BRANLAND – Rain in My Heart
Genre: 90s Rock, Garage Rock, Alternative Rock
Similar artists: Weezer, Grandaddy, Muse, Elliott Smith
The wise rock sages advise young musicians never to play in the gallery. This may sound like a noble thought made to encourage innovation. But it’s not entirely true now, is it? How many famous rock stars go out on tour nowadays and refuse to play their biggest hook-infused hit singles? Not one, unless they’ve stuck on to a small club stage wearing a disguise.
The truth is that the truth has to be presented in musical form in an attractive manner for it to have a chance of reaching a sizeable audience. Whether the artist is jumping for joy or locking the barrel of their gun as they point it at their head, the tunes that they sing better come equipped with a melodic punch.
BRANLAND, who we have reviewed before, might be obsessed with sad-sack rockstars, but only with the ones that know that there’s no shame in conquering your audience with a great chorus. Rain in my heart resembles Weezer’s post-grunge melancholy-driven power-pop. It’s a tune that thrives on loud-soft dynamics and one that knows how to draw listeners in on BRANLAND’s cause.
Pony Girl – Enny One Wil Love You
Genre: Shoegaze, Psychedelic Rock, Indie Rock
The life expectancy of rock stars has increased dramatically in recent years. Give praises to an increase in medical technology. But, the fact that their employers are much less comfortable standing for the kind of things that they used to get up to in the past certainly is a contributing factor.
With chemical experimentation no longer the norm and, in some cases, almost a stigma in the music industry, the psych-rock pioneers have to dig deeper. It has, fortunately for us, left us with artists willing to explore the edges of reality in a more profound and more surprising way.
Pony Girl’s Enny One Will Love You straddles the worlds of mature pop-rock and bizarre psych music with grace and confidence. The result is an exploration of tenderness and of hope. Is it much different from the kinds of sounds that its predecessors, the kind that would write rock operas about staring at trees, could come up with? It is because perhaps it puts more faith in the power of pure imagination.
