Justin Sconza – There’s That Sound
Before pop music was all about personal branding, selling a star’s life story, and utilizing trendy technological tools to make records, it was about sounds that could transport listeners to a faraway place. The methods were simple. But, every time someone actually managed to do this, it felt like they’d made use of some kind of magic trick.
A guitar is not a complicated device. Variations of it have existed far longer than even history can remember. But inside those stringed instruments, there can be something that borders on the mystical. It’s not just about telling a story with it or about using a musical formula that has worked in the past. It’s about putting all those things together and somehow making life, for a while, better than it once was.
Justin Sconza chases something that might potentially be sacred on “There’s That Sound.” Sconza is after the special sauce that some of the best 60s pop-rock groups were able to add to their songs and elevate them to the status of princeless heirlooms. The search is going well, and Sconza’s lo-fi retro-pop-rock occasionally finds that higher plane and manages to settle on it.
The Shrines – Spilled Ink
Thriving in this modern economy is all about specializing, and rock bands are no different. “Big in Japan” wasn’t a joke. It was a manual for how to earn enough money as a musician to make rent.
See, for the most part, musicians make their dough by going out and playing to audiences that either find them refreshingly familiar or wildly exotic. Bruce Springsteen or Garth Brooks, until recently, rarely appealed to audiences outside the U.S.A. They were familiar. Milli Vanilli were also beloved in the U.S. They were exotic, and known, particularly, for their thick Franco-German accents.
Mysterious music with songs about terrible things, played by people who look like they grew up in the care of orthodox monasteries, don’t necessarily appear to be a realistic proposition for the pop charts across the world. But they tend to do great in Northern Europe.
Denmark is the least extreme of Northern European countries, and the Danes, as opposed to their Scandinavian neighbors, can even be described as friendly. But they do love a good murder mystery them.
The Shrines are on call to provide them with this on their newest single, “Spilled Ink,” a track that brings to mind Nick Cave, Tom Waits, and every other songwriter who avoided sunlight for dear life. The Shrines know where their audience is, and it’s not in places where they drink cocktails underneath the palm trees.
