Meer - Live Ostrów Rock Festival 2025

 Meer - Live Ostrów Rock Festival 2025 - Part 1

 

 Meer - Live Ostrów Rock Festival 2025 - Part 2

 

Meer were playing in Germany a couple of years ago when a man came up to them after the show. “He wanted to thank us, but he started crying,” says co-vocalist Johanne Kippersund Nesdal. “And he just cried and cried. He said, ‘You are making me do this.’ Getting that kind of reaction from a grown man makes you realise that your music is impacting people’s lives.”
It’s not surprising they provoked such a reaction. The Norwegian eight-piece’s music is big in every sense: melodically, emotionally, dramatically, marrying the intricacy and grand sweep of modern prog to the accessibility of pop. Even their name is a play on ‘Mer’ – the Norwegian word for ‘more.’
“We always want more,” jokes Eivind Strømstad, Meer’s guitarist and also Johanne’s husband. The pair are speaking from a room in the theatre that Nesdal and her brother and co-vocalist Knut’s parents own in the lakeside town of Hamar, 90 minutes north of Oslo (current productions: a summery spin on Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale and a version of Alice In Wonderland). Nesdal and Strømstad both work there. “He married into the family business,” says the singer.
Appropriately then, there’s a sense of drama to Meer’s third album, Wheels Within Wheels. The uplifting rush of their music is powered by the Nesdal siblings’ distinctive voices: Johanne’s powerful and soaring, Knut’s lithe and melodic. The latter came fourth in the Norwegian heats for Eurovision in 2014. “We both love to sing, but he’s more into the glam, TV stuff than I am,” says Johanne.
Wheels Within Wheels doesn’t exactly set its sights on Eurovision, but it does come with an unashamed desire to balance complexity with catchiness. “We wanted to write songs that people would have fun singing along with,” says Johanne. “Some of the songs are a little more pop-rocky. You can dance along to them.”
The singer was weaned on her parents’ classic rock CDs – Rainbow, Queen, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd. She sang in a Rush cover band as a teenager, but remained oblivious to the modern prog scene until Meer signed to influential Norwegian label Karisma for their second album, 2021’s Playing House. By contrast, Eivind was a full-blooded prog metal fan: Opeth and Pain Of Salvation were favourites. “Then I had a period where I pretended to be into jazz,” he says wryly. “If you want to study music, you have to.”
Such is the breadth of Wheels Within Wheels that all of those influences are evident, together with everything from Ennio Morricone to acclaimed British singer- songwriter Michael Kiwanuka. “With eight people in the band, there are eight sets of different musical influences,” says Johanne. Elvind adds: “Because I was a certified prog-head in my teen years, I was actively trying not to make prog music early on in the band. But that music is part of who I am.”  From: https://www.loudersound.com/features/meer-wheels-within-wheels

 

 

uKanDanZ - War Pigs

How do you improve a perfect sounding song? Sing it in a different language! uKanDanZ’s cover of War Pigs is performed in the Amharic language, one of the many languages of Ethiopia. uKanDanZ is an Ethiopian band formed in 2010, amd this track comes from their 7th album, Evil Plan.
Covers can be real tricky things for bands because ideally they want the familiarity of the song while giving it their own sound. this is made even harder when the song itself is something iconic like War Pigs, a song that it feels like has been covered by almost every metal and rock band.
However, uKanDanZ delivers. The soulful singing of Asnake Gebreyes combined with the surprisingly well placed Saxophone playing of Lionel Martin has them knock this classic heavy metal tune out of the park.  From: https://cavedwellermusic.net/albums-reviews/u/ukandanz-war-pigs-amharic-cover-review/

Róis - Caoine / Feel Love

 Róis - Caoine

 

 Róis - Feel Love

 

