
Impending Joy – Dry Pond
Similar artists: Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Post Animal, Wand
Genre: Surf Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Garage Rock
Impending Joy play colourful, psychedelic rock music as if their 1960s gig on the beach somehow transported them to 2023.
Expanding your mind is not always what it’s cracked out to be. Of course, such activities come with warnings. You may not like what you find once your mind has become more elastic. What you find may even drive you insane. Or, even worse, you may find nothing there and wonder why you’ve spent all that time in the first place.
Mind expansion techniques can’t truly be done on any impressive scale without the aid of music. It would be like throwing a silent party where music is completely banned. In fact, psychedelic explorers have all agreed that it is carefully arranged musical sounds that might give the best description of the hidden worlds that they are trying to uncover.
Impending Joy’s “Dry Pond” rings out with colourful sounds like a lysergically-tinged beach party. The music captures the energy of 1960s music but brings a tinge of modern anxiety to the mix as well. This is psychedelic rock for people who are not done exploring the outer regions of their minds.
NOL K – THE SHIELD
Similar artists: PÆRISH, blink-182, The Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots
Genre: Pop Punk, Alternative Rock
NOL K write alt-rock melodramas and pop-punk jingles about being misunderstood and not fitting into the world.
The world, as it turns out, doesn’t really care much for you. And your friends, while considerate of your plight, don’t really have the patience to deal with someone’s issues besides their own. It leaves only a few things, chiefly music to offer some sort of shelter.
But music can’t get by on good intentions. In order to truly reach the hearts and minds of its listeners, it needs to represent the sense of distress that they’re going through truthfully. To do that, the songwriters must dig deep and turn themselves inside out. Only then can they be trusted.
NOL K’s “THE SHIELD” is a song that blends aspects of pop-punk and alternative rock and brings them together for an emotionally charged performance. It’s not just the determined vocals that let the audience know that the artists are fighting the same fight. It’s the elongated, theatrical musical outro that makes the same confession.