
HOWL – Beneath the Surface
Genre: Garage Rock, Alternative Rock
When most actors are tasked with playing a villain they focus on one trait that will let audiences know, before they’ve uttered a single word, what their intentions are. The bad guys will talk with a lisp, will limp, will head their head too proudly, or will speak in a way that inhibits others from saying how they feel.
Garage-rock works much in the same way. Sure, there are certain subtleties involved that only the biggest fans will understand and love. However, it’s a genre that functions as long as it starts strongly. Almost always, it needs to start with a great guitar riff. This lets you know that the band is up to no good.
HOWL plays up to the part on Beneath the Surface, an effective garage-rocker that utilizes light and darkness to its advantage. This is not a group that likes to go charging in. They know their strengths and will stop everything before delivering a memorable riff or a powerful vocal line. It’s nasty music that would get banned in certain countries on the basis of the power of the sound alone.
llawgne – Oh Juliana
Genre: Alternative-rock, grunge, shoegaze
People tend to react to pure melodies and harmonies the way that they do to any object constructed in perfect symmetry. They admire it. No matter how far and wide musicians will go looking for innovative sound and recording techniques meant to sever their connection to the past, like a rubber band, popular music will return to pretty melodies.
There’s nothing wrong with liking good-looking or good-sounding things. This is something that 90s alt-rock musicians stumbled upon early. Sure, many of them may have resembled dirty street urchins out to set dynamite to the world of pop music. However, really, most of their hit songs were a success because of the fact that they returned to the golden ratio that we mentioned before.
Sweden’s llawgne is a songwriter with a passion for that decade of music and for the alt-rockers embrace of loud guitars and powerful dynamics. On Oh, Juliana The musician, however, is also an admirer of the classic songwriting devices. The melodies introduce dramatism. The song structure is used to provide a focal point. And, in writing a love song, there’s an attempt to improve some of the problems of the world.