Grá mór to Róis and her album Mo Léan. This hidden story of the Irish keening tradition has become a shared fascination. She has liberated voices, long silenced by Church, State and Empire. A wonderful coup.
Last week, there were two distinctions for Róis at the RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards ­– Best Original Folk Track for ‘Caoine’ and Best Emerging Artist. The week before that, she was saluted at the Gradaim Nós event in Belfast. And now this week, the album is shortlisted in the Choice Music Prize, alongside peers like Fontaines DC, Kneecap and New Dad. Might there be an outlier victory that upsets the bookies?
“Well I’m up against the Fontaines,” says Róis, laughing, “so I’m not expecting anything at all. But it’s just great to have a night out with family. I wasn’t expecting anything in the Folk Awards now, either, but sure…”
There was an excellent moment during last Saturday’s RTÉ programming when Róis finished up the Tommy Tiernan Show and then reappeared, minutes later, in the TV transmission of the Folk Awards. It was like radical marketing, repeated glimpses of an artist wailing out of the darkness with a black veil on her head. You could hardly miss it. A good feeling, surely?
“It’s very satisfying. It’s a good time in Ireland to be bringing back keening – and as a woman as well. And it’s a nice mixture between experimental and not-so experimental.”
Róis says she doesn’t have a speech ready for the awards. She’s not presuming anything. When she was awarded her second RTÉ award, she was actually back in the balcony, unaware of what was happening. She almost missed receiving her trophy from Mary Chapin Carpenter, to the amusement of the Vicar Street audience. “I’d be late for my own funeral,” she told them, when she finally reached the stage, impeccably dressed in black.
I suggest that for her potential Choice Prize acceptance speech, Róis could resurrect the Father Ted moment at the Golden Cleric Awards. A good time to settle scores. She thinks this might be a fun idea.
“I know that speech very well. Off by heart. ‘And now, we move on to liars…’”
Róis, aka Rose Connolly, is from Newtownbutler in Fermanagh. She was raised in a music family, alive to trad music. She played the whistle, fiddle, banjo, piano, flute and mandolin. As a teenager, she liked Nirvana. “I was obsessed by Kurt Cobain. I was one of those angsty teenagers. I played ‘Stay Away’ in the bedroom constantly. I was very inspired by that expressive Nirvana feeling.” Hence her magnificent version of ‘Something in the Way’ that Róis fetched up last December, during her performance at the Black Box.
In 2018 she attended the Royal Irish Academy of Music, sometimes working against the formal constraints. She took an Erasmus visit to the Royal Conservatoire of the Hague. She listened to Meredith Monk, Hatis Noit and Alice Coltrane – some of which was evident on her debut album, Uisce Agus Bean, which combined the avant-garde with Irish trad and mythical themes.
The story of keening is sketchy and lightly documented. It was frowned on as a pagan legacy, and outlawed by the church. Much of this Irish tradition had vanished before the folk collectors arrived. Only scraps remain, like the voice of Cití Ní Ghallchóir, recorded by Alan Lomax in in Donegal, 1951, remembering a lament for a dead child.
I ask Róis if her work has parallels with the writing of Manchán Magan, who is drilling down into Irish language and culture, seeking the pre-Christian significance and linking it to the Indo-European trail. Manchán appeared on the Kneecap album, a cameo part as a rogue druid. But there are other voices out there, like Huartan, who venerate the hawthorn tree and strive to de-colonise their heads. All over, there are masks and sedition. A fascinating time.
“I think there’s a bit of a zeitgeist,” says Róis. “A resurgence, some sort of celebration. Pagan just means countryside, so I suppose it is a sort of a country-ness, a sort of a wildness, that we want to go back to. It’s been cleaned and sterilised by the likes of the Catholic Church and colonisation.
“There was too much order. And I think there has to be a balance of order and chaos, and I think we’re going back to the chaos. I think keening really suits me. And it’s no coincidence that it’s keening. We only have three recordings of the last keening women, and there’s a lot of hypothesis.
“What I think, and what other academic research says, is that before Christianity, keening would have been very experimental. It would have been so unique and individual to the keener. Like, the keening women used it for their own grievances on the village, or used it as a call to arms. And they tried to banish the priests that were there, doing wrong. And then of course, the priests then won, and banned them. In the end, we lost that tradition.”
When you watch Róis on stage, it’s seems like the music is being channelled. She has clearly found a medium that suits her.
“I love screaming. Not as art, just as a way to figure out my own emotions. Just to get that scaoil amach, that relief. It just suits my kind of thing. And I like that archetype of the wild woman (the hag, the sentainne, the cailleach) I think we should stop saying that it’s coming back because Growler (Dee Mulrooney), Manchán Magan, The Wild Geeze, the comedians, Julie Goo and all these people are bringing it all back.”
Was Róis confident that Mo Léan (my woe) was a significant record when she was finishing it?
“I remember starting it last year, and it just seemed wholesome and holistic. It was coming full circle. The stuff that I’m interested in is culture, a bit political, and putting a new spin on the tradition. It’s what I’m all about. I wanted the ‘Feel Love’ track to feel like a celebration.  I don’t want Róis to be this doom and gloom, scary mask thing. I want it to be like a dance party and fun because that’s what life is about too, and that’s what they used to celebrate. It wasn’t just all sad. I think we’ve actually gone too far…over to sad.”
Several of the speeches during the RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards, particularly in relation to the pioneer spirit of Dónal Lunny, stressed that the tradition was there to be respected, but that it was also fit for experiment. It was a reminder that some of the best practitioners have been mavericks. Like Seán Ó Riada, bringing the European classical canon to the music, or more recently Úna Monaghan, using AI to write weird airs. Róis agrees.
“Yeah, it’s great to know who you are as an artist. You always have to be very aware of your authenticity – what you believe in, and who you are, and it’s really important to know where you came from. Folk and sean-nós speaks to me, because I’m very connected to the land in Fermanagh and my musical upbringing was all traditional music.
“When I was about seven, I started getting into classical and jazz and all that, but it was always trad that was the main thing. It’s exploring that history and where it comes from… and the songs that would have been in the household. So yeah, knowing where you’re come from and where you’re going to. That anachronistic exploration is what I’m interested in.”
In the past, people sometimes said that Sinéad O’Connor was keening in her music, particularly on songs like ‘Jackie’, which was likely inspired by the keening mother at the end of the JM Synge play, Riders to the Sea. If so, you wonder if Sinéad had made a study of the form, or rather, that she pulled it out of some mythical race memory?
“She was so intuitive though. I think it’s like being in the moment – intuition, like. Maybe there is some sort of zeitgeist, the keening women in us. But I think it’s just being human and so was just so real and raw. That was her.”
The wearing of the mask is goes back to Irish traditions like the wren boys and the rhymers. Oscar Wilde famously noted that, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” (The Critic as Artist, 1891). WB Yeats was fascinated by Japanese noh theatre and wrote up his Doctrine of the Mask, which pervaded much of his work. More recently, Blindboy Boatclub has said that wearing a shopping bag on his head aids his neurodivergent personality. It gives him anonymity and an escape from a neurotypical world. How does the Róis method fit with all this?
“My first love for music was Daft Punk. And Daft Punk obviously had the masks on. I remember my brothers were very influenced by that, and how mysterious that was. For me, it’s that anonymity. For the first year of gigging in Belfast, I wasn’t really sticking to it that much. But now I’ve won an award, I’m gonna definitely stick to it. It’s really great for performing it. You can really let go. You can express yourself more freely with the mask on.”
Upcoming plans for the artist include a possible collaboration with David Holmes plus a second keening album, this time with The Crash Ensemble. This latter project will be an elegy for rural Ireland, partly inspired by a John Healy book, The Death of an Irish Town (1967). “He writes about how emigration has been described as ‘outward social mobility’. He describes it as a ‘dead corpse’ –  the spasms when people leave, it’s already dead. I was very inspired by that.”  From: https://www.digwithit.com/?p=3526

 

 

