"Peter Gabriel meets David Gray in one-man popster Nicholas Roy. His beautiful voice is full of weariness and drama; his instruments stretched and warped to create a whole dynamic world"
Beat Magazine "I like a guy bold enough to list Elton John as an influence.." Richard Kingsmill, Triple J When Nicholas Roy started playing the Melbourne live circuit, he felt a bit out of place in venues like The Espy.
Catcall’s sound omits whiffs of early Kate Bush, Grace Jones and Tom Tom Club but also stands next to contemporaries such as Santigold, The Knife and disco queen Glass Candy; her original style shows off a strong character, with beats and quirky melodies that quickly sublet their way into your brain 23-year old Catherine Kelleher (Sydney, Australia) cut her musical teeth as a teenager in DIY punk group Kiosk; a band famed for their polarizing and bratty no-wave noise sound but eventually discovered their pop sensibility within the aggression and urgency of punk rock.
Giant Drag is a Californian indie rock group, composed of singer/guitarist Annie Hardy and simultaneous drummer/synth-player Micah Calabrese. They have released an EP, Lemona, in 2003 and a debut album, Hearts And Unicorns, which was released in the United States on September 13, 2005, and February 27, 2006 in the UK. Giant Drag played their first show on June 4, 2003 at the Scene in Los Angeles, eventually getting residencies at area clubs Silverlake Lounge and Spaceland.
It’s a birds and the bees sort of question… Or maybe a chicken or the egg sort of question… What came first the rosined violin strings, major falls, classical theory or the smashed guitars, split finger tips and sweaty bodies? To see the Balconies play is nothing short of grasping at science. Even when placed down neatly in a Petri dish underneath thumbs and forefingers – the DNA-code of their infectious pop hooks interweaved with classical sensibility and theory is hard to discern.
Lead singer and main song-writer Sarah McLeod formed the band in late 1994 with guitarist (and her guitar teacher at the time) Chris Tennent, drummer Paul Berryman and bass player Stuart Rudd. They were originally called Hell's Kitchen before changing their name to The Superjesus on the eve of the 1994 Big Day Out in Adelaide. Says Paul Berryman of the name: "It was basically just a piss-take on commonly used words in the 90's.
Nobody expected Lily & Madeleine’s first original song, “In the Middle,” to rack up a quarter of a million YouTube views. The Internet is obsessed with what’s new and what’s next, the fads and memes of viral culture, and so it would have to seem a little incongruous for social networks and content aggregators to embrace gimmick-free, black-and-white footage of an unplugged duo crooning a bittersweet and understated melody.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Less is more. Make it work with what you've got. 2 Guitars, a junkyard drum kit (harvested from an actual garbage heap- adorned with tamborines, flowers and kitchen rags), a handful of harmonicas, voices, and above all.. songs. Cary Ann Hearst & Michael Trent prefer to keep it simple. They have cleverly managed to take 3 separate recording projects and combine them into 1 cohesive, folk rock, sloppy tonk, harmonized, loose but tight, streamlined audience killing machine.
Faris Badwan, frontman for UK indie rockers The Horrors, has a new project: Cat's Eyes, a duo with the Canadian opera soprano and multi-instrumentalist Rachel Zeffira. The group specializes in a glassy, symphonic take on girl-group pop, and they played their first show in December in a pretty unusual place: St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, during an afternoon mass "attended by seven high-ranking cardinals," according to a press release. Webpage: http://www.catseyesmusic.com/
The Twoks are an art-pop duo from Melbourne, Australia featuring Xani Kolac on electric violin and vocals and Mark Leahy on drums. The music created by The Twoks has been described as
DIIV (previously known as Dive) is an ongoing project composed of Beach Fossils guitarist Cole Smith, Devin Ruben Perez, Andrew Bailey, and ex-Smith Westerns drummer Colby Hewitt. DIIV's first release, the Sometime 7" on Captured Tracks, was released on Oct. 11th, 2011, Oshin their debut album was released in June 2012.