There’s something springlike about the self-titled debut album by Lake Lure-based vocalist and songwriter Celia Verbeck. Lead track “Opposite the Echo” is all fresh burble and sprightly high notes. The music by Adeodat Warfield — synthesized beats and airy melodies — are well paired with Verbeck’s sweet, elastic soprano.
While the conversations between the instruments are active and cerebral, moods wash through the music so that it’s felt emotionally as well as intellectually.
Cohen and Justin Eisenman make up the country duo The Clydes. From the opening notes of their debut album, Rattlesnake Lodge, they establish themselves as storytellers, composers of redolent scores and skilled singers of duets.
The spatial construction of the sound alone takes it beyond any basic blues formation, but it’s easy in its experimentation, at peace with its inner weirdness and content to strut and sway no matter who might be watching.
At turns cozy and exposed, myopic and panoramic, Mystic Canticle is felt as much as it’s heard. These are compositions that go deep, living in the listener’s subconscious and resonating long past the album’s final notes.
Local musician Erica Russo released her new album, In Between Dreams, over the summer. And at the end of September, she put out a video for the otherworldly track, “Dreams.” Xpress checks out the album before Russo’s Nov. 11 performance at The Mothlight.
Melancholy that runs like a thread throughout Wintervals’ writing, but it’s a delicious sort of sadness that never devolves into gloom. “Overnight,” with the line, “I know your secret, you know mine. You know I won’t judge you, I think you’re fine,” sways softly with a kind of unselfconscious delicacy.
Wright’s new album and fifth offering, builds on the musician’s foundation in jazz and gospel. Although the album moves through various musical genres — the sultry lilt of “The Game,” the breathless slow dance of “Right Where You Are,” the aching, gospel-infused cover of The Bee Gee’s “To Love Somebody” — every song is ultimately about Wright’s voice.
Reality meets science fiction on Hank West & the Smokin’ Hots’ recent release. If this album is anything to go by, it catches the group at a moment of high energy, fantastical ideas and tight musicianship — a combination that works for the heady and highly imaginative collection of songs.
This year’s Snake Oil Medicine Show reunion concert is also a release party for “The Golden Hour.” Founding members Phil Cheney, Caroline Pond, George and Andy Pond, Jason Krekel and Jay Sanders will be joined by Billy Seawell on drums at Isis Restaurant & Music Hall on Friday, Aug. 21.
Each song on the Alex Krug Combo’s new EP, Gentle Spotted Giants, is delivered with absolute care, even as its wrung from the singer’s guts. The album is launched at a release party at Isis Restaurant & Music Hall on Saturday, Aug. 22, at 8:30 p.m.
The nine tracks of Elvis Depressedly’s most recent release, New Alhambra run about 20 minutes in total — the 3 1/2 minute title song is the longest. It builds slowly, its arc almost imperceptible until a particularly contemplative melody rings through the ambient hum.
Lovecraft’s nine tracks are more lush and stylized than typical singer-songwriter fare, more laid-back than typical indie-rock. iTunes insists they’re pop, but each song is a world unto itself with careful and joyful interplay between musicality and lyrics.
PJ Bond’s catch phrase for his sound is “honest music about real things” — and that’s a damn good summation, but it suggests bit more earnestness than the 11 tracks of Where Were You actually reveal. Not that the songs are without integrity. In fact, with continued play, they seem to peel back layers, revealing strata of meaning, insight and imagery.
Musical selflessness and open-book lyrics infuse “Appalachiacana” band Tellico’s album Relics and Roses with honesty. The 45-minute collection of mountain-inspired tunes is out now.
Xenography, the new album by composer and musician Chris Stack is intensely observant and deeply peaceful. It’s not an album that commands you to listen, that stage dives and struts and makes a spectacle of itself. But to really pay attention to these songs is to go into a deeper, quieter, slower-paced place; a place welling with its own life forms and pulses and magic.
Part experimental, part indie-pop, Kisses to the Sky — the new release from N.C.-based collective Oulipo is as risky as it is dreamy. The album “takes inspiration from the studio pop melodrama of Talk Talk, Phil Collins, and the two Bruces (Springsteen & Hornsby)” says the group’s Bandcamp page.
“Half a Heart,” the lead track to the self titled debut EP from local indie-soul outfit Magenta Sunshine, might have a sad-sounding name, but it plays like a tropical beach party.
Even at 11 tracks, the new self-titled album from former Ashevillean Woody Pines is just over 30 minutes long. It’s an album that wastes little time.
Stars and Dust, the new album by Songs of Water (out in June), is not easy listening — which is not to say it’s un easy listening. But these 10 tracks demand attention. From the first staccato notes of “11 Miles,” the album is a journey, transportive and transformative.
Local pop-punk outfit Running on E gets right to the heart of the matter. “Don’t waste away, don’t burn away the light that I refused,” sings vocalist Nick Norton in the urgent opening notes of “Vagrants and Vagabonds.”