Melody Fields - Fire

The Sixties. The decade when all good music was made. The greatest albums of all time. Except that’s not true, is it? Arguably, what we mean when we say the ’60s is the years between 1965 and 1969, plus a few earlier records by the Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys and Dylan. A switch flicks in ’65 and we get Rubber Soul - Out Of Our Heads - Beach Boys Today - Bringing It All Back Home - Highway 61 Revisited - Black Monk Time - The Pretty Things - The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads - Bert Jansch - Mr. Tambourine Man - The Paul Simon Songbook - Otis Blue - Turn Turn Turn - My Generation - Here Are The Sonics - The Transfiguration Of Blind Joe Death.
This doesn’t include the brilliant jazz records that came out prior to this date.  I’m talking about “pop” music, as it was classified then. Rock, pop, soul, whatever. That splurge of great, innovative music that poured out across those twelve months is still being felt today. And the albums that followed in ’66? ’67? The tremors of those classic singles from the early ’60s would erupt in a volcano of sound that is still being felt now.
Melody Fields aren’t from the ’60s, though you might be forgiven for thinking they’re some long lost acid group from that hallowed time.  The sleeve looks like something from the peak of the psychedelic era. Think Disraeli Gears but less shit. Drop the needle and right away you’re needing to give your inner eye a quick squeegee. 
So the first thing to say about this Swedish band is that there’s nothing particularly new here. So what. That’s true of a lot of great bands. These guys are tapped right into a bygone world of crushed velvet flairs and brown acid. The genius here is that they do it so well. Like The Strokes reconfiguring the sound of CBGBs for an audience who hadn’t even been born the first time round. And of course, they’re not the first bunch of hairy misfits to tap into these grooves. Spacemen 3 and Loop also spring to mind, along with the first two Spiritualized albums, back before Jason Spaceman disappeared up his own arse. 
So again, drop the needle on it and get sucked into that vortex, ride the drones and jangles and feel your synapses begin to crackle and fizz. Little maelstroms of chaos swirling across the landscape of your cortex. Jump in. Feel the little fishes swim between your toes. You’ll get notes of patchouli and reefer. Like that first Spiritualized album, Laser Guided Melodies, the songs blend into one another. This isn’t a bad thing. The melodies are varied and sparkle across the album. But the mood is there. The mood that sucks you in and keeps you captive. But while that first Spiritualized record always felt a little dry in its production, this feels fresh and warm. The music breathes. Unlike Spacemen 3 and their relentless drugginess, or Loop with their tough, raw guitar sound, there is a deftness here. A lightness of touch. 
Another group that spring to my mind is Cosmic Rough Riders, those jangly Glaswegian guys who caused a minor stir at the start of the century. But while CRR were clearly enthralled by the Byrds, Love and Buffalo Springfield, Melody Fields are much better at submerging their influences.  Yeah, the spirit of ’67 is here in all its raging glory, but it doesn’t sound derivative. When I first played it, it felt like a discovery. A lost album from that time. One of those pieces that gets a loving vinyl repress years later and is held up as a lost classic.
Being a Swedish group, it only seems right to namecheck the axis of Pärson Sound, International Harvester, and Träd, Gräs och Stenar. These cult classics are similarly rooted in drones and lysergic mayhem. What Melody Fields bring to the table is an emphasis on tunes and songs.  From: https://www.minimusiccritic.com/quarantine-diaries-time-traveling-with-melody-fields/ 

 

Mr. Gnome - House of Circles

The Cleveland-based experimental rock duo Mr. Gnome was one of our favorite discoveries from South by Southwest earlier this year, and now the band is back on our radar with an amazing new video. "House of Circles," from Mr. Gnome's recent album Madness in Miniature, is an epic, wildly imaginative story about a band of rebel fighters who attempt to save the world from the evil Queen Machine.
The video, which is designed to look like a graphic novel, is full of seemingly high-end visual and special effects, but band members Nicole Barille and Sam Meister produced the entire short film on their own — writing, directing and editing it on a shoestring budget.
In an email, singer and guitarist Barille told us that the whole thing cost less than the band's $2,000 budget, most of which was spent on costumes and camera equipment. "We decided the only way we could pull off a fantasy world of machines and flying people was to shoot it all in front of a green screen and use miniature sets. Sam's mom, Barb, has been a huge part of our team since our first music video for 'Night of the Crickets,' and she really helped pull together the costumes and sets to create the look we were going for. Many of the roles and characters were played by the same people."
Mr. Gnome originally wrote an elaborate fairytale around the entire Madness in Miniature album, and intended to turn it into a full-length film. The project was eventually scaled back to this eight-minute video, focusing on the final chapter of the story. "We realized it would've taken years to finish a feature film," Barille says. "We'd love to tell the whole story at some point, whether it's through a graphic novel, animation or a feature-length film. Hopefully, we'll get the opportunity to do this sooner than later."  From: https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2012/11/29/166169700/first-watch-mr-gnome-house-of-circles

