Earlier in 2014, Big Tea signings Silver Arm released their debut EP, the excellent ‘He of the Slow Creep’ [review here].
We’re now reaching the end of a great year for music and Silver Arm have returned! You can now stream their new track – courtesy of Big Tea Records – in full below.
Queen Chief are an alt-rock band led by Justin Lien, a young musician with Native American and Germanic/Nordic roots. Their debut EP throws the listener in at the deep end with a particularly grand approach. It’s a concept release bringing (in the band’s own words) “a brutally honest, heavy rocking representation of life in the Northwestern United States’ low income suburbs and Native American reservations”. No messing there. Just as direct as the attitude driving the band, the tunes themselves pack a huge punch throughout – most carrying a weighty riff; each riff then given a huge send off courtesy of King Black Acid member and producer Daniel Riddle. The resultant sounds, resting somewhere between post-grunge and a hybrid of psychedelic blues, all come with plenty of volume – even if played quietly – and just as much attitude.
Seattle-based blues rock band Fox and The Law have recently released their third album ‘Stoned To Death’ via Failure By Design Records. To tie in with the release, they’ve also issued a new video for ‘Cheap Talk’ which you can see in full below.
Some press materials can be read below the embedded YouTube box.
Signed to Roadrunner Records at the tail end of 2013 on the strength of two demo EPs and a couple of independently released singles, Yorkshire’s Marmozets are a powerhouse of alt-metal and mathrock. Their full length debut ‘The Weird and Wonderful Marmozets’ is full of great choruses, which combined with some tight musicianship results in an album with pretty much no weak elements. While the studio recordings do not always entirely capture the incendiary power of their live act, the album’s thirteen numbers have a real sense of urgency and – more importantly – songs that really force their way into the subconscious.
Gay Elvis is the long-serving bassist with New Jersey based alt-rock/power pop band Readymade Breakup. In between work with that band, he’s tinkered with extra-curricular recordings, the first fruits of which surfaced as a free download track ‘Morning Cigarette’ in 2012. Since then, he’s embraced fatherhood. Various songwriting sessions since then yielded the bones some thirty or so songs, but by the musician’s own admission, those songs tackled the same topics repeatedly – how it sucks to grow up, how growing up can turn you into a loser and ultimately how growing up is inevitable…and cool. No matter how the tunes sounded, the sentiments were always pre-occupied with maturity. In this sense, he had hoped that his solo release would “be [his] ‘Pet Sounds’ or ‘Abbey Road’”. Things don’t always turn out as planned and after shelving lots of incomplete material for a later convenience, the result is this three song EP. Judging by these songs, it’s a shame we didn’t get just a little bit more…