Mediocre – Mattress Bitch
Genre: 90s Rock, Indie Rock, Alternative Rock
Mediocre sound like the high-school band that you’ll always tell your friends that you once played in. “We were going places, you know!”.
Do not let that discourage you though! Quite the contrary. The world’s heard enough people that can play as good as Jimi Hendrix. Most of them are making pseudo-John Mayer records. There’s a great force in creating art when you have all the enthusiasm and few of the tools to do it.
Many of the greatest punk or post-punk records, for example, were made by absolute beginners, people that wouldn’t have been able to tune their guitars if their lives depended on it, let alone write out their parts as sheet music.
Youthful punks Mediocre have that kind of excitement, but something else as well. Unlike 99% of groups of any age, they seem to have their direction well mapped out. Their alternative-rock one-two punk of Mattress Bitch finds a high-school band that in sound and presentation is fully formed and waiting for the world to come to them.
Meskerem Mees – Man Of Manners
Genre: Commercial, Singer-Songwriter, Folk
Meskerem Mees’ writing is not just pretty. It’s filled with the confidence of an artist that seems to know exactly where their music needs to head next.
There are two types of musicians that make classic folk/pop/rock nowadays. There are those that know on which doors they’re going to be knocking. Their work is directed towards people with great taste, who stopped listening to new music many decades ago. This retro fetishism can be very profitable.
Then there are a few, like Belgium singer-songwriter, Meskerem Mees that write music as if nothing has happened between the mid-1960s and today. This is not music that hints towards the past, but that assumes the right direction for music was at some point lost.
One can only admire this sort of conviction. Meskerem Mees’s Man Of Manners is a classic folk ballad, a tune about struggle, war, and lack of fairness. The tools are only a guitar, a voice, and the conviction that telling a story with sincerity, in a poetic language will be understood by many as the right thing to do. Meskerem Mees’ gamble has proven truthful.