Brass Camel - Borrowed Time

Daniel Sveinson of Brass Camel (who does electric guitar and vocals) speaks to us about the backstory to the band’s latest album, Brass Camel (2026):
Being in Brass Camel presents so many situations which, at first glance, may seem almost paradoxical. The music is funky, yet it’s proggy. It’s dead serious at times and bewilderingly light-headed the very next minute. Onstage the band walks a tightrope between a striving for clinical precision and an ability to let loose like a psychedelic jam band. It is a culmination of these various balancing acts that makes the Camel an incredibly rewarding, fun band to be a part of and I believe it’s also why we can be a tough group to put a finger on. All too often we’re presented with an evaluation, be it a concert/album review or just a quick comment, along the lines of “I haven’t seen anything quite like that, what would you even call that type of music? Is it prog? Is it funk rock? Is it heavy metal?” and that’s what excites us – there are no rules with this band. We’re just Brass Camel and that can mean whatever you want it to mean.
Since January 2023, when we really become a “band” with the addition of two crucial members, we have crossed Canada four times and it has been so energising to see more and more people coming to shows and responding to the music. We recorded our second album, “Camel” in 2024 and began planning a 6 week tour to support its release in April of 2025. With a bit of a slower touring pace in the winter of 2024 after a relentless year-and-a-half of playing live, I was determined to spend more time than ever writing music and that’s what I did. Every day I would head to the studio in the morning and start working on songs and before long there was a huge amount of raw material to sift through. It was exciting because for the first time we were looking forward at a recording made up of entirely new material – nothing that had been lingering around for two or three years before making it into the studio. We began going over songs and demos with the idea that we would record them in late 2025. 
We had made friends with the amazing people in Crown Lands while on tour in late 2024, after Kevin (Comeau) had come to our show at Toronto’s Longboat Hall. He invited us to hang out at the beautiful Chalet Studios in Uxbridge on an off day, which we gladly took him up on, and in a few hours of talking about music and jamming on deep cuts like Genesis’s “The Battle of Epping Forest” we hit it off like kindred spirits. We had to be back on the road for the westbound journey home but we all agreed it would be great to return to the Chalet and, if nothing else, hang out and possibly record some live session video.
Fast forwarding a few months, I get talking with Kevin about our tour plans and mention that we’ve got a lot of new material that will make it to a third album one day. One thing leads to another and a plan was hatched to accelerate the schedule dramatically – instead of waiting until the fall and recording on our own time, we would stop into Uxbridge while on tour in Ontario and track a ten song LP in between shows on the weekend. It felt like a monumental challenge but we’ve never been ones to do things the easy way so we locked it in and got to work fleshing out these songs that would be recorded with Kevin at the helm as engineer and co-producer.
“Brass Camel” is, appropriately, the first Brass Camel record that I feel sounds like a Brass Camel record. We’ve spent god knows how many hours in a bus together, in studio together and onstage together and I’d like to believe that is reflected in this collection of songs and recordings. We were focused, driven and motivated throughout the process and can’t wait to play these songs live all over the country and, later this year, in Europe (and hopefully the UK). This album is more lyrically dense – there’s a higher word count here than our first two LPs put together – and more musically ambitious, weirder and yet somehow more accessible than our previous efforts. There are a lot of subtleties and easter eggs hidden in the arrangements which I hope will make each listen more entertaining than the last! When it’s funk, it’s funkier. When it’s proggy, it’s proggier. When it’s loud, it’s louder. When it’s quiet, it’s quieter. There’s a lot more of a lot more but it’s all Brass Camel. Hope you enjoy it.  From: https://progarchy.com/2026/04/16/66886/

Say She She - Questions

Say She She take the soulful aspects of disco and add a modern twist. Spending summer on the road, the Brooklyn-rooted trio have played some immaculate festival sets, including a daring weekend trip to Glastonbury. New album ‘Silver’ is out now, a glorious feast of dose songcraft, showing the genre at its most soulful. Becoming a breakout moment, Say She She match impeccable sonics with lyrics that pick apart life at its most complex.
Album cut ‘Questions’ is a case in point. Dipping into the power dynamics that adorn our lives, it looks at relationships and friendships. The group’s Piya Malik comments: “It probes at the nature of oppression – and what it does to the human psyche. If there are always bound to be winners and losers then ‘…who wins? Who falls behind?'”
Alyssa Boni directs the incredible video for ‘Questions’, complete with animation from Matt Castanos and maverick movement from British choreographer Daniel Perry. A riveting watch, it taps into the deeply physical power of Say She She’s music, while also illustrating their emotive prowess.
The film-maker explains: I wanted to create a visual style and energy that would reflect the song’s punchy vibe. Using their mouths in time with the chorus was always going to be an important aspect, underscoring the track’s big statement: Say She She have something to say, so listen up!
It’s quite a complex process to put together a collage animation film like this. Myself and animator, Matt Castanos, created a selection of bespoke photographic and video assets, all shot separately. We then pieced it together in post production. The use of bold colours inspired by the punk movement emphasizes the video’s mind-bending impact.”  From: https://www.clashmusic.com/music-videos/say-she-shes-questions-dives-into-power-dynamics/

 

The Band - Up On Cripple Creek

"Up on Cripple Creek" is notable as it is one of the first instances of a Hohner clavinet being played with a wah-wah pedal. The riff can be heard after each chorus of the song. The clavinet, especially in tandem with a wah-wah pedal, was a sound that became famous in the early to mid-1970s, especially in funk music.
Robbie Robertson said of writing the song: I had some ideas for 'Up on Cripple Creek' when we were still based in Woodstock making Music From Big Pink. Then after Woodstock, I went to Montreal and my daughter Alexandra was born. We had been snowed in at Woodstock and in Montreal it was freezing, so we went to Hawaii, really as some kind of a way to get some warmth, and to begin preparing for making our second album. I think it was really pieces and ideas coming on during that traveling process that sparked the idea about a man who just drives these trucks across the whole country. I don’t remember where I sat down and finished the song, though.
Drawing upon the Band's musical roots—the American South, American rock and roll, and bluegrass/country—the song is sung from the point of view of a truck driver who goes to Lake Charles, Louisiana, to stay with a local girl, Bessie, with whom he has a history. In the song, he gambles, drinks, listens to music, and spends time with "little Bessie," who takes an active role in the goings-on, while expressing her opinions, further endearing herself to the narrator. At the end of the song, after exhausting himself on the road, he talks about going home to his woman, "big mama," but is tempted to return to Bessie again. He may or may not be cheating. Truckers also use the term "Big Mama" to refer to their dispatcher over CB radio. Concerns about the weather in other parts of the country and the line "this life of living on the road" suggest over-the-road trucking. At the start of the song he's hauling logs off a mountain and at the end he may be weighing options: "rolling in" to home base for a new cargo or seeing his Bessie again.
One verse has the singer and Bessie listening to and commenting on the music of 1940s and 1950s bandleader Spike Jones. Robertson said of Jones, "I was a Spike Jones admirer. I thought the way that he treated music was a healthy thing. He could take a song and do his own impression of it that was so odd and outside the box – and in many cases hilarious. I liked him a lot.”
Robertson has said of the song: We're not dealing with people at the top of the ladder, we're saying what about that house out there in the middle of that field? What does this guy think, with that one light on upstairs, and that truck parked out there? That's who I'm curious about. What is going on in there? And just following the story of this person, and he just drives these trucks across the whole country, and he knows these characters that he drops in on, on his travels. Just following him with a camera is really what this song's all about.  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_on_Cripple_Creek

