Mastria

Celebrate the King by Larry Karpenko creeps around and up on you, as you flip the family album and accidentally fall over a picture that pulls. He recreates music that has become familiar, as well as original, drawing on jazz notes and gospel swells that are authentic, with a natural feel Tracks like "Mary, Did You Know?" construct with skyscraping lines, whereas the song One Small Child plunges into dramatic twists of violins. All of it is captured in his Loma Linda location, as well as collaborators such as Ben Phipatanakul providing groove. No rush. Just layers unfolding. I put it on a quiet afternoon, and it stuck and those warm vocals went round like an old blanket on a cold evening with that kind of reverence and swing. In adore, Karpenko has a melancholy voice that strikes in soft duet with his daughter Lauryn-intimate, unimposing. Influences peak through: an allusion to Steven Curtis Chapman in the ballads, the jazz comfort Diana Krall has in the song Jesus, You’re Ch...

Risky Game by Julie July Band is passed like the glances of an old flame in a full room, which provokes that same sense of what-ifs without uttering a single word. The track is an outburst of the edgy nature of the gamble of love, which is their album Flight of Fancy. It builds slowly. However, the heritage of 60s and 70s folk-rock is visible in the band, and it combines the timeless coziness with the modern rhythm which does not seem to be imposed. Julie July sings with clarity and emotion, with the heartache of one half-forgotten dream of hope and doubt. They rise and fall. Pieces are overlaid, five voices like strands in a woven tapestry, making the piece all the more thick and rich with that persistence that is long-lived when it is no more. The emotion here is not screamed, but experienced in the pauses between notes and it brings one to the heart of the song, not apologetically. Soulfully gyrating, twangy and bluesy, like fingers following scars where dangers have been taken, the...

The Star by Michellar is the experience of entering a dim room with a scent of pine and memories, with a soft light that envelops you, and does not want to release its grip. Her singing is positive and welcoming as a hand touching you at a distance of miles and drawing you nearer with each song. Her singing has a certain magic in it that expresses a certain intensity of emotion making even her mere nostalgia sound so personally restorative as she seems to be telling a secret that only the heart comprehends. The music is timeless folk elegance, as soft as a quilt made of childhood snow, a mixture of self-exploration and an eternal swing that reminds of the gentle storytelling of Dan Fogelberg. The warm atmosphere synths blend with close-up acoustic guitars to form a minimalistic sound world that breathes, as candlelight, shimmering on the smooth walls, and silent yet alive. This calmness is enriched by the production of Toby Wilson, who restrains and warms at the same time to allow all ...

The Love is Everywhere by Intercontinen7al hugs around you like a breeze, with whispers of shores so far away, a good-bye whisper that pulls the heart-strings with the harmonious radiance. Written by Argentina's Nereo Paulus, this Beatles-esque indie charmer is like the sun peeking through a canopy of recollections, optimistic and revitalizing, as though you are looking at an old photo album and it suddenly turns color. The singing is upliftingly warm and the harmonies are arranged in such a manner that makes you feel like you are in a group of friends telling stories around a fire and their optimism is felt right up to your heart and there is a silent hope that love does exist in every nook and cranny. The tune immediately catches your ear, catchy and appealing, like the road you have been on, but now view through new lenses, and trickling guitars intertwine with smooth, swiveling sounds, making a relaxing nostalgia that is both personal and vast. The instrumentation is a mixture ...

Andy Smythe and his Emergency present itself quickly. It was not noisily, but just spontaneously there, as the light varies in a street when the clouds shift without any previous notice. It changes the mood virtually without your awareness. Something out of the ordinary, something rollicking. It doesn't push. It simply hangs around you, and that is likely the reason why it works. He is playing a good part of it himself, guitar, piano, bass, organ, and you can tell that it is of a single hand, a single decision. Nothing comes out as deliberately orchestrated. The lead guitar of Paul Challenger comes in where it should be, gives a little lift, and subsides. Smythe has a warm and steady voice, without showiness. has a rustic charm at the fringes.  The music is motion without drawing much attention to itself. It is surrounded by guitar lines that twist around it in a manner that suggests older British pop, yet it does not even pause to admire the fact. It has a touch of rock, a slight ...

