Hey everyone, it’s Charlie, and this week I’m excited to tell you about The Hunts, an indie-folk alternative group out of Virginia. The group is seven brothers and sisters, and I would ordinarily call their music something out of this world - but I’m going to argue instead that their music is distinctly of this world, and that’s precisely what makes it so remarkable.
Read MoreKatie here writing another essay for Underwater Sunshine Fest and feeling incredibly privileged that I get to share such special musicians and art with you. This one is a little bit different for me, though, because I’ve already written about the band— Marcy Playground— when they played our inaugural festival last October. In my first article, I wanted to make the point that any band that has survived, thrived, and gotten better over decades is a hell of a lot more than one song. So, having written last time about how they’re not just “the guys who sang ‘Sex and Candy,’” let me tell you a little this time about what they are.
Read MoreOur musical landscape needs more artists like Claire Morales. Her songs are weird. And great. But weird. The baritone flutter in her voice, the chordal structure and spatial arrangements, the lyrical prophecy of something like “too rare so far / you can't remember what you are / you need someone to show you what / this cosmic dust is doing here”.
Read MoreI was going to write this about how Fairhazel was one of the most exciting bands to come out of April’s Underwater Sunshine, because...well, they were. I loved them the first time they sang through my headphones way back when the year was still new and cold. Then they came and turned The Bowery Electric upside down and inside out with a live show that somehow both accentuated their quiet solemnity and, more surprisingly, showed their sharp teeth, as they knifed into these lush gorgeous songs and just made them bleed out in the room. Hugh Macdonald knows how to put a live band together, no question about that. Fairhazel’s music actually blooms when you hear it live.
Read MoreHello friends and family, Katie here again! This time, I won a bit of an arm wrestle and I get to introduce you to Onliest. Toward the end of the first loooooong 12hr day of the spring festival Garden Sessions— also known as Thursday night— we were all, to stick with the “underwater” theme, a little waterlogged. My guess is everyone’s had the experience of going to a great concert and either crying, being completely overwhelmed, or just not knowing how to process it, not because it was BAD, but because SO MUCH GOOD happened at once? (I’ll admit I once cried the entire was from Indianapolis back to southern Indiana after an Old 97’s concert and I still think it was just too good for me to be ready to leave.)
Read MoreI listen to a ton of new artists so, for someone to catch my ear, they need to hit my musical trifecta. I knew Town Meeting was great from that first video because the music, the voice, and the lyrics all worked. Town Meeting has not one amazing lead voice but three! The Condon brothers are all songwriters. Sometimes they sing their own songs and other times the four of them write together and the person taking the lead just happens. Luke couples singing with guitar, Russ with cajon or drums and Babe with harmonica and tambourine. Tim adds depth and color to their voices with his rotation of bass, mandolin, acoustic, electric and tenor guitar, and now banjo!
Read MoreYou came to hear about Skout, the guitar-playing duo comprised of Laura Valk and Connor Gladney, whose website describes them as “indie folk with an edge,” who opened for Underwater Sunshine alum Eric Hutchinson in 2015, and whose music, if you’ve given it a listen, is somehow both arresting and electrifying. But I’d like to argue for a moment that Skout and gravity have a lot in common.
Read MoreI wrote the profile of Matt for the inaugural Underwater Sunshine Fest in October. It’s only been a year but, when I went to “update” my work for this fest, I was blown away by everything Matt has accomplished since then. He never, ever stays still. Among other things, he toured all across the country, released a brilliant LP in Thousand Dollar Dinners, and even filmed a performance at the Paste studio. So while some of this essay might sound similar, my guess is what you’re picking up on is largely tone: how can you write about a man who beams like Matt Sucich without picking up some of the radiance and glow yourself?
Read MoreHere’s the thing: Hugh Macdonald, the man behind Fairhazel, is tapping into something special. It’s clear that Hugh is a writer’s writer and a storyteller’s storyteller. He just also happens to be a talented musician with an ear for melody and a gift for building simple, restrained parts that layer together to form a perfect, complementary bed for his stories to inhabit. This combination of tight, purposeful prose wrapped in meticulously crafted, lush melody is the hallmark of Fairhazel and it’s why Fairhazel is one of the bands I’m most excited to see play the Underwater Sunshine Festival the first weekend of April…
Read MoreIt’s the kind of magic that happens often in New York. Maybe it’s bound to, by virtue of the magnitude and diversity of the population here. New York is a place where a Robyn dance party erupts out of nowhere in a subway station and where a rodent can be seen hauling a whole slice of pizza. And it’s the kind of place where one of my late-night walks through Harlem was interrupted by music that stopped me in my tracks, and led me down into the speakeasy-esque basement at Silvana’s…
Read MoreThe Underwater Sunshine Fest is taking over NYC again next weekend. This indie music celebration is about "finding those musical gems from the deep," as music journalist James Campion writes. Each artist is hand-selected by two-time Grammy nominated Adam Duritz of Counting Crows, who curates a lineup that feels like the best mix tape you've ever heard. He gets by with a little help from his friends who also support indie music, including this year's Very Special Guest Cyndi Lauper and platinum recording artist Eric Hutchinson.
