Formed in late 2021, Velvet Beach are an independent band from Toronto. Originally formed by members of Newcomer, Matias Gutierrez and Martin Camara were then joined by Sean Stover (Silus, The Honeycomb Flyers) and Meagan Aversa. Existing somewhere between shoegaze, dream pop, and new wave, Velvet Beach strive for authenticity without forgetting some of their core influences such as The Cure, Beach House, and Slowdive.
Their second single, “Home (Is It True?),” is a dream pop tune that feels like the beginning of a love story but whose lyrics evoke melancholic images of doubt and uncertainty.
Lead vocalist Matias Gutierrez was inspired to write the song after reading an article about the effects of the pandemic on the lives of independent artists in North America. He sympathized with the feelings of frustration and helplessness particularly through his own experiences during the pandemic and feeling like he wasn’t in control of his own life.
The single artwork is actually a childhood photo of guitarist Sean Stover, following the band’s theme of childhood photos from their first single, “Youth.” The album centers upon how we cope with feelings of frustration, helplessness, and not feeling in control of your life. Remembering ourselves as kids acts as a foil to these feelings of our adulthood by reminding us of the wonder we experienced as children towards even seemingly mundane experiences like swimming in a lake or laying in a field.
Vancouver based jazz and blues songwriter Eva Schubert is sharing The Feel of Your Love, her new album which is a sultry, sometimes hypnotic collection of songs that have the power to effortlessly shift the colour of your mood.
The album’s title track is a languid meditation on desire, creating a slowburning world of downtempo jazz for listeners to sink into.
“Songs get bound up with our memories, emotions and experiences. They can take us back to moments we have lived, and serve as carriers of emotions we have forgotten. It’s a kind of magic, and I am always trying to cast that kind of spell,” explains Schubert.
Classically trained vocalist, singer-songwriter, and owner of award-winning French education company, Les Petites Pommes, Mary Clements has created a warm and personal invitation in the form of her debut album, Come With Me.
The album’s indie pop and folk influenced arrangements compliment songs focused on connection, with Clements reflecting on stages of her life when she was trying to figure out who she was alone, experiences with anxiety, as well as her decision to go all in on her relationship and marry her husband.
The vocally powerful, piano and guitar driven “Possibilities” is what Clements refers to as a “funeral for all those opportunities that could have been pursued but died once a path was chosen.”
Its lyrics speak to the pressures that we have all been faced with when making big decisions that can change the course of our lives, such as moving to a new city, pursuing a relationship, or altering one’s career path.
“To me, there’s nothing more special and powerful in life than feeling connected to each other so [listeners] have given me a great gift. Together, I hope we can create and multiply more of these moments in the world,” Clements expresses.
Dyatlov Pass is an 8 – song historical concept album by Welcome to the 21st! about the mysterious fate of eight college – age students and their guide who died while on a winter trek in the USSR’s Ural Mountains in February 1959. The students were found over time after they disappeared, with varying injuries, and no one knows exactly what happened. It remains an open inquiry to this day. The theories as to what happened include an avalanche, a military test gone awry, and some even believe a malevolent supernatural intervention.
The album follows the 20 – something nature travelers from meeting up before they left ( Hang on to Yourself – Song 1 ), to the early part of their voyage through a peaceful winter environment ( Sing to the Moon – Song 4 ), with hints of warnings along the way ( Warning Signs – Song 3 ). The middle of the album tracks the group’s eventual demise near a frozen mountain pass ( Dyaltov Pass – Song 5 and Lost but Found – Song 6 ), to the search and recovery teams that looked for them ( Boots in the Rain – Song 7 ) and who have sought for years to determine what actually happened ( Misleading Clues – Song 8 ). Band Info: The album was written and conceived of by Bob Blumenfeld (Guitars, from Texas, US) and Touanda (Vocals, from Manchester, UK), who met online through AirGigs. The rest of the instrumentation was mainly performed by, and mixed and produced by , John Dufilho a multi – instrumentalist, drummer, and long – time established indie music producer from Dallas, Texas. Bob’s other bands include The Disappearing Act and Lowdog. John is best known for his work with his band Deathray Davies.
Robert Blumenfeld of the band shares:
“A few years ago, my good friend and former bandmate, Mark Mendel, gave me a nonfiction book about the Incident at Dyatlov Pass, a Soviet-era Russia unsolved mystery. If you haven’t heard of this, which most Americans haven’t, in February 1959, a group of eight students and their guide went missing on a winter trek through the Ural mountains. Search and rescue teams later found their empty tent pitched on a mountain side, sliced open, and a few frozen bodies, without shoes, laying some distance away. It took several months to find all the bodies and it has taken over 60 years to piece together what might have gone wrong. No one knows exactly what happened, and the forensic evidence discovered afterwards, for a lack of a better description, is really weird and creepy.
I originally thought I might write a book or play about the Dyatlov mystery, but as much as I think one day I’ll write about history, it turns out I am better at songwriting than being an author. In 2018, I was commuting back and forth between El Paso, where I worked, and the Dallas area, where I had moved with my wife. I had more time to write songs that year, my brother Dan had just built a baritone guitar for me, and that guitar inspired a slew of new songs. One of those songs just came to me, fairly fully formed for me, with lyrics – and the song “Dyatlov Pass” was born.
The idea for a “concept album” came a bit later, during Covid. I wanted to keep developing new material during the early days of the “lockdown” and reached out to Touanda, who I met on an online song-writing platform, about helping me write the song “Lost But Found” about the students who never made it back from their trek back in 1959. I sent Touanda the rough mix of the song and the idea, and she did her own research on the subject and turned a draft of the song right around in a day or two, giving us the song Lost But Found. Two songs down, and the idea of a historical concept album was on its way.
