Sick Pills review in The Noise
You can read the review here.
SICK PILLS – Sickening (75orLess Records) 12 tracks
Chris Guaraldi has anchored punk band Chris Evil & the Taints and more rootsy group the Blood Moons for over a decade. His new outfit, Sick Pills, is a bit more straight ahead rock, with garage and punk elements still there. This album is in-your-face rock music, but there are catchy parts that subtly recall The Cars or Modern Lovers. Chris Evil is turning over a new leaf and uncovering some dark subject matter in songs like “Wormfood” and “Dead Teenager.” I think I can best describe this CD by quoting my friends The Tall many years ago, “This is rock ’n’ roll.”
Vote in the 2014 Motif Music Awards
You can go here to vote for the 2014 nominees for the Motif Music Awards. 75orLess artists with nominations include Bob Kendall, Mark Cutler, The McGunks, Sick Pills, The diePods, Haunt the House, Jacob Haller, and Six Star General.
Allysen Caller ‘Mumblin’ Sue’ review at No Depression
You can read the review here.
If you’re in Austin this week, one performer to check out at SXSW is “ghost folk” artist Allysen Callery. Hailing from tiny Rhode Island, she was just selected as one of 40 “intriguing” artists to watch at SXSW by NPR critic Bob Boilen. Although she is pretty well known in New England (2012 Providence Phoenix Singer-Songwriter of the Year), and has a dedicated following in Europe and Australia, she’s yet to break out on the national scene. Her recent release, Mumblin’ Sue, could change that.
Callery lives by the ocean in Bristol, Rhode Island, across the pond from Bristol, UK. Her style is heavily influenced by the British Folk Revival of the 1960s and early 70s. In an interview she noted, “I grew up listening to my father’s old Steeleye Span, Incredible String Band, and Fairport Convention records. When I started writing music of my own, it was noted in some of the first reviews that the ‘ghost of British Isles Folk’ was in my music.”
She’s recorded several albums that show that influence, most recently, Mumblin’ Sue, released in June of 2013. The collection of songs is notable for its intricate guitar work – no overdubs here – just pure melodic magic. In fact her fingerpicked guitar feels more like her singing partner; sometimes leading her, other times, seemingly answering her lyrics. The interplay between her voice and her guitar is unique.
Her lyrics are just on the edge of surreal, slightly off center, and intensely passionate. Her voice is unique, but not unfamiliar. Sounding a little like early Joni Mitchell, with a voice airy and mystical, she’s a fairy whisperer. But her words speak to the human experience. In “The Hollow,” she asks…
In Your Hollow
Do You Collect the Sunlight
In Your Hollow
Lonely
On the brilliant “Lily of the Valley,” her nuanced guitar work equals her understated delivery.
Someone had to be the hard headed hammer
Well let me be the part that pries the nails out
When all of the walls built between us are gone
We’ll lie in the grass
In the warm sun
She has some fun on this album too. On the delicate “I Had a Lover I Thought Was My Own,” the narrator falls for the town gigolo. In “My Carolina,” whimsical lyrics match an upbeat tempo…
Meet Me Midnight
Soft step candlelight
And I’ll slip inside
I’m on fire driving down your highway
Callery’s warmth and delicate delivery comes through in concert; her “look” is reminiscent of early Joan Baez. There’s a lot going on in her music, and it’s well worth a listen. No doubt, there are many talented artists deserving of more widespread recognition – Allysen Callery is one of them.
Sick Pills – Sickening
75OL-184 Sick Pills – Sickening CD
$7.00 S&H Included
Digital download is available here
Track Listing
1. Wormfood
2. Nothing To Me
3. Get You Off My Mind
4. Evil In Your Eye
5. Summer’s Gone
6. Dead Teenager
7. If It’s Real
8. Growing Up
9. The Beach
10. He’s A Creep
11. I Wanna Be Adored
12. Without You
The debut album by Sick Pills recorded in the Fall of 2013 at Feedback Studios by Ron Poitras. 12 songs heavily influenced by 1980’s underground college rock. Sometimes noisy, sometimes poppy, and sometimes both! Influences include: Chameleons UK, Jesus and Mary Chain, Sonic Youth.
Deadlands – Faceless Angels
75OL-185 Deadlands – Faceless Angels CD
$7.00 S&H Included
Digital download is available here
Track Listing
1. Before You Were Born
2. Bottom Feeders
3. Libby Prison Blues
4. (I’m) Sinking In
5. Discotex
6. Fink
7. Cracks
8. Down for the Count
9. Sleeper in a Dream
10. Cold Cold Cold
2014 warms up with “Faceless Angels,” the latest from Cranston’s Deadlands. Murder/apocalypse blues that you can tap your toes to. A good chunk of the album was recorded live at Plan of a Boy. Hot guitars and cool dead dames, where no one is guilty and no one plays innocent (very well).
Mark Cutler ‘Dreamland’ review at Bill Copeland Music News
You can read the article here.