 

Lysa Gora – Krzycze

The premiere of Łysa Góra's new single, "Krzyczę" (I Scream), took place on October 24th, and the track is now available on streaming platforms. A concert tour promoting the band's new material is also underway. 
The band has been active since 2012, and their music is a combination of powerful, progressive metal structures with Slavic influences, traditional vocal techniques, and ethnic instruments. Their latest album, "W Ogniu Swiat" (In the Fire of the World) (2023), was nominated for a Fryderyk Award in the Metal Album of the Year category. "'Krzyczę' is my personal confession. The song was created when the cup of bitterness overflowed after all the difficult moments in my life. In the middle of the night, the words just poured onto the paper," said Dorota Filipczak-Brzychcy, the leader and vocalist of Łysa Góra and the author of the lyrics. 
The song "Krzyczę" skillfully and thoughtfully combines an intimate string intro with an explosion of guitars and drums. It's a unique, unconventional, and very personal artistic manifesto, in which folk motifs and traditional singing intertwine with the style of heavy metal riffs. 
Stanisław Mąderek was responsible for the entire music video. As a "one-man band," he handled the script, filming, and final editing. Łysa Góra was already familiar with this creator's capabilities, having collaborated on music videos for songs such as "Morowa dziewica" and "W Ogniu Swiat," so they confidently entrusted him with creating the video for the new track. The band also revealed that "Krzyczę" will not be their last collaboration, although they don't want to reveal more details about future projects.  Translated from: https://m.folk24.pl/wiesci/krzyczy-lysa-gora/

Mr. Bison - Holy Oak

Mr. Bison has been active for a few years now, releasing quite a few great albums. Would you like to talk a bit about your background? When and how did you all originally meet?

Matteo Barsacchi: In 2008 I wrote some songs and decided to play with a couple of friends from the city. We started as a side project and immediately understood that we have a good feeling and the songs were born very easily. We started playing rock and roll contaminated by stoner rock. Although in Italy at that time stoner music was almost completely unknown, during our live show, the audience was very excited! This surprised us a lot and we therefore decided to abandon our musical projects to dedicate ourselves to Mr. Bison. After an EP and the first album ‘We’ll be brief’, there was a line up change due to different views. From the second album, ‘Asteroid’ on, Matteo Sciocchetto on guitar and vocals and Matteo D’Ignazi on drums and sound effects joined the band. Unlike the musicians of the first line up, who were more influenced by stoner music and 90’s, the two Matteo’s, excellent musicians, have a more 70’s background. I too have a passion for 70s music. The band started to evolve, adding many 70s influences. The album ‘Holy Oak’ was the first step between stoner and new influences. Curious to explore the world of progressive, and the vocal harmonic solutions of the Golden Era like The Beatles, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, we decided to forg ‘Seaward’. That was truly the culmination of a full year’s hard labor. It was released in October 2020 via Subsound and Ripple Music. ‘Seaward’ is arguably the most blazing, powerful and eclectic album yet by us.

How did you decide to name your band Mr. Bison?

The name was born by chance one evening when me and Francesco – the bassist (the first months we also had the bass) played in the 80’s Street Fighters, thought about the name for the band. We liked the name of Mr. Bison, the last character to fight in the game and his role as a boss of a criminal organization named Shadaloo with an amazing insignia of a winged skull with a lightning bolt on the hat.

‘Seaward’ is your latest album. What’s the story behind it?

We live in front of the Tuscan archipelago. We love the sea, … walk and listen to the sound of the waves, especially in Winter. The sea is the greatest source of inspiration for us and the perfect place to write music. We’ve done a lot of research to identify this theme. When we found this legend we immediately realized that it would be perfect to represent the music and our ideas. ‘Seaward’ is a concept album and it draws inspiration from the sea and from the legend of the 7 pearls of the Tyrrhenian Sea. The legend tells that Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, leaving the waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea proceeding towards the mainland to meet Eros, trying to adjust the necklace donated by Paris, broke the necklace, letting 7 pearls slide into the water, where they magically, remained on the surface and began to be populated by flora and fauna, giving life to the 7 wonderful islands of the Tuscan archipelago. Another research about the number 7 also inspired us. There are many meanings and archetypes related to number 7 like Aphrodite’s pearls and the number of days in each moon phase, which affects the tides and the mood of each individual who, during magical moments of solitude and reflection, finds refuge in the horizon and in the wonderful echo of the vibrations of this majestic expanse of water, looking “towards the sea”.

Would it be possible to make a comparison to ‘Holy Oak’ or even to ‘Asteroid’?

As I explained, after the change of line up the influences of the 70s are deeply rooted in our song writing. ‘Asteroid’ is a stoner heavy rock album. I wrote this album in my recording studio, during the passage from the second line up. It is a monolithic album, … during that period I was influenced by bands like Clutch, Fu Manchu et cetera. ‘Holy Oak’ is the gateway between our stoner roots and the actual heavy psych prog influence. I love ‘Holy Oak’ so much! Songs like ‘Sacred Deal’, the title track, and ‘Heavy Rain’ are an interesting mix through heavy rock and psych music. Talking about ‘Seaward’, we used the progressive structure, using a lot of dynamics and tempo changes … We decided to develop the album as a concept, linking each song. It was a hard job.

How would you describe your sound?

We consider ourselves a heavy psych prog band, because we have no frame or scheme in music. We are a band with a lot of musical culture and we are not radical musicians. We love quality music of all genres, so we try to combine all our influences in our way using a heavy psych prog writing key. We have a particularity, we don’t have a bass player. In this music scene the presence of the bass line is very important for composing songs. We are a strange trio, though Mr. Bison‘s two guitars together build a massive wall of sound through which listeners will likely never notice the absence of the bass guitar. It’s hard to explain quickly, but in a nutshell each guitar has 2 channels. The second channel of our pedal boards is connected to an octaver and the bass amp, and one of us always plays like a bass player … this solution is very interesting because the band seems to play like a band of 4/5 members… for example sometimes during a song, you can listen 2 fuzzy harmonized guitars, one clean bass and at the same time Hammond, all played live. Often the audience is surprised, because they see a trio but they listen to 4-5 instruments and at the end of the gigs often a lot of fans ask us about our tech solutions.