Read MoreHello everyone! Katie here today. I’m so proud of the lineup we’re already establishing that it’s sometimes like an embarrassment of riches: I am always vibrating with a weird excitement for who I get to write about, and even better, what I’ll be able to share with you April 5th and 6th at the Bowery Electric. This is a particularly special post for me, because I was actually introduced to this band in the basement of the Electric, years ago, sandwiched in a full room, holding my husband’s hand as the band led a singalong. But I’m getting ahead of myself. (It’s the excitement.)
Read MoreThey’ve certainly captured that vibey indie sound, but the combo of Katie Von Schleicher and Gabriel Birnbaum’s voices plus the nature of Gabriel’s songwriting evokes something else I usually call “dream pop”. The songs are haunting and moved forward by driving percussion but they take you somewhere else, sometimes quite literally, while you’re listening to them.
Read MoreThe Ryan Hamilton that emerged from People on Vacation had tongue firmly in cheek and had left some of the straight folk sensibilities of Smile, Smile in the past in favor of writing perfectly crafted power pop rock that married melody to wit and welded it all together with loud guitars and just the right amount of humor. Recording since then as Ryan Hamilton and the Traitors and current incarnation, Ryan Hamilton and the Harlequin Ghosts, Ryan has developed into an adept pop rock journeyman, bringing forward the best legacies of the genre: earnestness, loud guitars, and a more than healthy dose of wit.
Read MoreWith over one-thousand performances and seven full-length records released; including 2013’s With Innocence and Go Amaze in 2016, both debuting in the Top 10 on the iTunes charts, Taylor Carson comes to the Underwater Sunshine Fest through our pal, and Fest alum, Stephen Kellogg. Taylor opened for Stephen’s Daryl’s House show in upstate New York late last year and caught my attention by stilling the room as he humbly presented his gripping songs of love, life and family…
Read MoreHonestly, the hardest part about writing this review is that every single lyric is so good, I could write an essay purely discussing the nature of how it interacts with the current political and social climate and how that runs counter to human instinct. Instead, I’m just going to share the first verse and chorus. I want you to listen to the song. Desperately. I want you to go turn it on right now so that we can talk about it. I want you to message me on Twitter about how great “Double Take” is (so not kidding: @kwdarby). That said? Even reading these lyrics delights me…
Read MoreBear Cub is a great band, and you can hear some of the reason behind that in the way Hall approaches, talks about, and truly loves music. He listened and he studied and he knows why the pieces fit where they do. He knows how to connect the chambers of the heart. And now he’s doing that with his own music.
Read MoreWild Pink is the perfect band to play the Underwater Sunshine Fest, for its very existence can be found in the soul of what this gathering of artists is all about; discovery in music.
To wit: It is a trio that is occasionally a quartet, a rock and roll band that isn’t necessarily or in any way rock and roll, and plays well-structured, singularly-composed songs which find their ethereal form in a free-association band construct. And that is only part of what you can figure out about Wild Pink, if you try. But why waste your time with such nonsense, when this is a band not made for “figuring”. It is made for absorbing, digesting and experiencing; all the things that matter in great art.
Read MoreNotwithstanding Maria’s haunting and sorrowful onstage demeanor, she is so very lively offstage, attentive with spellbinding eye contact that transforms you into the most charming, likable version of yourself by being the warmest, most personable human imaginable herself - all with absolutely no trace of artificiality. I’m gushing, but I promise it relates to the music because this warmth of hers also radiates from each of her records in special ways.
Read MoreHonestly, it’s scary to me to think that somehow McGill saw this version of middle America back in 2013, but it’s a still a timely portrait of a place that seems to encompass the best and worst of humanity. It’s easy enough when he’s pocketing a hard truth in a joke— which McGill does deftly— but he doesn’t have to do so to write an effective song, and better than that, to vocalize it. If you were listening to the song, you’d still feel the tension underlying it, whether you stopped to parse lyrics or not. Cameron is an expert at finding a way to use backup vocals in surprising places, or when to use almost vaudeville-era piano techniques to lead you plinking away from the awful thing he’s about to say.
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