Mark Cutler has been a fixture in the New England roots music scene for some time now. The Rhode Island native’s latest album Dreamland continues his tradition of laying down earthy, soulful music with rich acoustic instrumentation around his mellow, flowing vocal, driving beats, and edgy guitar.
Opening his disc with “Doing Things That We Like To Do,” Cutler unfurls his flowing, tender guitar melodies. Within no time, a listener is wrapped up in the dreamy landscape of floating nuances from the acoustic instruments. A sparse amount of notes gather to make a fulsome sound around that assured, easeful vocal glide. Above all else, the tune is quite catchy, and hummable. It feels like a folk-rock number from the early 1970s.
Cutler digs deeper into his roots influences for “Tankful Of Gas,” a mellow piece marked by tender slide guitar. Possessing a real front porch in the summer of 1939 vibe, Cutler takes his sweet time finessing his tragic tale of a racing car driver. It’s a treat to hear all of the old time guitar picking styles offering notes that strut, jump around, and slide with greasy tenderness around its sturdy fretboard.
Cutler rocks things up a bit on “You’re Gonna Need My Help.” Here, an electric guitar gets a bit edgier while the percussion pieces slap things out uptempo. Cutler expresses his admonition to a friend with world weary persistence. It’s a fun number to follow because its pace and vigor make a listener picture all sorts urgent outcomes if his friend doesn’t take his advice. There’s a batch of roots things going on at once that make it a thicket of emotive, soulful Americana.
“Circle To A Square” finds Cutler holding his vocal notes a bit after accenting them with a driving persistence. He makes you feel the urgency of his tale. Surrounding his voice is a carefree layering of gritty banjo, thumping low end, pushy drum beats, and a smoldering electric guitar. The tune makes its steady march into destiny as a lead guitar unfurls its burning passion at its own considered pace.
Title track “Dreamland” moseys on up to the listener with a lilting, moody harmonica line that could be friendly or that could be weary. Cutler sings this one with a world worn resignation. He clearly has feelings about his situation but he also clearly feels that those feelings won’t power his dreams. That handsome vocal makes you feel what the song is about while putting its own indelible stamp on the song. You know its Cutler when you hear him. You also hear him control every direction that every verse and every instrument is taking. Cutler’s easeful control over his songs gives them another layer of that drifty, roots quality you’re looking for in this genre.
“Too Much Fun” feels like an FM classic rock staple even though it’s a new original song. Cutler puts something comfortably familiar in his acoustic guitar chord progression. It invites you in like an old friend waving you into his home,. The melody is alluring and the chorus is hooky as hell. An adept lead guitar line too helps to burn this song into a listener’s consciousness with its simmering buzz, its ability to swagger around the beat.
“Soul Flame” switches gears back into down tempo folksy roots flavoring. Cutler’s voice flows like honey over a thumpy beat and alongside fulsome harmonica and a hefty acoustic guitar melody. This creates a warm thick vibe that invites one in while offering plenty of nuances within a sparse instrumentation. A listener can follow Cutler’s message because he unfurls it at a friendly, respectful pace. His theme is strong enough to explain itself without a lot of verbiage and his rich, fulsome vocal makes it come alive like a fire that’s just burst into full bloom.
“Dead Man’s Song” continues the traditional Americana roots styles. Cutler’s lyrics sound like they were written in an earlier time period in American history. It’s as if Cutler had traveled back in time, worked at a 1930s gas station in a sleepy town for a few years, then came back to the present to write about all the human drama that the town slept on. His handsome vocal slides across the back of the imagery he offers. Meanwhile, a greasy slide guitar projects his message over a brittle thatch of peppy acoustic instrumentation. It’s that buzz of activity that keeps the ears glued to the song.
A wistful feeling permeates “We Don’t Do That Stuff No More.” Cutler looks back at his past with mournful respect. Each verse his voice glides through bring his story to vivid life, infusing each with his plaintive timbre. He doesn’t just sing to you. He invites you into his world with an unforced, unobtrusive vocal approach. It’s like a painting on the wall that draws your attention with all of the details and nuances it offers. The instrumentation around his voice is, as always, plentiful in taste, respect, the right touches in the right places. Each time that greasy slide guitar unleashes another melodic line inside a measure, you feel the personality behind the man playing it and the man who wrote the song.
Closing out his album with “I’ll Play For You,” Cutler offers the listener one last parting glimpse into his world, a landscape of human souls bruised, wounded, enlightened, and rescued by the power of redemption or damaged or destroyed by the indifferent hand of fate. It’s a gritty, realistic world Cutler writes and sings about. The gritty instrumentation around his steadfastly handsome vocal helps deliver that world with soulful, emotive purpose.
Dreamland is certainly another tasty nugget in a line of gems from this Americana roots music singer-songwriter. One can only play his albums over and over until he releases his next offering of timeless roots music and gritty realistic words. This is a songwriter who deeply cares about people from the highways and back roads and dark alleys of American life.
Bob Kendall in the Providence Journal
You can read the article here.