It is like confetti in a whirlwind, Hot Mess by Ava Valianti hits your ears and crashes, is chaotic, and has a colorful aspect, and impossible to ignore. This Newbury songwriter is only sixteen, but she transforms the crude mess of teenage misfitting into the ferociously joyful, and the outcome is like a warm embrace of the person who has got it. There is a softness in her voice that is almost as gentle as the daylight and there is a muffled authority in her voice, drawing you directly into her world like an old and battered sweatshirt. The song has a playful-pop sparkle and more inner, reflective shadows, and it immediately catches your attention, but then lets you be quiet with the thought-of-the-autumn sun peeking in the leaves on a hot and breezy afternoon. The colliding of soft textures with twisted edges in the instrumentation reflects that push-pull of desiring to conceal your flaws but at the same time needs to be visible. The production is desperate and personal simultaneously...

  The Game of Love by Michellar with Rad Datsun is a soft breeze with a breath of that love affair you forgot, and it brings that aching pang of what-ifs and could-bes back to your heart. The result of an accidental partnership between Michelle Bond and Brad Johnson during a songwriting retreat, this song seems like a discovery of an old photo album-pages of bright snapshots of the happy dance of love, with neither a trace of bitterness or resentment. The interlacing of the duet vocals between Michellar and Rad Datsun is comparable to two hands holding in a packed room, and both voices provide a different perspective of the growing bond, and the two combine in a way that pulled at your heart strings without any strain. Lightweight synth riffs and twangy guitar structures are like sunlight hitting water, beautifully fading into each other, giving the sensation of a new love in the short moments of life. The instrumentation is played to produce a cloud like a feeling of nostalgia and...

It is a silent form of loneliness that falls in when you are around people, yet somehow not really connected to them as their bodies are around, but their souls are not. Energy Whores know that instinctively, and Electric Friends makes it what you can nearly feel almost slapping your face in the light of a screen. Carrie Schoenfeld and Attilio Valenti make the track look like the slow moving shadow scene, beautiful and enthralling. It is slow, it is gradual and gradually unpeels the layers of digital gloss, until you are left standing in front of one naked and uncovered thing. The trip-hop sounds are floating in the production like dense fog, creating an impulse that calms and narrows at the same time, reverberating the push and pull of the online spaces that it silently challenges. The reservedness of Electric Friends is what is of real weight. It never raises its voice. It only sits there, warm and long-suffering, urging you to take your time with the discomfort, to have closer looks...

The centrepiece of JCCutter in We Live Through It All is a collection of quiet steadiness, taken off the album Perspectives. It mingles round like solid ground that has been shaken by the very harsh waters, gives comfort without making the reality of all that has been gone through any less true. This is an experience based song that is grounded on resilience which has been achieved as opposed to being conceived. Basing his sound on the traditions of soft-rock and country, the New Mexico songwriter builds a close, yet expansive sound. The conversation of the guitar and the violin is what it can be described as an emotional pulse of the song, swelling up and down with cinematic grace, as the lights are setting in the wide landscape. It is the kind of composition that can invite you to a state of calm and listen to yourself and to assess. It is the understanding in the song that stays on. Learning through years of tourism of the cyclones and through his own turmoil, JCCutter does not use ...

The song Till I’m Drunk and Confused by Exzenya has a bright and bouncy beginning of the song, the type of tunes that sound pleasant to listen to immediately. It has a definite folk-pop bias, owing to ukulele and acoustic guitar, and a tempo that keeps things going along well. Being her eighth single to be released by Exzenya Productions, it is easy to believe that it is doing the right thing, and that it is upbeat at least at the surface but something bigger is going on beneath it when you persist. It is the vocals that actually make you draw in. They are captured on the spot and are left largely unmanipulated and that sincerity does matter. You are able to detect the cracks and the feeling, which perfectly suits the theme of the song heartbreak and denial. Lyrically, it revolves around going out at night and drinking too much and not wanting to face the truth as long as possible until everything comes back to reality. It fits well into the larger Bar Scenes and Rumors project, with i...