
Matt Cox – Dark Matter
It all comes down to the blues and guitar music, doesn’t it? Skinny rockers singing about girls and cars may have gone out of fashion a long time ago. And, every other form of proliferation of rock music is dying a slow and painful death. But, from pop to rap, and even electronic music, everything returns systematically to the blues and to the howl of the electric guitar.
There’s truth in those sounds. Frankly, no other style of music has travelled as many borders, and broken as many barriers, unless you count, perhaps, Caribbean music. And, through it all, the blues offers a refuge for the battered and blue, but resilient guitar slingers and soulful singers of the world.
One such singer, possessing forged through endless repetition, as well as singing, is Matt Cox. His single, Dark Matter, is an elegant proof of concept of how the blues may endlessly mutate to accommodate recent trends and fashions. In a time where the endless news cycle seems designed to keep folks in an unending period of mourning, the blues might be the best soundtrack that we have.
Karaboudjan – I’ll Be Just Fine
Chemical refreshments have improved and been enhanced over the years… I am told. A 1960s hippie would have no hope of hanging out with a modern-day festival goer unless they did some serious preparation beforehand.
Similarly, the music designed to accompany or replace such thrills has also grown and evolved. If the original psychedelic music was merely designed to boost life experiences during the 1960s, modern psychedelic plays as a backdrop to the synthetic, mechanical modern age.
Karaboudjan’s well-produced single I’ll Be Just Fine sounds like a prog-rock group making for a large company that makes household appliances or a group commissioned to provide music for an airport. The tune contains dreamy, trippy sounds, but they carry the mark of escapism. The computers have been fully integrated into our lives, and they too are learning to sing their own blues.