Dante Mazzetti – Hey Now
Everybody’s looking for a shoulder to cry on, and your favourite rock stars are no different. Down and out tunes about failure and misery are a dime a-plenty. Yet, for the most part, they come off as acting done with not enough decent lines to work off of.
The career screwups, the professional drunks, the ones whose dreams have been irrevocably shattered speak in broken sentences that carry the comedy and burden that makes up their life. These characters sound a lot like Dante Mazzetti on “Hey Now”.
I don’t know just how Mr Mazzetti was able to pull off this magic trick. He’s created a Tom Waits-like song without using any props such as hipster lyrics, strange instruments, or a cement-mixer timbre.
Like Van Morrison tune wasting no breath on superfluous lines, or a believable four in the morning conversation, Dante Mazzetti has managed to get to the root of the problem with little effort as possible.
Bryan Porter Hinkley – No Time
There was a time before the advent of Big Star, the great Memphis, Tennessee group always doomed to fail in the eyes of the record-buying public, that bands felt that fast-paced rock and sugar-soaked pop were stuff belonging to two extremely different worlds.
Alex Chilton’s impact was such that many musicians instantly decided that playing fun music and equipping it with an arsenal of carefully crafted guitar lines was not such a bad idea after all. Some call it power-pop.
Bryan Porter Hinkley, like many other contemporary artists, sounds like he grew up on a collection containing a fair bit of power-pop. The single “No Time” includes some of that lustre that only acoustic guitars over a tight drum groove, under a bright production, can summon. Bryan Porter Hinkley’s “No Time” is an ode to the summer of 2020 that almost was.
