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Jazzcat Fuse Slacker-pop with Midwestern Indie on Latest Single 'Robyn' - Interview

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  Credit: Jazzcat A stunning combination of silky-smooth bass, sugar-coated sonics and woozy, pleading vocals, Jazzcat’s debut single ‘Robyn’ pangs with a weighty sense of lost-hope and melancholic nostalgia, both thematically and texturally. The opening, strung out riffage sings with the same elements of desperation and fragility that frontman Jaimie Jagger does, menacingly out-of-key guitar feedback introducing the track before its accompaniment of chorus-laden, shimmering six-string swells. Jazzcat’s typically bedroom-come-slacker pop stylistic tendencies on ‘Robyn’ are met with intricate drum fills and breaks, with liquid basslines taking up the spaces in-between, granting the song a math-rocky, almost midwestern emo approach to songwriting. It is no wonder that the Birmingham quartet cite the late duo Her’s as an inspiration to their compositions, a group who, too, amalgamated   drifting melodic vox and guitar with a catchy yet experimental rhythm section. Jagger’s yearning
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Lafayette Afro Rock Band and Their Influence Over Contemporary Hip-Hop

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  The mystique and sensuality of Leroy Gomez’s iconic saxophone riff that opens 1975’s Darkest Light has paved the way for some of the biggest hip-hop artists of the modern day – but little recognition is given to the band who are responsible. Forming in Roosevelt, a suburb of Long Island, NYC in 1971, The Bobby Boyd Congress borrowed from the break-beat ridden, groove-laden ‘funk’ that was quickly consuming the black American music scene in the late sixties, thanks to the likes of pioneers James Brown and the psychedelic-come-RnB of Sly and the Family Stone. The Bobby Boyd Congress’s response to the expansion of funk throughout the US was to relocate to Paris, where they would gain recognition within their circle and change their name to the Lafayette Afro Rock Band - their gigging haunt Barb è s, a Parisian district with a large population of North African immigrants, inspired them to incorporate typically African instrumentation and beat tendencies into their songs, fusing the
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Wax Lyrical with Richie Culture

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  Photographer - unknown Island music and has always found its way into the UK’s music hotspots since ska and rocksteady first emerged onto the scene. As reggae evolved from these early Jamaican styles, the British youth found themselves swept up in bass culture and the dance-inducing pop tones of lovers-rock reggae, as well as the combative militancy of the likes of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Peter Tosh, who’s protest songs soundtracked the Windrush generation’s sons and daughters’ struggle against police oppression. Areas populated by kids of West Indian descent during the late seventies and early eighties – Brixton, Hansworth - latched onto this invasion of reggae, which influenced a subculture of first-generation British born West Indians to emulate the sounds of their favourite Jamaican artists. While London’s Ashwad and Matumbi were products of this new musical movement, Birmingham was birthing the likes of the legendary Steel Pulse, Musical Youth, UB40 and The Beat, bands who’s sk
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Luna Rosa - 'The Remixes' EP Review

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  Upon the cover art: "Aiden found a vintage photo store in Canada, and they just had all these amazing polaroids from around the world. We just really loved this one and felt it fit with the songs. The photo tells a joyous story, just a guy dancing alone in his living room drinking a beer, what more can you want!"  Guitar music has strangely enough always fitted perfectly alongside the underground rawness of electronica. Both have the capacity to achieve astounding levels of heaviness and euphoria, and the consolidation of the two through genre fusion and remix go hand in hand. Typically alternative guitar acts like Foals and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds are consistent in their inclusion of remixes of original songs and projects, with more recent acts like Fontaines D.C and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard following suit. Luna Rosa are a band constantly chasing new sonics, so their latest effort ‘The Remixes E.P’, which follows this same format, comes as no surprise.
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Katus Myles Switches RnB for Gritty Road-Rap on Recent Single CNF

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  ' CNF' - Katus Myles. Artwork by @vicmoy _ & @sixela.xo Birmingham prodigy Katus Myles may be known for his slick, infectiously harmonious RnB songwriting, but recent single CNF perfectly exhibits his ability to shift from romantic slow-jams to gritty rap with lo-fi hooks and even grittier lyricism.   Coming straight off of the release of his 2022 EP The Inbetween , Katus’s newfound style sees him temporarily laying his avant-soul, hip-hop oriented pop stylistics to the side, instead opting for a sound that gives room for refined wordplay and harsher vocal inflections. CNF is Myles’s exploration into grimy road-rap, tinged with a signature soulful presence that seamlessly creeps its way into the chorus with a memorable vocal hook. Myles in fact manages to weave melody into the fabric of all of his songwriting, even on a track as diverse as CNF - combined with an effortlessly raw-sounding looped brass sample, the track takes on its own distinctive voice entirely.  
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Island of Love Weave Pop Tones into the Grungy Fabric of Their Song-writing on Latest Single 'Fed Rock'

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  Photography: unknown Island of Love are quickly becoming something of an enigma within the underground circuit. Though only existing on major music platforms for some two years, the four-piece have already displayed their eclectic range of style that they explore within the boundaries of their simplistic guitar-bass-drums structure. 2022 hit ‘Head Case’ oozes with the sludgy teenage angst of a Sonic Youth track, fashionably reviving the trashy DIY sound so popularized by such nineties acts. With its stylishly raw, clumsy opening sequence leading the song from solitary guitar into a beautifully melodic raucous, it's no wonder that the track was recently used over an online campaign for fashion brand Dsquared.  The quartet delved into even murkier garage-rock territory with their previous effort in the form of album ‘Promo Tape’, a mush of six string fuzz, murky feedback and trashy noise-rock. The poor quality of the recordings that make up Island of Love’s debut exemplify the band
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NEONE the Wonderer: Obscuro-Soul Meets Psychedelic Rap on Latest Single 'Heartwing'

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  Photography by Tatiana Glorilovsky (@tatianaglorilovsky) Every once in a while, a certain artist comes along who’s sound, though entwined with a multitude of influences and styles, is completely independent to them as a musician. NEONE the Wonderer fits perfectly into this category. The Wolverhampton native’s music allows for a vast array of styles to cross, combine and birth their own, which comes through in his work as a completely newly crafted sound, entirely unique to himself. For those yet to be acquainted with his expanding discography, one can expect to hear something that would only seem way too vast and ignorant to regard solely as ‘experimental hip-hop’. While 2021’s sublime ‘Nose Dive’ is a hypnotic blend of scatty drums, captivating bass lines and soul-soothing sax interludes, ‘Grass is Greener’ adopts grimy, east-coast psychedelic hip-hop qualities that would not sound out of place next to the likes of A$AP Mob or Meechy Darko. The uplifting ‘Never Die’ explores the rhy
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