Hailing from Observatory, Cape Town, She Man Lion spent two years honing their skills before their breakthrough performance to a packed Zula Sound Bar in August 2008. The band rose to an initial crescendo in 2009 with their winning the Red Bull Radar competition at Rocking the Daisies Festival. Growing interest in SHE MAN LION’S synth-driven uplifting dance music led to performances with the likes of top local acts BLK JKS, Desmond & the Tutus, Kidofdoom and Lark. After a line up change in early 2010 the band went on to perform at Rocking the Daisies 2010 with renewed energy, further progressing their sound into the new decade.
By: Elizabeth Stene | Beat-Play Ambassador South Africa | @LizMWL | Music Without Labels & Beat-Play, LLC
The Weeknd just dropped his latest tracks on youtube last week and for some reason it has been removed because it violates Youtubes Terms and Services!!!! DUMB!!! Thanks to soundcloud we were able to grab the original version of this instant acoustic-vibin’ hit brought to you by 2011’s top R&B artist. Definitely staying consistent with his quality continually raising the bar higher and higher for himself. Here is “Rolling Stone”
So we finally got ahold of that track, but that’s not all that’s going on in the music world of The Weeknd. Since his infamous release of House Of Balloons earlier this year, many fans have been comprising music videos for the artist to show there never-ending support. Some videos weren’t really recognized by the Weeknd but others kindly caught his graces such as the most recent release for his track “Wicked Games”. Directed by Storm Saulter
Shapes, an NYC-outfit, self -describes as “Gutter-glam, A true melding of pop and punk, sans penis and fart jokes. Brutally honest and ugly lyrics set to undeniably poppy music. Songs of love and death. This music is the sound of yearning. An earnest, sober (sometimes… but not too often), & mournful acceptance that life will never be what you want it to, tempered by an undying youthful exuberance and acceptance of nothing. It is the sound of going down drinking and swinging. SHAPES, will forever go, anything, but gentle(!), into that good night.”
I enjoyed hearing Shapes for the first time, partially because it was refreshing to hear something different, but mainly because it’s just a pretty awesome song. The video invokes nausea because of the camera perspective, but if you close your eyes (or minimized the browser) that feeling will be alleviated. You can check out their facebook page or follow them @shapesband for more information.
Kyle C. Stilley | Marketing Strategist | @stillz | Music Without Labels & Beat-Play, LLC | kyle@musicwithoutlabels.com
From an early age, Brandon Ramon was attracted to sports and Hip-hop music. He can recall listening to songs like “It Takes Two” by Rob Base and Rakim’s “Microphone Fiend.”
While his passion for hip-hop grew through childhood, his calling was not manifested until post-adolescence.
Brought up in the city of Richmond, Virginia, Brandon used events from his tumultuous upbringing, to fuel his music, even adopting the alias of the “Voice of Struggle.”
There’s something that just authentic about listening to Rebel Ramon. His music depicts the hardships of living in the inner-city while also presenting positive messages throughout. Recently, I randomly stumbled upon his latest video, “They Can’t Stop Me,” which presumably will also be featured on Rebel Ramon’s “Brainstorm EP” that is set to launch at the end of June. I’m looking forward to hearing more from this young hip-hop artist.
Be sure to catch one of Fiery I’s action-packed live shows if you’re in the Southern California area. These guys have one goal: “to make sweet love to your ears”.
Hannah Miller‘s soulful voice is on full display in her newest music video to her track, “The Reason Why.” The gentleness of her voice provides such comfort as her sultry lyrics dance to the solemn notes of a reverent piano. Miller, a Tennessee native, creates a delicate yet powerful tone in “The Reason Why,” a theme which seems recurrent in a lot of her recorded work.
Hannah Miller will be touring the during summer months in states up and down the eastern shore. You can review her tour schedule on her blog and facebook page.
Last year, Miller released her fourth independent album, Journey to the Moon, which four-track set is inspired by love and life. Along with three other tracks, you can find “Way About You,” a catchy jingle set to a retro-themed video.
