Canadian singer-songwriter Zachary Lucky is getting ready to release his next full-length album Everywhere A Man Can Be. This album that was produced by Aaron Goldstein will come out October 7th on Wroxton Recordings. There’s currently a pledge campaign going on to support the release. So click this link, in case you want to pre-order a copy of this (most likely) great album. There’s also a small Finnish connection. Zachary toured here a couple of years ago and one of the song carries a title Helsinki and it was written after that Finland tour.
This is Make It On Time from the forthcoming Zachary Lucky album.
Amen 1 by Mikko Joensuu is my favourite Finnish album of the year so far. Second part of the trilogy Amen 2 is coming out in November on Svart Records. The first single There Used To Be A Darkness surfaced six days ago. I was a little bit wary during the early stages of the song, because the sound of Amen 1 is probably closer to the core of my music taste. Somehow Mikko still won my heart over during the 11 minutes this song lasts and when the song reached the end, all that wariness had vanished and it was time to hit the play button again. I gave it my best effort, but it turned out that it was just too hard to be a prejudiced grumpy prick when listening to this man. Sorry about that. See if you can do a better job by listening to this beautiful monster below. If you can somehow handle that, try Thief and a Liar from Amen 1 and your heart will definitely melt. I can’t wait to hear Amen 2 in November and Amen 3 sometime in 2017.
I haven’t done a Spotify list in a long time, so I made one out of 2016 songs that I’ve fallen in love with. It’s by no means a definite best of the year list. I could easily come up with another 40 similarly important and there’s a bunch of stuff that isn’t on Spotify. This thing already kind of got out of hand, because the plan was to just quickly put 20 great songs on a list. Anyway, here it is in case someone wants to hear it. Maybe I’ll do another in a few weeks/months time or just add more stuff to this one.
I really should quit this blog, because I haven’t even managed to write about the new Austin Lucas album Between The Moon & The Midwest. I always end up in trouble with the albums that matter the most, because I want to write something better and more meaningful about them than just a quick little news entry. Then months fly by, because I can’t come up with anything that I would be happy about and one day I notice that the album(s) that matter the most to me, didn’t even get a mention. For example new Austin Lucas and Daniel Romano albums fall into this category. I suppose the good thing is that while these people might not be world famous, the readers of this little website are probably all aware of their greatness. So this is like preaching to a choir kind of thing.
Between The Moon & The Midwest came out early in the year on At The Helm Records (UK/Europe) and Last Chance Records (USA) and it’s one of my favourite albums of the year. The whole thing is absolutely gorgeous. Personal favourites are the opener Unbroken Hearts and it’s traditional country vibes, Wrong Side of the Dream that is beautiful duet with Lydia Loveless and the album closer Midnight. Austin Lucas sure knows how to end an album. Splinters was the biggest treasure on his previous album Stay Reckless and Midnight is the one that strikes me the hardest on this new album. So brilliant. The whole album is. You’ll definitely need to hear this one, if you already haven’t. Austin is timeless and Sally is forever.
It proved to be difficult to find album cuts to stream from the usual places, so here’s a great video of Austin performing the album opener Unbroken Hearts (video by Alex Berlin).
