In This Issue...
Chester French: Hip-hop, Academia and Six-Minute Abs
D.A. Wallach and Max Drummey are pushing boundaries - combining wit, intellect and an undeniable penchant for art-pop, their duo, Chester French, is fashioning their own musical canon. With a myriad of different sounds ranging from Motown and power pop to retro-pop to hip-hop, Chester French combines the strongest facets of the music into one kaleidoscope of sensibility and diversity.
In This Issue...
Love Is All: Love and Insomnia
Love Is All’s latest release, A Hundred Things Keep Me Up at Night, is is a devilishly contagious amalgam of pop and punk, done sublimely, as only this bustling Swedish five-piece can. Seeing them live, whether at a secret show inside a remote Brooklyn gallery or at a proper downtown venue, confirms them as all the more flawless, since one of the best facets of their music stems from the band’s quirky collective personality.
In This Issue...
Late of the Pier: Glitter Done Right
Sitting in the Astralwerks boardroom is a huge poster of The B-52’s. Bassist Andrew Faley sits admiring the wacky disco-pop veterans with synth wiz (and longtime friend) Sam Potter. I can already see the band’s outlandish personalities that inject Late of the Pier with massive dosages of Ritalin to produce a sound that is infused with psych/synth/glam/electro, that is overflowing on their mega debut, Fantasy Black Channel.
In This Issue...
Girl Talk: Everyday People
Girl Talk mastermind Gregg Gillis interprets the Top 40 with a scientific approach, absorbing each rhythmic song as he pries for phrases, sounds and melodies that culminate into sample-based symphonies. His fourth album, Feed the Animals is a grandiose adventure composed through a pain-staking process of transcending typical vocal tracks and rhymes creating melodic dance tracks that force shoulders to shimmy.
In This Issue...
Snow Patrol: Love and Other Disaster Buttons
Gary Lightbody willingly refers to himself as a “calamity magnet,” without much prodding or inference. He also estimates that, personally, the distance “from a sitting still vantage point to chaos is four beers away.” It’s this kind of blunt and awkward honesty that makes the Irish singer such a delightful interview subject.