Kyle C. Stilley | Marketing Strategist | @stillz | Music Without Labels & Beat-Play, LLC | kyle@musicwithoutlabels.com
The Great Apes are a blues-rock band out of Cape Town. Under the influence of old blues legends like Muddy Waters and Odetta, this band has alot of soul. Layers of spirit and primal noise create a monster of seductive rock ‘n roll. The five apes include Yusif Sayigh on vocals, Pienaar Du Plessis in control of rhythm guitar, Antonie Gunter mastering feedback on lead guitar, Jacques Stemmet grooving base and Jaekan Coetzee smashing drums. They have played at various venues throughout South Africa – check out their song Mad Again/I’m Bad Like Jesse James here.
The first things you notice are the voice and the space. That voice belongs to Nathaniel Rateliff, a man who’s earned the twang and hard-knock weariness that shines through on his Rounder debut. The space comes courtesy of producer Brian Deck (Califone, Iron & Wine, Modest Mouse), who helped transform 8-track bedroom demos into miniature epics of contrast, beauty, and yearning. In Memory of Loss is a stunning, heartbreaking sonic document from a singer-songwriter who’s made his way from a childhood in Bay, Missouri (pop. 60) to the national stage.
Rateliff grew up of modest means, the son of devout Southern churchgoers. The family sang together throughout his childhood. At age 7 Rateliff learned the drums. As a teenager, he stumbled across a cassette of Led Zeppelin’s IV abandoned in a local barn; he wore the tape out listening to it on headphones, drumming along with “When the Levee Breaks” and “Misty Mountain Hop.”
Rateliff’s youth in rural Missouri was quiet and rambling. He built skateboard ramps, explored caves, slept outdoors in the heat. “I loved growing up there,” he says. “It’s beautiful. There’s something really nice about there not being much to do; it really helped me be a creative person.” After his father passed away, when Rateliff was only 13, he picked up the guitar. His mother taught him three chords, a friend showed him a few more, and there was no need to bother with lessons; he started penning his own songs on an acoustic. He’d later go electric, gaining an appreciation for the freedom of effect pedals: “I was really into making feedback for hours at a time.” Both impulses are present on In Memory of Loss, with its shards of raw guitar rising beneath hushed, insistent melodies.
At eighteen Rateliff relocated to Denver. He scored a job with a trucking company, working on the dock and the yard. The money was good, but Rateliff kept falling asleep at the wheel. “I had a little stint of narcolepsy,” he says. “My limbs were going numb, the color was all weird in ‘em. My thyroid wasn’t working. Weird stuff that shouldn’t be happening when you’re in your 20s, but it was.” After a battery of tests Rateliff decided to take time off from the job. It was a period of rest and recovery, but also one of artistic growth and fresh challenges. Rateliff used the break to learn the piano, much as he had other instruments—by teaching himself. The first song he tackled was Leonard Cohen’s melancholy classic, “Hallelujah.” (That same mixture of the sacred and profane is recognizable on “We Never Win,” with its throwbacks to gospel vocal harmonies, Rateliff harkening to “an old time revival.”)
Meanwhile, Rateliff developed a dedicated following within the Denver music community and beyond. Spin praised his “massive, alluring” voice. Billboard dubbed the unsigned singer-songwriter a ‘must hear.’ This wave of acclaim lead to a live set on the popular indie site Daytrotter and a solo tour opening for the Fray. The New York Times praised Rateliff’s “stark, eloquent [Johnny] Cash echoes,” and he earned enthusiastic mentions from Time Out New York and the tastemaker music blog, Brooklyn Vegan. New York magazine pegged Rateliff as an “artist everyone should be listening to” during the pivotal CMJ Music Festival.
Rateliff began writing a different sort of song than he was used to: quieter, more introspective and patient. A friend turned him on to the bedroom recording potentials of the time-honored 8-track, and a new working method was born. “I just kind of went back to my roots,” he says. “It was a different sound, but it was still coming from the same place.”
While recording In Memory of Loss, Rateliff lived in Chicago, working with producer Brian Deck to craft the nuances: mournful harmonica on “You Should’ve Seen the Other Guy,” the ominous organ of “Longing and Losing,” propulsive bass drum on “Early Spring Till.” Rateliff’s Rounder debut is rooted in a bygone era. It’s both fresh and classic, imbued with a melancholy nostalgia, the rough candor of rock’n’roll’s past and the warmth and earnestness of folk storytellers. Rateliff has a personal connection to the sounds of the 60s and 70s. “It was more about songs, and not about an industry,” he says. “It was about a movement, not about making money. I think we’re moving back into that again. There’s still an importance in actually writing songs again. People are interested in hearing things that make sense.”
