March of the Shameless: Just One More Stride…

By RingMaster Review on October 28, 2022 • ( 0 )

Ok, so we could not help ourselves to one last dip this month into the vast wealth of goodness the ears for great sounds that is Shauna of the band Ummagma and Shameless Promotion PR brought our way. Here are four singles which deserve your exploration and in turn you their pleasure…

With his new album, The Slow Death of the LoveMyth, drawing keen attention and praise, Brooklyn-based Dubliner RONAN CONROY has sealed the urge to go explore his a few days old release with the track Dark Paradise.

The single is a cover of the LANA DEL REY classic and sees Conroy casting and re-imagining it in the post punk/dark wave cast sound which shape his full-length. It is a proposal which draws fresh shadows and dilemmas within the well-known song, its shoegaze sheen wrapped in crepuscular interpretation and aligned to Conroy’s own intimately darkened vocals.

The track’s inherent catchiness is retained from its first breath, set in an electronic pulsing which cradles vocals and the just as eerily stretched wires of guitar. Already emotively tense, the song only escalated its drama, heart and pull with its galvanic chorus, an uprising of passion and energy which almost scorches air and senses alike.

Dark Paradise is a striking and irresistible take on the original and if we are honest for us the more irresistible.

With their new full-length, Above The Water, also days old from its Magic Door Records unveiling, New Jersey’s ELK CITY have similarly only led greater curiosity its way with Your Time Doesn’t Exist, a song as the album relishing the band’s new guitar-rich line-up featuring members of VERSUS, LUNA and the PSYCHEDELIC FURS side-project FEED.

The single also resonates, as its predecessor That Someone, with the fresh evolution in the band’s sound, its founders in artist/ vocalist Renée LoBue and producer/drummer Ray Ketchem completing ELK CITY’S personnel with guitarists Sean Eden (Luna) and Chris Robertson (Feed, Punch Havana) and bass guitarist Richard Baluyut (Versus).

The song’s gentle entrance is marked by its instinctive catchiness, that alignment of guitar and bass bringing a mix of light and darker elements to meet LoBue’s potent tones. With sense of contemplation soaking every breath, word and sound and a growing maze of enterprise shaping its captivating indie rock bred character, Your Time Doesn’t Exist proved a fascinating and ear gripping proposal which with every passing second drew us deeper into its unique tapestry and the waiting arms of the new ELK CITY album.

It is only a few weeks back that Seattle indie rockers BLACK NITE CRASH had us hooked and looking ahead to their new album with the single The Take. Ensuring that Washed in the Sound with Black Nite Crash stayed on our exploratory horizon they have just uncaged its newest single, Sugarwave, another bold slice of psychedelically lit indie incitement which greedily wormed under the skin.

From its opening weave of guitar, Sugarwave cast magnetic temptation; it’s unassuming yet inescapably potent coaxing soon joined by the ethereally wrapped tones of Claire Tucker and the equally crystalline web of guitars, with the rhythmic jab of Tony Zuniga just as manipulative.

There is also a sense of volatility to the track’s mercurial landscape, a breeding of climatic eruptions with virulent persuasion on body and spirit, guitarists Jim Biggs and James Stone almost duelling with bassist John Parker and Tucker to cast the richest incitement.

Released via NEON SIGH, Sugarwave is one of those songs which leave lingering and edaciously memorable temptation, relentlessly bouncing bodies before it the proof.

Lastly and unsurprisingly continuing the theme of potent lures to greater adventures, US postpunk new romantics CANDY COFFINS ensured their own days old release of new album Once Do It With Feeling, came under close scrutiny with another lead single from it. Seaside Girls is an inspiriting slice of psych provoked indie rock with a choice PSYCHEDELIC FURS hue to it.

Taking Every Day A Fresh Atrocity, the album’s first single, into account too, the band formed and led by South Carolina based vocalist, guitarist and songwriter James Lathren, reveal a definite UK eighties influence to their sound, a proposition which has seen CANDY COFFINS draw references to the likes of JOY DIVISION, THE CURE, and THE AFGHANS WIGS as well as those we previously mentioned, yet as previous offerings and the two singles here prove, its individuality steers the ship of enterprise and indie jangle.

A “tribute to the playful abandon of youth”, Seaside Girls springs to life with an immediately lively gait and a melodic revelry which soon escalated in the subsequent almost clamorous energy and joyfulness of the song. Celebratory in its breath and bearing the recklessness of youth in its spirit and trespass, Seaside Girls embraces every reason to venture into Once Do It With Feeling…see you there.