Review: Silver Bars – Center of the City Lights

Silver Bars - Center of the City Lights

Debut albums are rarely this immediately endearing, but when you make excellent dreamscape rock, such as what Silver Bars have created here on Center of the City Lights, it finds a way to pull you in. The Austin, Texas four-piece are led by vocalist and guitarist Paula J. Smith, and her confident vocal delivery allows the rest of the group to fill out the wall-of-sound that encompasses the majority of the record. Much like other dream pop-bands such as Beach House, Silver Bars have created sonic musical landscapes with cranked up guitars to help them stand apart.

The 10-track album is filled with lush sounding rock songs, and the band sounds as confident as ever in their delivery. Led by the single, “Lost You to L.A.” Silver Bars’ introduction to the music world allows the listener to come along for the ride with favorable results in the listening experience. The dual-guitar attack from Smith and Ken Hatten is the band’s real strength, as they know exactly when to crank up the sound, or allow a song to brood for a bit. Rounding out the unit is the ultra-talented bassist Stephen Thurman and drummer Johnny Wilkins.

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Can Music Journalism Transcend Its Access Problem?

Jeremy Gordon, writing at CJR:

Twenty years ago, a magazine could slot a profile of a smaller band alongside an interview with a popular artist, and hope that it might be read as part of the whole. Now, every article is packaged individually on the internet and measured to the last click, making it very clear when something isn’t being read, incentivizing coverage of artists with proven followings. “It’s a giant shift,” Ken Weinstein says. “It was kind of better when people couldn’t really put an absolute finger on it because art is not that.”

Most music journalists aren’t so craven as to go entirely by the numbers, but they work at businesses. “I could invest ten hours and do a long feature on something that no one has ever heard of, but five people will read it,” Julianne Shepherd, editor-in-chief at Jezebel and former executive editor at The Fader, says. “And then is my boss going to be like, ‘Yo, what the fuck are you doing?’”

I found that this piece hit a little too close to home a few times. Especially when thinking about AbsolutePunk.net and the machine it got sucked up in. However, now that we’re independent, and largely based around a member supported model, I don’t have to care about what gets the most pageviews or clicks. It’s freeing.

Review: Modern Nature – How To Live

Modern Nature - How To Live

It isn’t often that I hear an album that feels tailor-made for me. Modern Nature’s debut album, How To Live might be it. Bounding off the tails of the twelve-minute epic “Supernature” from the supergroup’s debut EP, Nature, vocalist Jack Cooper (ex-Ultimate Painting), keyboardist Will Young (BEAK>) and drummer Aaron Neveu (Woods) climb to great heights, enhancing their already entrancing compositions with the induction of cellist Rupert Gillett and saxophonist Jeff Tobias (Sunwatchers). It’s Young’s work with BEAK> and Portishead instrumentalist, Geoff Barrow that stunningly complements Cooper’s vision for Modern Nature, blossoming into an astonishing slow-burning tension. In How To Live, the rural and the urban unite; isolation is in decline and endless beauty surfaces.

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