Æladin – Sail into the Sun
Similar artists: Nick Hakim, M. Ward, oso leone, Michael Nau, Patrick Watson
Genre: Lo-fi Rock, Psychedelic-rock
Maybe we’re all just too busy trying to make sense of things. Maybe we’re just wasting our time, and its affecting our work. The artistic professions are some of the most affected by this trend toward realism and careful analysis. After all, why should anything make sense and why should we expect a pop song or a Hollywood movie to reveal the truth to us.
The artists truly making a dent nowadays are the ones who have stopped reporting the news. Joe Strummer was right, but a new Joe Strummer isn’t needed right now. He wouldn’t get much coverage anyway. He’d get canceled, have to move to a motorhome outside of London, and we, his fans, would end up feeling guilty for his terrible fortune.
Nah, the world can’t be figured out, but it can be broken down into little pieces and reassembled until it takes a shape that we can live with. This is what modern psych-rock artist Æladin does with “Sail into the Sun.” It can provide as much information as a laboratory experiment, or it can be just another attempt of many. It doesn’t much matter. Æladin makes music about living, not about wishing to start living.
New Age Healers – The Spin Out
It’s no wonder that rock stars turn out to be terrible dictators. What some of them receive through their work is an immense amount of power that no person wielding a six-string ought to ever have to manage. Yes, they just climb on a stage and sing their songs. But the best of them make you witness them perform in exactly the way that they want to be seen.
Of course, it doesn’t just happen without any effort at all. Not everyone’s cut out to be a rockstar or a dictator. The ones who manage have a knack for making their music sound like an accompaniment to the greatest storms hidden inside of your soul. They make you feel as if by listening to it, you have joined something greater than yourself. These songs create a great illusion.
New Age Healers’ “The Spin Out” sounds like a recording of a terrible naval disaster translated into the language of pop music. The greatest strength that song possesses is its knack for putting an exclamation point where it’s most needed. It makes this psych-shoegaze tune sound confrontational. And it forces you to look at it just as The Healers want you to. Starting a cult is next!