Bob Kendall moved from Middletown to Boston at age 19 and became the founding member of the bands Lifeboat, The Blood Oranges and The Brothers Kendall. He and brother Greg (“Skeg”) collaborated on music in the films “Bandwagon,” “The Unbelievable Truth” and “Drive Me Crazy.”
In 2002, he returned to Rhode Island, played the Newport Folk Festival (it was the year Bob Dylan returned) and released his first solo record, “Enough is Enough.”
Kendall’s new recording, “Midnight Flower,” is a collection of songs written over the past decade. Echoes of Ian Hunter, Tom Petty and even the British Invasion can be heard. His band is also featured on the upcoming release of “The Spindle City Gram Parsons Tribute.”
Bob Kendall performs acoustic rock and blues on Friday at 8 p.m. at the Courthouse Center for the Arts, 3481 Kingstown Rd., West Kingston. Tickets are $15 and there is limited seating. For information or tickets call (401) 782-1018 or go to the courthouse website.
The Noise reviews Mark Cutler, Allysen Callery, Haunt the House, and Dan Baker.
You can read the article here.
MARK CUTLER – Dreamland
Singer/songwriter Mark Cutler is in Rhode Island’s Men of Great Courage and in this side project, he is more coffeehouse then nightclub. This side of Cutler is more folk and more introspective, but the passion still prevails in every song. “Circle to a Square,” a slow Americana ballad, “I’ll Play for You,” “Soul Flame,” and the title tune, “Dreamland” with a nice harp, are all very personal confessions of a very talented artist to his audience; and his gentle voice is well suited for this intimacy. There is even some banjo on this Americana flavored CD. Mark Cutler delivers some nice acoustic ballads. This is a good listen. (A.J. Wachtel)
DAN BAKER – Pistol In My Pocket
Got misery? Dan Baker does, in spades. His latest CD speaks of lost love, mournfulness, and general-type unhappiness. I mean, when an album contains tracks titled “She’s Not Gonna Call” and “Threw Me Down a Well” you’re kind of clued in early this is not going to be a compilation of cheerful, danceable ditties, and this isn’t.
Recorded live in the vast, echoing space of an empty Masonic temple, Baker and band have at it, down, dirty… and good. The arrangements are lean and spare, with sometimes-skeletal acoustic guitar carrying the load alone. For others, his band adds the right shades of angst. Dan’s voice yowls and growls in a manner that echoes early Neil Young, but like Neil’s, it’s a voice that delivers pain perfectly. (Tim O’Brien)
ALLYSEN CALLERY – Mumblin’ Sue
While the hypnotic intertwining of Callery’s fancy finger-picking lulls you into a meditative state, it’s her petal-soft lilt that really does a number on your heart-strings, plucking them with the same fervor as she does her guitar. The music is stoic yet still yearningly bitter-sweet. The lyrics, poetic and steeped in country wisdom, relate stories of heartache seen through sadder-but-wiser eyes. The power isn’t only in the words themselves, but in they way they’re sung—in a melancholy, reverberating sean-nós style. Something tells me she could be singing in Swahili or Cantonese and anyone with ears would still have some idea of what she was singing about. (Will Barry)
HAUNT THE HOUSE – Rural Introspection Study Group
Will Houlihan’s solo foray is a modest collection of guitar ballads and blues. There’s no gainsaying his personal approach to the material, of which the best of show is the bluesy “Vampyre,” along with the heartfelt “Eden.” (Francis DiMenno)
Red Line Roots profiles Haunt the House
You can read the article here.
There are those who try and fake vigor and enthusiasm. The world is full of “douche face” guitar solos, crappy rhyming schemes in songs, and jackasses dressed in late 19th century garb singing about the farmland when they live in a 3 story brownstone in Allston. This is not of those people. Will Houlihan absolutely exudes passion for his music and songs.
Rural Instrospection Study Group
There is a beautiful simplicity to this release. Its so emotionally full, but the sound has this hollow “man alone in an empty room with a guitar” vibe to it. The music is really quite incredible. There’s some hints of Jeff Buckley there. The second track ‘Vamprye’ leads off with a shrill, shocking, but incredibly beautiful vocal falsetto.I just really really want to listen to this over and over again. It’s a short 6 tracks, but still feels like a complete and well presented thought. Something that is loose, but still consciously purposeful. Spooky, powerful, and affecting. With the way Houlihan sings and arranges his work its no surprise he goes by the moniker “Haunt the House”.
While Haunt the House is Will and his performing act, he also has a myriad of folks join him on stage to perform as this act. Always a treat, always more emotion driven and more beautiful than the last time you see them. They are constantly evolving the craft and perfecting how to really get that evocative and stirring sound. Recently I had the pleasure of seeing Will perform at a Brown Bird Tribute show. Quoting my recap ” so f*cking beautiful, I have nothing else I could possibly say to better describe it”. That’s really it. I hate to use this again, but the music is haunting, the name fits. This is music who’s purpose is to make you feel feelings. It simply evokes something inside of you that makes you feel moved.
Eric Baylies Lists His Top 30 Bands for 2013
You can read the article here.