High Fade – Burnt Toast & Coffee
Similar artists: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Vulfpeck, The Fearless Flyers, Cory Wong, Graham Central Station
Genre: Classic Rock
High Fade resort to retro funk-rock as a means to grab your attention, but the band has enough collective muscle to push their way through.
There’s very little that’s new. That goes for any discipline, especially the arts. The A&R people telling you otherwise are either new to their business or playing some kind of well-paid game. After all, just how much novelty can we squeeze out of a 12-note scale?
No, the modern greats simply have a knack for rearranging familiar patterns in a fantasy-filled way. They can make vintage clothing appear like the look that every modern concert-goer should consider. And, most importantly, they inject their music with enthusiasm, the propeller of rock n’ roll.
High Fade’s “Burnt Toast & Coffee” is filled with the kind of excitement that one usually encounters with kids skipping school. There’s just something about being young and doing something that’s not exactly good for you. High Fade understands this and melds this attitude with the kind of funk-metal reminiscent of early Red Hot Chili Peppers or Faith No More. The fact that the aforementioned bands have long since departed this style of music means that High Fade’s antics are really doing all of us a favour.
Paper Anthem – Malus
Similar artists: The 1975, Snow Patrol, blink-182, Foo Fighters, Foals
Genre: Alternative Rock
Paper Anthem are extremely frank with their intention of maximising their success and extremely direct in their modern pop-rock approach.
Most artists like to live outside the constraints of time. At least, they attempt it. Artists aren’t especially known for waking up early, being on time for meetings, or keeping up wth the news. If they were, they’d join a newspaper, study to become a lawyer or bluff their way into getting a job in finance.
This lifestyle, however, can also have a detrimental effect on their work. By ignoring the things that their peers see as obvious, some artists are simply unable to find a way to address their peers. The really clever ones manage to marry ambition with a pristine sense of reading just what’s going on at any particular time.
Paper Anthem’s “Malus” is, in many ways, a pop-rock collage of all of the sounds, new and old, that have been popular with pop-rock listeners in recent years. While it doesn’t entirely represent a colossal innovation, it is true that it captures the spirit of the time. It takes a particular kind of skill to write a guitar-driven song for this Summer, and Paper Anthem manage this here.
