What began as drummer Matt Shaw’s acoustic demos back in 2017 quickly developed into a six-piece band, bonding over a love of artists like American Football, Minus The Bear, and The Appleseed Cast. The group has taken influence from mid-western emo, math-rock, and alternative indie and combined those with Fleetwood Mac style dual-vocal pop melodies and twinkling glockenspiel to create their trademark “Glock-Rock” sound.
Earning their stripes in pubs and clubs of the Watford music scene, Lakes have been emboldened with a DIY attitude that was born from the frustration of life on the peripheries of a capital city. The group’s fiercely independent attitude has led them to record all their own music, produce their own music videos, and with families of their own – organize child-friendly matinee gigs in their hometown.
After self-releasing their first two EPs, Lakes joined The LP Cafe in the UK and Friend of Mine Records in Japan to release their debut full-length album in August 2019 entitled “The Constance LP”.
This led Washed Up Emo to label them “your new favorite band” and Punktastic to include them on their list of the most important bands of the next decade stating “it’s hard to look past their potential as future frontrunners of the UK emo scene.
With nods to midwestern emo giants in American Football and Braid, Lakes create a truly unique take on the genre interlacing shimmering glockenspiels, beautiful harmonies, and pop sensibilities in everything they do.”
The album was recorded entirely by drummer Matt Shaw in a spare room using a couple of mics and a PC over the space of a year. With no timing or financial restraints that would come from a proper studio, the band took their time crafting the songs and discovering their sound. This has resulted in a truly unique album, one that is completely holistic in its presentation with band members also taking control of photography, graphic design, web design and accompanying music videos.
Lakes’ ‘This World Of Ours, It Came Apart,’ was released in July 2020 via Know Hope Records in North America and The LP Cafe in the UK.
LINKS:
https://www.ourbandlakes.com
https://www.facebook.com/ourbandlakes
https://www.instagram.com/ourbandlakes
https://twitter.com/ourbandlakes
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Charlie Melrose – The Original Ghost
Touching upon the hook-laden electro grooves of Lady Gaga and Christine & The Queens, UK’s fast-rising art-pop/neo soul creator ‘Charlie Melrose’ delivers news of her single and video release.
‘The Original Ghost’ tackles her dad ‘ghosting’ her. Charlie was born into a musical family – her Auntie is 80’s music royalty, Hazel O’Connor (D-Days, Will You, Breaking Glass) and her father is Neil O’Connor. Throughout her childhood, her father would be away a great deal due to the requirements his career in music, especially while working with The Human League but as a child this was something Charlie says she found hard to deal with and didn’t really understand. In Charlie’s words ‘Instead of hating him, I just used to see him as this amazing person who kept leaving because I was probably rubbish… you know how children’s brains work?’
In the end, her father’s work took over and Charlie felt like she was totally dropped – which undeniably many daughters and sons would have an affinity with. Despite Charlie’s attempts to try and have a relationship with her father, he ended up cutting off contact and ‘Ghosting’ her. That is the backdrop to Charlie’s new single.
The story of their relationship both as a child and as an aspiring musician is a fascinating and heart-rending story. ‘The Original Ghost’ is Charlie’s attempt to come to terms with some of the confusion that affected her childhood and still burdens her today as an adult, her story as she explains resonates with many thousands of children who are now adults; the song’s lyrics combine both sadness and empowerment.
LINKS:
https://www.facebook.com/charliemelrosemusic
https://twitter.com/Charlie_Melrose
https://www.instagram.com/charliemelrose
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/the-original-ghost-single/1441276392
https://open.spotify.com/artist/0xPg9VQMYIHLCVxB0zHjNS?si=DunLQNBlTVywa-X43RX5qg -
deM atlaS – Bad Loves Company (The Visual EP)
Produced entirely by Ant, the beat-making half of Atmosphere, the project will be available worldwide October 19, 2018 via Rhymesayers Entertainment.
deM atlaS’ new album Bad Actress is only the latest in a string of releases–including the 9-song EP DWNR that, according to Pitchfork, “splits the difference on ‘depressed’ and ‘party mode.’” In some ways the new work feels like a debut, not just because it’s his first proper LP, but because it represents the culmination of a twisting creative path that Turner’s patiently been following since his teens. He was a poet, a painter, and the frontman for a rock band before he found his space in Minneapolis’s prolific rap scene. Once there, a philosophy of saying yes to any opportunity that passed his way quickly led him from playing shows for nugs of weed to a showcase in front of Rhymesayers CEO Siddiq, and a single recording session with Atmosphere beatmaker Ant that kept going until they’d made almost an entire album together.