From: https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2022/05/mr-bison-interview-the-sea-is-the-greatest-source-of-inspiration.html

Eurythmics - Love Is a Stranger

Sometimes, the truth about pop music's best works takes a while to reveal itself. Such is the case with "Love Is a Stranger," the third single from Eurythmics' 1983 album Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This). The song heralded the band's rise to superstardom — but it went almost completely unnoticed upon its initial single release on Nov. 8, 1982.
Eurythmics' origins date back to the mid-'70s when band members Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart met in London. She was from Scotland, had emigrated to London to study at the Royal Academy of Music and was supporting her musical career by working in bars and restaurants. He was English and had been obsessed with making rock 'n' roll since he'd first heard Robert Johnson's King of the Delta Blues Singers at age 14.
The two began working together and soon formed the Tourists, which enjoyed modest success before disbanding in 1980. Lennox and Stewart formed Eurythmics the same year and released their debut album, In the Garden, in 1981, watching in disappointment as it fizzled out.
Undeterred, the duo rented an attic room above a picture-framing shop using money that Stewart secured by dressing up "like a businessman" and convincing a bank manager to give him a loan, he explained in a 1983 interview with Musician magazine. Drawing on the electronic music influence they'd picked up in Germany, they developed a sound that was, as Stewart told Classic Pop magazine, composed of "cold, European, hard, tough-sounding synthesizers with a soulful voice."
This sound pervaded Eurythmics' second album, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This). The duo released the opening track on the album, "Love Is a Stranger," as a single in November 1982. Just as the songs from The Garden had, it failed to make an impression on the public, topping out at No. 54 on the U.K. Singles Chart.
But this time, change was coming. Sweet Dreams' next single and title track became not just a hit, but a sensation. With its spooky synthesizer beat and instant-classic music video — which highlighted Lennox's androgynous style, including close-cropped orange hair and a man's suit — "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" launched Eurythmics into the pop-culture stratosphere upon its January 1983 release.
Yet while "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" is indubitably more famous, "Love Is a Stranger" is, in many ways, more fundamental to Eurythmics' sound — and it might be the better song. It opens similarly, with a driving beat overlaid by a synthesizer hook. But here the melodic line is delicate and airy, in contrast to the gloomy, ominous "Sweet Dreams." Lennox's lithe vocals match the ethereal quality of the music. "Love is a stranger in an open car," she sings, "to tempt you in and drive you far away."
As the song builds, it toes the line between cool observation and deep torment. Lennox maintains an air of detachment while warning of the perils of love and heartbreak: "It's savage and it's cruel, and it shines like destruction ... It's noble and it's brutal / It distorts and deranges / And it wrenches you up / And you're left like a zombie." It's an icy song, indeed, but it's also sensual and alluring, drawing listeners into a world Lennox creates with her voice.  From: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/eurythmics-love-is-a-stranger/

National Park Radio - Livestream from the Woods 2020

 National Park Radio - Livestream from the Woods 2020 - Part 1

 

 National Park Radio - Livestream from the Woods 2020 - Part 2

 

Though he’d dabbled in music since his early teens, Arkansas native and National Park Radio frontman Stefan Szabo didn’t start writing seriously until his mid-20s, when he left his IT job to pursue his dream of being a songwriter. In light of that dream, National Park Radio was born, and along with it the band’s debut The Great Divide, a solid Americana/folk album reminiscent of the Avett Brothers. We chat with Szabo about Ben Gibbard, the importance of keeping an open mind and his decision to finally take the plunge into the music industry.

What’s your typical songwriting process?

Typically, it starts with some sort of improvisation of chord progressions on the acoustic guitar, along with humming or singing a melody to the music. I rarely have any lyrics before that, but sometimes a line or two will come spontaneously during that stage. I’ll just continue to jam, for hours at times, and hone in on something that I feel could turn into a compelling hook. I’ll make sure to quickly record the ideas as they come, usually with my phone, so I don’t forget them, and either continue working on an idea, or move on to another one. Many times, one idea will lead to another, to another, and I could end up with several different song ideas from one session. From there, I usually let the idea sit, and I’ll come back to it later. Sometimes I’ll come back to it and realize it’s not as good as I thought it was and trash it, but other times, I might realize the idea has potential. When something gets stuck in my head and haunts me, and I end up coming back to it over and over again, it’s usually a sign that I need to set aside time to develop it into a real song. This leads to a more intense, frustrating stage of the process for me. Hashing out a verse to compliment a chorus, or vice versa is one of the most difficult parts of the process for me. I feel like once I’ve have chord progressions and vocal melodies for a verse and a chorus, and they’ve been vetted, revised, deconstructed, and reconstructed, 2/3 of the work is done. All that’s left is to write some compelling lyrics… Easy, right? Actually, I wouldn’t say it’s easy for me to write a bunch of great lyrics, but I do think that lyrics are easier for me to write than the music and melody. Maybe it’s because I have a higher standard in my mind to make the musical part of the song catchy and compelling, while many times, my goal with lyrics is to just write something that works with the music. Most of the time though, writing lyrics turns into much more than just that, and I end up writing with purpose.
If I end up feeling strongly about a song, I want to make sure I’m treating it right both lyrically and musically, and just as much – or more – time is put into developing the lyrics. I can’t tell you how much time and thought is put into this process, and it’s very much different with each song I write. Most songs take weeks to months to complete from start to finish, although some have taken less than a day and some have taken over a year. But at the core of any successful song is a hook, something that grabs the listeners’ ears and doesn’t let go, and that’s what I’m always in search of. At any given point, I probably have a couple hundred song ideas waiting to be developed or trashed, and upwards of 10-20 songs that are in the serious lyrics writing stage. How often I complete a song usually depends on how much stress I’m feeling – more stress equals less songs –  and how much free or alone time I have.

