With a name that sounds like a blockbuster film director hybrid, the British singer-songwriter is next in line to hold the crown of a thousand sprawling voices calling out in the tube station at noon. We want to see him in a dank-ass club this week so we can tell the story about it for the next 20 years.
There’s a groove to tracks like “Stolen Dance” that will make the German folk duo of Clemens Rehbein and Philipp Dausch darlings of any party in Austin, regardless of sponsor weight. Never has the lyric “Stoned in paradise/Shouldn’t talk about it” seemed so at odds.
This New York City indie-pop quartet is doing silly things to pop music, and those first few strains of “Reflections” are going to sound great under the Austin sunshine. Singer Mandy Lee has a vocal delivery that reminds of us of Ellie Goulding, but the entire Misterwives package is a refreshing take on blissful percussion- and groove-led pop.
In the mid-2000s Natalie Prass went to Berklee for a year, then packed up and jetted to Nashville. These days she’s touring with Ryan Adams and the duo is breaking up the monotonous day-in, day-out routine by pairing up on stage and covering Patrick Swayze’s ’80s classic from Dirty Dancing, “She’s Like The Wind.” Everybody wins, and everybody loves Prass.
Just when people were saying things like Parquet Courts were New York City’s last rock and roll band (ever, ever?), along came Public Access TV to dropkick us back 15 years. The NME loves them, they write “snazzy guitar-rock boppers (says us) and some of these dudes used to be in bands like Be Your Own Pet and the Virgins. Cap along to the new-old sound.
Back in the fall when we first heard Shura’s new track “Indecision,” we couldn’t shake off the similarities to “Holiday” by Madonna. The track was a lovely hat tip, and the London electronic pop singer’s other tracks, like “Touch” and “2Shy,” are starting to forge a true identity of shimmering, day-lit, and introspective tracks with greater depth than what’s apparent on casual listen.
Irish teenager Bridie Monds-Watson sings songs well beyond her years, carried by a voice that flutters and bobs over her acoustic guitar. Taking her stage moniker by combining “folk” and “soul” — hey, what was your badge as a teen? — Monds-Watson feels destined to be a voice with much to say and a figure with many walls to break down.