The title Bad Actress comes from Turner’s inability to hide his true feelings, and he’s packed the album with unguarded emotions centered around a lifetime of unhealthy relationships, struggles with mental illness, and an indomitable drive to overcome them. Musically it draws from every stage of Turner’s young career, from the high school rock singer to the scruffy DIY-er who self-recorded his Charle Brwn EP while figuring out the basics of Garageband to the confident, versatile vocalist he is today, equally at home crooning and screaming as he is rapping over beats by heavy hitters like Ant and MF DOOM.
From the grime-caked beats to the confessional lyrics to the supercharged guitars laced throughout, Bad Actress is an album that’s deeply rooted in Minneapolis’s singular hip-hop scene, where boom-bap never went out of style and raw honesty still beats flashy materialism. Turner’s soulful singing voice, and his ability to navigate from the acidic Sly Stone funk of “Gratitude” to the acoustic balladry of “Music Man” to the purple-tinged minimalist gospel of “Runnin Back” make it clear that he’s one of the young talents who’s going to author the next chapter in the city’s storied musical history. After all, an atlas isn’t only a collection of maps, but a man who’s strong enough to carry the weight of the whole world on his shoulders.
SOURCE: Official Bio
LINKS:
https://rhymesayers.com/artists/dematlas
https://twitter.com/dematlas
https://www.instagram.com/dematlas
https://www.facebook.com/dematlas -
Johnny Marr – Easy Money
The early 1980s weren’t the best of times to be an aspiring guitar player. Twenty years earlier, the head of Decca records, Dick Rowe, had made the biggest A&R gaff in pop history with the legendary clanger “Guitar groups are on their way out, Mr Epstein”. But in 1982, Rowe’s apocalyptic prophecy suddenly sounded frighteningly real. After the initial roar and storm of punk, British pop music had succumbed to a synthesizer-driven pursuit of new waves and new romanticism. In an age of Vienna’s, Tainted Love’s and Too Shy’s, the pure sound of six-stringed, melodic pop – be it as amorous as The Beatles, as lascivious as The Stones or as giddy as T.Rex – was fast becoming a lost cause with few willing to fight its corner.
That all changed with Johnny Marr.
Born in Manchester on Halloween 1963, of Irish heritage, Marr’s earliest musical memories are the get-togethers of his extended family, perhaps – as his early guitar idol Marc Bolan would sing – dancing himself out of the womb to the traditional strains of Black Velvet Band. As a child, he’d be spellbound by his parents’ record collection: the forlorn dramas of Del Shannon, the prison doldrums of Johnny Cash and the heart-popping bliss of his mother’s Four Tops singles. All these influences would linger at the back of the boy Marr’s brain, waiting for the command to attack his fingertips at a later date.
That date finally came during the early summer of 1982 when Marr, just 18 years-old, formed The Smiths after seeking out the reclusive and elusive Stretford poet, Morrissey. Musically, the sound of The Smiths was a guitar noise nostalgically familiar yet equally dumbfounding in its pristine newness. The tunes were giant, euphoric and instantaneous but woven together with such nimble flair it appeared as if the guitar was playing Marr instead of the other way round. Lost for words, early critics of the day undersold him with the words “jingle” and “jangle” when, had they tried, they might better have described the sound of Johnny Marr as that of Van Gogh’s Starry Night in angry animation. Or the echo of diamonds raining down upon zinc-plated cobblestones. Or the sound of kitchen cutlery bouncing off a gaffer-taped Telecaster (which, ridiculous as it sounds, is how Marr achieved some of the resonant clangs in This Charming Man.)
LINKS:
http://www.johnny-marr.com
http://www.facebook.com/officialjohnnymarr
http://www.twitter.com/johnny_marr
http://www.instagram.com/johnnymarrgram