Your bio says you started writing songs at age 27. What inspired you to start writing music at that time?

I wouldn’t necessarily say that I began writing songs at 27. It’d be more accurate to say that I started taking it seriously around that age, and I finally developed the confidence it takes to write and share a serious song. I believe so much about songwriting has to do with having the confidence to play your songs for others, and learning to be proud, not embarrassed of your work. I was also getting close to 30, and I felt my dreams of playing music would slip away if I didn’t get started soon, so I pushed myself hard and decided to give it a try. One after another, songs started to come out and I began to understand what it took to write music that people actually enjoyed listening to. I can tell you that if I didn’t get such positive reinforcement from family and friends who heard what I was doing, I would not have continued to create music. It’s so important to encourage young creative minds… even if what they’re creating isn’t amazingly well-refined, or is full of flaws.

As someone who didn’t grow up in a musical family or participate in your local music scene when you were younger, what’s been the most interesting thing you’ve learned about the music world so far?

I’d say the most interesting thing I’ve learned so far, from the short time that I’ve been involved in the scene, is that there is such a huge amount of talented musicians and songwriters out there, so many of them putting everything they have into their craft and most of them going largely unnoticed by the masses. This is not a fair business. I see so many musicians and songwriters that deserve success, even more so than myself, and the sheer amount of musical and lyrical talent out there is overwhelming. The most important thing that I think I’ve realized, though, is that hard work and tenacity seem to be the the keys to success, no matter how talented you are.

From: https://americansongwriter.com/national-park-radio/

 

The Guess Who - American Woman - Side 1

01. American Woman
02. No Time
03. Talisman
04. No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature

By early 1970, the Guess Who had established themselves as a true force on Top 40 radio—with “These Eyes,” “Laughing,” and “Undun” solidifying the Canadian band’s reputation as masters of the three-minute pop song. The group aspired to something more, however, and with the American Woman album, they achieved it. Sporting a heavier musical vibe and tackling weightier themes, the record helped carve a niche for the band among its harder rocking peers. Guitarist Randy Bachman and frontman Burton Cummings wrote nearly all the material for the album. Jim Kale (bass, backing vocals) and Garry Peterson (drums, backing vocals, percussion) filled out the band’s lineup.
“We always wanted to have a harder sound,” explained Bachman, speaking with this author for a 2001 feature that appeared in Performing Songwriter. “We fought like mad not to have ‘These Eyes’ released as our first single, because we didn’t want to be viewed as a ballad band. But when ‘These Eyes’ became a million-seller, the record company asked us to write another song like that one.
“When ‘Laughing’ came out, we were very fortunate that radio programmers flipped it over and started playing ‘Undun,’ which was the B-side. That song helped bridge a gap for us, and put us into a new arena.”
The first single from American Woman was “No Time,” a re-recorded version of a track featured on the band’s previous album, Canned Wheat. Released before the new album was completed, the song peaked at #5 on the charts, ramping up expectations for the forthcoming LP.
When American Woman hit record stores in January 1970, however, it was the title track that created the biggest stir. Structured around a heavy guitar riff worked up by Bachman during a concert jam, and featuring a menacing vocal from Cummings, the song homed in on what the band viewed as the social and political havoc wreaked by the Nixon administration.
“A lot of people thought ‘American Woman’ was addressing the woman on the street,” explains Bachman, “but it wasn’t at all. The band had witnessed all the desolation going on in America, where there were hardly any young men in any of the towns we went to. They had all been drafted. We would see 18-year-old guys at the airports, with their buzz cuts and their uniforms, with their fathers telling them how proud they were, and their mothers and sisters in tears. It was heartbreaking. So instead of singing ‘Uncle Sam, stay away from me,’ or ‘Richard Nixon, stay away from me,’ it was ‘American woman.’ RCA actually released a piece of promotion that showed a New York alley filled with litter, and at the back of the alley was the Statue of Liberty, holding up the torch. Fortunately, by the time radio and the government understood that the song was an anti-war song, it had already reached #1.
Following the explosive one-two punch of the title track and “No Time,” American Woman settles into an eclectic mix that showcases the growing maturation of Bachman and Cummings as songwriters. “Talisman” features Cummings singing the words to a poem he had written two years earlier, as Bachman provides classical-style accompaniment on acoustic guitar. “969” finds Bachman rocking out on a blues instrumental spiced by a jazzy break played on the flute. With the exception of the title song, however, it’s the inventive “combination” track, “No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature,” that shines most brightly. A melding of two distinct tunes into a “round,” of sorts, the composition resulted from a bit of serendipity.
“Burton and I often brought pieces of songs to one another,” observes Bachman. “We would write great half-songs, which is what most co-writers do. Or maybe you write a third, and your partner writes a third, and then you work on the last third together. In this instance, I brought Burton what I thought was a really weird song. It was in F#, which is a really strange key for the guitar. I played it for him, and he was like, ‘Hey that’s a complete song.’ Then Burton told me he had a song written in F#, which was also weird, to have a piano-based song in that key.”
Bachman continues: “Somehow, at that point, I got the idea that we should play both songs together. I started singing ‘No Sugar Tonight,’ and as I finished each line, Burton would answer me. It was just one of those magical things. We decided to do one of the songs, and then do the other, and then overlap them. The idea was that it would be like the Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life,’ where you have two different parts, in different tempos.”  From: https://bestclassicbands.com/guess-who-american-woman-album-review-9-30-166/

 

