After releasing several EP’s over the years, Brighten returns to their roots of acoustic guitars and honest, passionate songwriting on their new record Peace and Quiet. Delightfully simple yet powerful, Peace and Quiet takes its listeners on an emotional journey guaranteed to drop them off at the end with a refreshed, confident outlook on life.
A Gentle Reminder strings together fourteen fairly cohesive tracks into a statement from The Jealous Sound: they’re back and they have a new perspective, even on their previously-released music.
Sweatshirt Weather are going back to the basics with the recent release of their six-song acoustic EP Translations. Composed of three songs from their past EP’s, two new tracks, and a Something Corporate cover, the EP is a calculated combination of regression and advancement.
Artist vs Poet’s latest effort Keep Your Secrets is a light pop album that perhaps should have been released in early May, as it is ideal summertime music.
For their No Sleep Records debut, Major League were able to pull out all of the stops. While they may still be a relatively new band, Hard Feelings easily has the potential to become a classic and will find the band moving up to the big leagues of pop punk.
At a time when many bands would rather stick to trends than take a risk, Peace’d Out shine as something fresh that hopefully won’t be another one-and-done side project. The members take elements from each of their respective bands and put a collective spin on things, creating a sound all their own.
For fans of the Pompano-based emo act Further Seems Forever, the wait is finally over! The 11-track Penny Black is a mature conglomerate of upbeat, heartwarming, and sometimes dark songs.
The first challenge of properly absorbing Benjamin Gibbard’s first solo album Former Lives: separating the Death Cab For Cutie and Postal Service versions of Gibbard from the solo one. The new album is more gritty and acoustic than his former beloved gentle indie catalogue, true, but Former Lives needs to be experienced in its own right without any shackles of the past.
The xx’s second album Coexist feels a bit like floating aimlessly through space with no propulsion of energy in any particular direction. While some of the songs manage to maintain a simmering sensuality with Romy Madley Croft’s sweet voice delivering honest lyrics and enough repetition to elicit the feelings through heartfelt laments, most of the songs seem to remain unadorned and flat or build up to only thin air and the feeling that you’ve just barely missed out on the point.
With their self-titled EP, Sparks The Rescue have taken everything that was great about their last album – the catchy lyrics, the progressiveness of their sound, that “get up and dance†attitude – and fused it with their old school style to create an unforgettable seven-track compilation sure to get you off your feet with their first independent release since parting ways with Fearless Records.