So, the inspiration for the album is- besides me being a history buff – the true story of the Mystery of Dyatlov Pass. The album is arranged as a chronology of the ill-fated trip, starting with the group of 20s-something boys and girls meeting up, eating and drinking around a campfire before they left (Hang on to Yourself). The album midpoint is the last night of the trip for the trekkers, with them being lost but found afterwards. The last two songs take the point of view of the search and recovery teams that spent months to find all the bodies and years trying to figure out what happened to them.
The third member of the band that put this album together is John Dufilho, a multi-instrumentalist, producer and engineer in Dallas. John took the rough mixes Touanda and I were working on and turned them into full arrangements, giving us the opportunity to complete our Dyatlov Pass project.”
John Trescott Luis really stepped into music through the side door!
While setting aside a career in music, he went to work in Hollywood as a sound engineer for ABC where he worked on hundreds of sit-coms, soap operas, dramatic productions, NEWS shoots and Award shows. He never stopped dreaming of the music that could be and perhaps may be once he was done with his “real job”. He’s now focused on his long-desired music venture and doing so very successfully with 18k monthly listeners on Spotify.
His most recent single, “MisUnderstandings” is a Country Rock song that sounds like a mix of Tom Petty and Waylon Jennings. His voice has a Jackson Browne style with a sultry and soulful presentation.
During his first trip to Nashville to record songs with the new band, he was understandably nervous and privately hoped these world class players wouldn’t “laugh at this California guy’s songs”. They jumped in with “Stuck”, (the first song that he was to sing) and the band just nailed it. Everyone thought it was a hit, so they jammed ahead with the rest of the sessions feeling like a breeze. The nervousness was unfounded!
Back at his hotel room that night, he pulled out his guitar and started “messing with a few chords” and immediately came up with the opening for what would soon be “MisUnderstandings”. “I’ve learned that I come up with my most original ideas when I just start playing without thinking, then grab a hold of the first ideas,” shares John. After working on it, he builds the story of a guy and a girl up in a hotel room arguing about “nothing and everything” but realizing they are just MisUnderstandings. “I could have searched all day, and not found, where you’re at”. She’s Miss Understanding and he’s Mr. Understood.
Listening to his wide variety of music you can tell this is someone who has been experimenting with styles for some time and must love them all to create songs with this much depth like the Prog Rock Ballad “Fever Dreams” or the Blues Torch song “I Fell For Those Eyes” or perhaps the simplest yet most moving ballad “DayDream” which is very McCartney-esque…
It seems he is tackling Country/Americana now and after seeing the success of “Stuck”, we are sure “MisUnderstandings” will take him even higher.
John did mention that the next single is even more of a departure and even more of a musical risk… We can’t wait to see what he comes up with next…
Gaming Music legend TheFatRat, popularly known for his immense online following of over six million YouTube subscribers and iconic songs like “Unity” and “Fly Away (feat. Anjulie),” has collaborated with award-winning Korean girl band EVERGLOW for a seductive and energetic new K-Pop single. Known for pushing a stronger sound outside of the traditional “bubble gum pop,” these six global stars and their bass heavy, EDM-inspired discography pair with TheFatRat’s Gaming Music sound perfectly for the saxophone-heavy trap-leaning single “Ghost Light,” which is available now on all DSPs and streaming services HERE.
“Ghost Light” starts off mysteriously alluring, with lyrics such as “I’m your wildest dream, everything you need” comforting us, lulling the listener into a sense of warm security. As we settle in, these seductively sung, delicate reassurances gradually transform into forceful demands backed by a building trap-inspired saxophone riff. The suggestion to “come and follow” changes into a command, “Come and get me.” The marching, brass climax is coupled with the anthemic lyrics of “You know, you want more, so come try and catch me if you can.” Just as swiftly as it came, the tone quickly reverts back and forth between these powerful belts and the soothing, ethereal vocals of Everglow. The song climaxes with an energetic and vigorous horns and drums finale, then ends with a fittingly and contrastingly tranquil outro.
“Ghost Light has a large variety in vocal styles. Luckily with Everglow I found a perfect match for each part. I loved how Si-Heyon and Aisha made the verses sweet but mysterious, E:U gave the right energy to the bridge and Mia and Onda simply killed the powerful parts in the chorus.” – TheFatRat
“Ghost Light” follows TheFatRat’s highly-anticipated lore-filled debut ten-track album PARALLAX, which was released in September 2021. One song from the album was released each week followed by interactive Discord chats hosted by TheFatRat with collaborators and thousands of his fans. The album, artwork, and lyrics from PARALLAX tell their own cohesive story filled with imaginative characters and fantasy settings that have been referenced in his past projects, with each single sharing new chapters of the story. This lore is a huge interest for his rabid fans, who speculated wildly on online forums about the meaning of each release and guessing what was coming next.
In the midst of preparing to release Ghost Light, TheFatRat has been enjoying his recent social media virality with his 2014 song, “Xenogenesis” leading to fan videos accumulating over 100 million views within a few weeks and climbing with the so called Outro trend. Used for years by his YouTube gaming audience as a way to end their gamer videos, the Outro is currently sweeping social media and engaging celebrities, fans and media alike, as seen by Nick Kroll on The Tonight Show, Subtronics at Lost Lands, and Barstool Sports.
This will be EVERGLOW’s first official collaboration with a dance music artist and hopefully will be the start of more danceable tracks to come. Band member Aisha says, “[This collaboration] has a special place in my heart, and the fact that we got to work with Chris (TheFatRat) was such an honor.” Band member Si-Hyeon adds, “My personal highlight was to record ‘come and get me’ in an almost yelling manner. I think that part of the song hypes up the energy and will be fun to listen to.”
Modern Mystery 
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