These thirteen tracks, with their soulful minimalism, certainly make sense. Hints of the music he grew up on – Van Morrison, Muddy Waters, the Beatles—shine through. (Album closer “Happy Just To Be,” with its pounding piano chords, is a close cousin to the Lennon-penned “Across the Universe.”) Yet Rateliff is also at home in what may be called, for lack of a better term, the neo-folk revival. His voice is so confident that you can occasionally imagine the music dropping out entirely, a song propelled solely by Rateliff’s a capella strengths—equal parts church spiritual and TV on the Radio riffing on the Pixies’ “Mr. Grieves.”
“The one thing that made me want to write and play music was trying to get the same feeling that it gave me when I listened to it,” Rateliff says. “Like having an anxiety attack—where you almost start to weep, at the same time feel a strange pressure in your chest.” This persistent troubadour has struggled and persevered to this point; now, the wider world is ready for Nathaniel Rateliff. “In Memory of Loss,” he says, “is for everyone who’s willing to listen.”
Keep up to date with all things Nathaniel @ hisFacebook or [Dot Com]
By: Shayne Byrne | Beat-Play Ambassador Ireland |@shaynewithMWL| Music Without Labels & Beat-Play, LLC
Taxijam is an Internet mixed tape. Filmed here in the Mother City – it is a collection of unedited live performances in the back of a taxicab with local talent. They provide a selection of some of South Africa’s finest creative talent performing in an intimate 5-minute taxi ride. All clips are recorded and shot in exactly the same style, in one take and uploaded to their website. Each and every performance is entirely democratic; there are no expensive stages or creative lighting, which makes it possible for viewers watch multiple musicians in exactly the same context. Check out their website to view a variety of different artists. It’s the smallest gig around!
The Middle East are a musical collective based in Townsville in Queensland, Australia. Forming in 2005, the group played locally and completed several East Coast tours of mainly Christian festivals throughout Australia. In early 2008 they released an album called The Recordings of The Middle East before splitting up. Eight months after this decision was made, the band reconvened and later re-released an abridged version of the debut album, The Recordings of the Middle East as an EP in May 2009 through Spunk Records (AU). This EP was released in North America on the 27th of October, 2009. Their first full album, I Want That You Are Always Happy was released in Australia and New Zealand on 8 April 2011.
photo by: Lauren Farmer
The genre of the band themselves is difficult to specify. Whilst their MySpace profile lists the band as “indie”, elements of folk, pop, post rock, country and ambience can be found throughout their music. Instruments used include guitar— both electricand acoustic, drums, hand percussion, piano, glockenspiel and trumpet. Another distinguishing feature of the band’s music is the use of vocal harmony—in particular close harmony performed at times by several members.
The band have gone on to receive national radio airplay on Triple J and slots on several major Australian festivals such as Splendour in the Grass, the Big Day Out, Big Sound, Homebake, and the Woodford Folk Festival. As well as this, the band have toured with international bands such as British group Doves and have also achieved minor, developing interest in the United States, where The Recordings of The Middle East was released on October 27. Much of the interest surrounding the band can be related back to the blogosphere, with indie blog I Guess I’m Floating introducing the band stateside in May 2009.Thereafter The Middle East had over one hundred blog entries from around the world writing about the band. Recently,Pitchfork Media offered a free download of the song “The Darkest Side” as a part of their weekly Forkcast; describing the song as “a simple, finger-plucked acoustic affair with alternating and harmonizing vocals that lend the hushed track a sense of beleaguered hope”. They also were nominated and won the Triple J 2009 ‘Unearthed’ Award.
In October 2009, it was announced that the band would be opening for US band Grizzly Bear in their Melbourne shows. They were also announced as the support act for one of the band’s Sydney Festival shows. On November 11, 2009, it was announced that the band would be part of the festival Big Day Out, announced as part of the second line up, in East Coast areas.
Their songs “The Darkest Side” and “Blood” came in at number 87 and 64 respectively on the Australian Triple J Hottest 100 in 2009.
Their song ‘Blood’ is also featured in the films Accidents Happen and It’s Kind of a Funny Story as well as an episode of the Australian television comedy-drama series Offspring and a TV commercial for the European bank BNP Paribas.
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Be sure to catch one of Fiery I’s action-packed live shows if you’re in the Southern California area. These guys have one goal: “to make sweet love to your ears”.
The Beat-Play Experiment 