Country, Americana, Folk, Power Pop, Indie Pop
Hills (of Vaasa) actually exists. I heard the name years ago, but I wasn’t sure if Ove Ritola and Coma Silvennoinen were actually planning on releasing something under that name. They didn’t back then, but today Hills (of Vaasa) released their debut single Hello / It Was There. Sounding mighty good as expected. Especially loving the b-side It Was There. You can stream the single on their brand new website. I won’t embed the songs here, because you don’t want to miss those beautiful brides.
If you saw that early sketch for the albums of the year 2013 list, you are aware that I’m very much into the new Marine Dreams album Corner Of The Eye. I guess I can understand if someone thinks this is only good and nothing that special, but I instantly fell in love with this one and I’m in the process of forming a life-long relationship with this lovely little album. In fact, I think Ian Kehoe, the man behind Marine Dreams, must be some kind of pop genius with a fantastic melodic sense. And then you have highly talented Tamara Lindeman (The Weather Station) and Daniel Romano providing harmony vocals. Actually, maybe I find it hard to understand if someone doesn’t find this amazing. It’s sounds so brilliant to me. Corner Of The Eye came out in late september on the great You’ve Changed Records. This is my favourite song Morning. I could listen to this for hours and I probably already have.
I already quickly featured The Provincial Archive some weeks ago, but I think a revisit is in order. Especially because I just looked at my last.fm stats for the past month and the first one was The Provincial Archive with 396 plays (followed by The Deep Dark Woods and Penniless with around 150 plays) and that excludes car plays for example. Therefore it’s fair to say that I’ve been at least mildly addicted to this Canadian band and their albums Nameless Places (2009) and Maybe We Could Be Holy (2010). They are probably fed up with the comparison, but this does remind me of the good kind of Death Cab For Cutie with a folkier set-up. In some strange way this also hits the same corner of my hearts as The Weakerthans or Frontier Ruckus. But enough with the pointless namedropping. This is high quality folk-tinged pop music that sounds warm and captivating. Here are a couple of magnificent songs from Maybe We Could Be Holy.
Guided By Sundogs:
Live version of Art Museums and Tourist Traps (Southern Souls Video)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLu9WvEbnf0]
And I hope there will be a new album sometime soon, because this new single Common Cards is also marvellous. I already posted the song earlier, but now there’s also a great video.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvUJgXei39s]
Volter are back in this ball game with a new single The One. I think this one might be one of my favourite Volter songs. A pretty great slice of 60’s influenced pop music. They have already started working on their next full-length album and I really look forward to that. You can buy/listen to the single on their bandcamp. Here’s the a-side The One.