The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies‘ 11th long player! Style wise its a bit of ska, punk, a couple swing songs and a dash of funkiness. I think of it as a mural painted for 2017-2018- addressing that zeitgeist. But done in a way that’s actually universal and timeless. It’s a tough-minded, rockin’ and muscular satire “ripped from the headlines.” Bigger Life is like a throwback to our Ferociously Stoned days, mixed with our skacore influence of the Kids on the Street era.
New album by Tom Freund — Double Vinyl (Mastered by Bakery Mastering with audiophile precision)
featuring 2 unreleased tracks and duet with Ben Harper on “Let My Love Open The Door”. First 50 ordered signed by Tom – upon request!
SRSQ (pronounced seer-skew) is the solo project of Kennedy Ashlyn (vocalist/keyboardist of Them Are Us Too). Creative voids aren’t filled, but rather holes left that push the edges of the present into new realms of consciousness. SRSQ’s pulse began after the death of Kennedy’s closest friend and TAUT collaborator Cash Askew, a casualty in the sudden and tragic Oakland Ghost Ship Fire of 2016. Driven by loss, SRSQ became the vehicle for Kennedy’s transformative process, exploring nuance, nostalgia, reflection, and reconciliation, manifesting in the aural landscape of Unreality.
As a debut, Unreality is entrance into a new form of storytelling, traversing the present while pulling from a deep swath of experience, immersion, and sound. Like the impulse it pulls from, each song evokes the complex duality of meditation—where simple intersects with infinite. Ambient synthesizers that approach harshness, relentless arpeggiations act together with Kennedy’s vocals as a lush weapon, weaving cloudlike fables over orchestration that’s familiar and foreign. Trance-like at times, yet always rooted in cadence and structure, the synesthesia of sound and feeling takes cues from the delicate miasma of Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, or Dead Can Dance, using their example as the ground floor for building a new temple of frequency. Kennedy proves an adept architect of rhythm, using sequenced electronics as a deep backbeat that allows the harrowing beauty of her vocals to lead the journey.
Available from Dais Records.
yOya is the project of longtime songwriting partners Alex Pfender and Noah Dietterich. Natives of Corvallis, OR and friends since the fifth grade, Pfender and Dietterich grew up to the sound of rain in the fir trees and Graceland on cassette. When the duo moved to California they found themselves semi-consciously absorbing the electronic sounds of the LA scene. What emerged was yOya’s unique mix of folk-hearted songs, intricate vocal harmony, gritty synths, and thundering electronic beats.