Posted October 09, 2013in The Sound
“Envy Corps is Radiohead for Coldplay fans.” That’s how the band has referenced itself in T-shirt form. And curiously, whether you take that as a statement of self-congratulation or one of oblivious pretentiousness, it doesn’t make the sentence any less fitting. The Envy Corps has always taken a high-minded approach
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Posted October 02, 2013in The Sound
In a time when rock-n-roll was making large, exploratory steps away from the three-chord riffs of its 1950’s birth and branching out into harder rock and psychedelic sounds, The Moody Blues stepped up in 1967 and released the revolutionary album “Days of Future Past,” simultaneously giving birth to the prog
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Posted September 25, 2013in The Sound
Switchfoot, the San Diego-based five-piece, got its start in the world of contemporary Christian music. And while the band’s members have never shied away from their faith and continue to play Christian music festivals, they’ve never liked to pigeon-hole themselves. “Growing up in San Diego, there was no CCM scene,”
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Posted September 18, 2013in The Sound
Samuel Beam is a laid back dude. Chatting over the phone from his home in South Carolina, his voice doesn’t have the high-mileage road weariness of William Elliot Whitmore. His words don’t have the brooding gravitas of a Nick Cave or the emotional supplication of Glen Hansard. Beam is, in
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Posted September 11, 2013in The Sound
Anna Gebhardt is kind of a Zen master when it comes to self-effacing humility. “I’m just learning as I go,” she said over coffee. “I don’t really know what I’m doing.” That’s not completely true. Gebhardt is a classically-trained singer with a solid collegiate background in opera. It should also
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Posted September 04, 2013in The Sound
Bonne Finken and Sharika Soal sat in a booth at Raccoon River Brewery and, like just about everyone else last week, talked about Miley Cyrus. The pair have a slew of things happening in their respective worlds: Soal, who auditioned earlier in the year for both “America’s Got Talent” and
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Posted August 28, 2013in The Sound
“I’ll be driving in the car, and I’ll have a melody. Last night as I was going to bed, I had a melody idea in my head, so I just grabbed my phone and recorded it.” She pauses in the briefest flicker of reflection, then nods. “A lot of voice
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Posted August 21, 2013in The Sound
Said The Whale isn’t as well-known of a Canadian import as, say, Beiber or maple syrup, but the Vancouver-based five-piece has already established itself in its native country as one of the bright spots in Canada’s musical landscape. Notoriously hard workers, the group has released 10 EPs and three full-length
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Posted August 14, 2013in The Sound
We live in a disposable society. Remember, like, an hour ago when “Gangam Style” was all the rage and the video became the first on YouTube to amass a billion views, and now everyone is like “What’s Psi done for me lately?” No better example of this exists — musically
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Posted August 07, 2013in The Sound
Violent Fade is something of a niche within a niche. An instrumental three-piece, the band straddles a line within ambient rock that’s more structured than a jam band and more technically-minded than an avant garde noise-rock outfit. It is a sound that not everyone will take to right away. “We
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