Time for a party. A new Freschard album Sunday Night is out and available on Wiaiwya. My vinyl copy is still on its way, but I have the download to keep me company. So if you see me strolling on the streets of Turku with a giant smile on my face, I’m most likely just listening to Freschard. She is an excellent French songwriter who currently lives in Berlin. All her records are both fun & irresistible and beautiful & moving. The new one isn’t an exception. So so brilliant. Listening to Freschard keeps my life as something manageable. Here’s Eagle Eyes and the music video for the first single Friends. Buy the vinyl from Wiaiwya or the digital files from here.
Matt Woods – How To Survive
This has been an incredible music year. It feels like there’s 3-5 excellent albums coming out each Friday. I probably would struggle to keep up even if onechord.net was a full-time job. Unfortunately it’s not, but I’ll do my best (which isn’t very much at the moment). October 7th brought us new excellent albums from Matt Woods, Dan Edmonds, Zachary Lucky, Hiss Golden Messenger and Zach Schmidt. Plus all the great stuff that I’m not aware of.
I’ll start going through this latest new music Friday with Matt Woods from Knoxville, TN and his new album How To Survive. I’ve had it on heavy rotation and think it’s a wonderful country / americana album. Matt has the perfect voice for this kind of music and his singing would carry even weak song material into my heart. The songwriting is far from weak though. It’s damn good all the way through the album. Matt Woods also has an all-star or should be stars cast playing with him on the album. Including some of my personal heroes like Aaron Lee Tasjan and Todd Beene. Here’s the music video for the first single The American Way and a couple of outtakes from the album. You can hear/buy the whole thing on his Bandcamp or buy physical copies from his website.
Itasca – Open To Chance
Life has been busy and hard and my whole body aches, but thankfully there are things that have the ability to stop time and take care of me. Usually these things are songs and albums. L.A. based Kayla Cohen aka Itasca has written an absolute stunning album Open To Chance that came out 30th of September on the always magnificent Paradise Of Bachelors label. I bought a download when it came out and have lived the past week wrapped into the mesmerizing serene beauty of this album. It takes me back to that period in time in the early 00s when I bought everything I could find from artists like Sibylle Baier, Vashti Bunyan, Bridget St.John, Judee Sill, Linda Perhacs and I’m pretty confident that this amazing album can stand the test of time just as well as those classics have. This deserves a whole lot of love and longer, better actual review, but all I’m able to do right now is put the headphones on and let this captivating timeless music guide me into sleep. Here are a couple of standouts from the album, but you really need to hear the whole album.