If you were to close your eyes and listen to any one of Aguava (Allen Chen)’s songs, you’d easily find yourself transported to some faraway beach — sun shining, waves crashing, and with a mai tai in hand perhaps? So it was a bit surprising seeing his name on the SXSW artist roster, especially since […]
It started with the Summer 2020 release of her single “I’ll Just Dance” – a simple video of a younger Su Lee breaking out into an interpretive song and dance. Over a layered staccato of her pop-inspired instrumentals, her unfettered lyrics on dancing through overwhelming uncertainty hallmark her style of whimsical melancholy. “This is basically […]
It’s an unbearably hot day. The sweltering heat in Pasadena has reached heights that allowed for drink vendors at 88Rising’s Head in the Clouds fest to charge criminal prices ($15 for a 16 oz drink) — and get away with it. Bullets of sweat bead across virtually every attendee’s hairline in sight and I was […]
When now Austin-based indie pop band Letting Up Despite Great Faults first released their self-titled debut back in 2009, the music scene was completely different. Spotify was nonexistent, and the place where bands got discovered were the wild, wild west of music discovery: Myspace. Just one look at the album artwork for their debut will […]
In a way, Kainalu (Trent Prall)’s music sounds timeless. Even back when he released his first Bloom Lagoon EP (2017) and its pulsing retro-psychedelic debut album Lotus Gate (2019), Kainalu’s music already established itself as a modern approach to glitzy 70s psych and funk, always inspiring its listeners to move. Or at the very least, […]