Atavia - Azure

Atavia, solo endeavor of Michalina Maja Rutkowska — the vocalist known from the polish Post-Metal band Datûra, was formed in early 2018. Maja’s initial musical experiments gravitated toward Ambient, Dark Folk, and Psychedelia, taking the form of abstract soundscapes. Over time, the sound of the compositions evolved toward Rock and Post-Punk, and the tracks acquired a more song-oriented structure. Later, Tomek Wazia (drums) and Szymon Stadniczenko (guitar) joined Atavia, transforming the solo project into a power trio.
The name Atavia was derived from the term “atavistic nostalgia” by Phil Hine, an author of books on chaos magic. Briefly, this term signifies a longing for the primal forces dormant within humans that were lost during the evolutionary process. According to Hine, humans can evoke these forces by interacting with animals — their distant ancestors. The project’s name serves as a tribute to the non-verbalized, subconscious and primitive world. This is the world from which the ideas for the album “To the Old Ones” emerged.  From: https://progrockjournal.com/news-post-ambient-dark-folk-project-atavia-from-vocalist-of-polish-post-metal-band-datura-debuts-with-single-to-the-old-ones/

 

 

Susanna Hoffs - Eyes Of A Baby / Happy Place / To Sir With Love (Lulu cover)

Susanna Hoffs catapulted to stardom as part of the Bangles, the power poppers who rose from Los Angeles' Paisley Underground and into the Top 40 with "Manic Monday," a Prince song that Hoffs sang for the group. She sang the lion's share of the Bangles' big hits -- providing the closing verses on both "Walk Like an Egyptian" and "Hazy Shade of Winter" and taking the lead on "Walking Down Your Street," "In Your Room," and "Eternal Flame" -- positioning herself nicely for the solo career she launched with the 1991 release of When You're a Boy. Neither When You're a Boy nor its eponymous 1996 successor was a commercial success, so Hoffs returned to the guitar pop she loved best, first reuniting with the Bangles for 2003's Doll Revolution, then cutting a series of covers albums with Matthew Sweet in the 2000s and 2010s. By the 2020s, Hoffs had resumed a solo career with Bright Lights and The Deep End, a pair of records where she covered some of her favorite songwriters.
Hoffs was born in Los Angeles, California on January 17, 1959; her father, Joshua Hoffs, was a physician, while her mother, Tamar Simon Hoffs, was a screenwriter and film director. Susanna was the second of three children, and she and her siblings learned to play guitar from their uncle, a folk musician who also built dulcimers. Hoffs grew up on classic AM radio pop and literate, folk-influenced artists such as Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt; she enjoyed singing with family and friends but was more interested in pursuing acting or dance as a career (she played a small role in the 1978 film Stony Island, an acclaimed independent feature co-written by her mother) until she enrolled as a ballet student at UC Berkeley.
After her big brother passed along albums by the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads, and Susanna saw Patti Smith perform in San Francisco, she became a quick convert to the new wave, and formed an informal band with her brother and David Roback, a friend from the neighborhood who played guitar. While the trio proved short-lived, Hoffs and Roback, who were a couple for a while, recorded some living-room demos that emboldened her to form a band. (Echoes of these unreleased recordings can be heard on the 1984 album Rainy Day, coordinated by Roback after he became leader of the acclaimed Paisley Underground band Rain Parade; Hoffs contributes striking lead vocals to versions of the Velvet Underground's "I'll Be Your Mirror" and Bob Dylan's "I'll Keep It with Mine.")
Looking for like-minded musicians, Hoffs answered an ad in an L.A. weekly newspaper, The Recycler, in late 1980 and met guitarist Vicki Peterson and her sister Debbi Peterson, who played drums; the three shared a fondness for '60s-influened pop/rock and the Petersons were impressed with Hoffs' vocal abilities. The three formed a band called the Colours that would quickly evolve into the Bangs and became the Bangles after a threat of legal action from another group called the Bangs.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/susanna-hoffs-mn0000043241#biography 

Moving Oos - Eight Miles High

Since upper Norway in early February remains dark both at night and during most of the day, it is impossible for a visitor with only three days in the country to assess time with any accuracy. Add alcohol, plus sleep deprivation to the already extant sensory deprivation, and the task becomes laughable. The vague occasion was the after-party to what had previously seemed the after-party, on the day after the last night of Trondheim's by:Larm festival, and thus it could have been nearly any time in the early or even late morning that we emerged out of cluster of warehouses and, ducking the wind off the snow and the nearby fjord, ascended the steps up into the third or fifth venue of the evening.
Though we had been told otherwise, we did not expect the "biker bar" to which we had been referred to contain American-style bikers, to boast mounted Death Valley cow skulls and wall-to-wall worn-out leather jackets. And we did not expect the Moving Oos, which we knew as a side-project to the New Violators and were our last stop before the airport, to have much to do with "classic rock"-- somewhere, somebody sketchily said, between the Faces and MC5. We expected them to sound like the New Violators: gauzy not bluesy, early 1980s not early 70s, good clothes and a dignified affect, not blue jeans and jean jackets.
OK, that's not quite right. We knew their singer had worked as a truck driver and knew that Per Borten, the gifted music mimic, singer, and songwriter behind New Violators, wrote the Moving Oos' songs too. And we knew that the New Violators' occasional backup singer/siren was one of the two "oos" in that band's three-person vocal front (the two bands also share a drummer and keyboardist). Two of us had even seen the Oos the night before. But who could believe the same people carrying off such a brilliant American/English 80s pop resurrection could be doing the same thing later that evening for a completely different decade, the 1970s??
Anybody who's heard Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones or the Black Crowes or AC/DC-- everybody-- will know what's coming in this music minutes before it actually happens, making Peace and Love a brain-teaser of a good record. How can we still enjoy this stuff: the bluesy lick, guitar or keys; the tambourine hits on the eights; the gesture skyward cued by women saying "ooh"; the multi-tracked, song-title-based chorus? The motorcycle revs on "Natural Man", the "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" interpolation on "Turn Back Time", the "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution" intro on not one but two songs, "Prisoner" and "Promised Land"?
One answer is that Peace and Love is less homage than pretty close to the real thing, right place/wrong time, maybe, but right songs. What makes Peace and Love more than a joke or side-project or late night drunken escapism is something perhaps old fashioned or unfashionable, but it has to do with everyone in the band knowing how to sing, how to play their instruments, everyone knowing the exact moment on "Romancer" to get out of the way and let the two women deliver the second chorus by themselves, a shivery and sharp moment of clarity that says, just maybe, these guys know what they're about.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10037-peace-and-love/