfamiliar bands. This week, we bring you a mix of rock and pop, a downbeat tune from a cult singer songwriter based act, and a brilliant slice of melodic punks. Hopefully you’ll discover something new, or even find something or someone that, in time, will join some of your favourite artists.

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GODS OF SOMETIMES – Gods Of Sometimes

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You might assume that a band featuring Fu Manchu’s Brad Davis on various musical duties would take a stoner rock route, but his Gods of Sometimes – a duo formed with similarly multi-faced studio hand Andrew Gukamakis – paints a much broader musical canvas. Their self-titled album has a hazy desert rock air in a couple of places, but the bulk of the material shouldn’t just be pigeonholed as such. Nor is it an easy love letter to an alternative rock past; there are elements within the arrangements that call back a much earlier time, whilst still sounding relevant at the time of recording.

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POLLYANNA BLUE – Trials & Tribulations EP

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This debut EP from Pollyanna Blue is a short but amazing work. Latching onto a style where the alternative elements collide with a heavy electronic groove, they sometimes come across like a heavy version of Metric and Transister, but the musical duo wield some serious muscle and add their own much harder edge to a genuinely classic sound.

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REDEYE CARAVAN – Snake Oil & Lullabies EP

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Formed in 2019, Greek band Redeye Caravan bill themselves as “dark country”, but their sound runs far deeper than that. For those people who are country averse, it’ll come as a relief that they don’t necessarily fit the country mould – or certainly not as a lot of people would perceive it. For example, the brilliant ‘El Muerto’ from their 2020 album ‘Nostrum Remedium’ actually plays more like a swamp blues; a landscape where acoustic slide guitars meet haunting harmonica lines and a gruff vocal comes a little closer to the work of Molly Hatchet. The same record features a choir of vocals exploring some moody folk sounds (‘Banshee’); a marriage of hefty twanging guitars and whistled melodies on a piece that’s clearly modelled on an Ennio Morricone score for a Western (‘Old Debt’), and even a mix of blues and cajun (‘The Road North’). There are hints of something a little more traditional when ‘At Gallows End’ plays more like a moody Johnny Cash number by way of Mark Lanegan, but it would be hard to pigeonhole the whole affair as “a country record”.

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THE FIERCE AND THE DEAD – News From The Invisible World

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With every new album from The Fierce And The Dead, there have been changes to the band’s sound. The now classic ‘Spooky Action’ took the experimentation of their earlier ‘If It Carries On Like This, We’re Moving To Morecambe’ and added extra layers. On tunes like the title cut and the now classic ‘Ark’, the lighter guitar tones from Matt Stevens gave the material a quality that was pleasingly playful. A few years down the line, the band’s breakthrough album ‘The Euphoric’ was heavier in places, but in others, sounded more accessible and tuneful than The Fierce And The Dead had ever been before, without losing too much of their recognisable sound.

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