Genre: Pop

It’s a foreboding time to make pop music. But like a sunbeam peering through a haze of wildfire smoke, Early Eyes have somehow persevered through dashed dreams, fractured relationships, historic social justice uprisings in their own hometown, and a society tearing apart at the seams to make an album that is both responsive to the chaos and wearily optimistic.

“It almost feels like Look Alive! is a direct response to the pandemic,” bandleader Jake Berglove reflects. “It was like, oh, my goodness, all of our capitalist anxieties just came true! We took all of that anxiety and angry energy and put it into making a really fucked up album.”

“The album was not just an expression of all of our frustrations, but also an escape from it,” adds guitarist Joe Villano. “And I feel like the process of making it really carried us through the year.”

Look Alive! vibrates with angst, punctuated by computerized glitches and disintegrating threads of abandoned melodies that echo in the distance before roaring back to life. A track like “Chemicals” will begin with Early Eyes’ signature buoyant and catchy pop-rock, but as the song progresses it grows more ominous before shattering apart in an earthquake of rattling, subterranean bass.

On a warm summer evening in the year of our Lord 2015, a young college drop out is in his backyard, guitar in hands scribbling lazily on a loose sheet of paper. He taps his pen on his chin intensely, contemplating the first and only line that reads: “I’m going down”. he stares down at his pathetic excuse for an opening line and calls it a night. “eh, I’ll try again tomorrow” he says. This is his mantra. He didn’t know it then, but that pathetic little line would be the birthplace of a little band called Mustard Service and that pathetic little line would be the opening line of a little album called Zest Pop.
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For the next two years Marco Rivero and Armando Baeza (producer and former drummer) wrote and recorded the debut album “Zest Pop”, bringing in their friends Gabriel Marinuchi (guitar), Augusti Di Catarina (bass, backing vocals), and Leo Cattani (keys) to play the songs live as a full band. they played a few push-moshing, beer-spilling, gear-breaking, cop-calling, arrested-getting shows throughout Miami-Dade County, managing to amass a small yet passionate fanbase in their home town. In those years, GarageBand™ transitioned into ProTools™, recordings evolved into mastered tracks, and small house shows turned into packed venues.
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Their Debut album was released in June of 2017, relying solely on live shows and streaming platform algorithms for promotion and exposure. The algorithm gods took pity on these poor fools and granted them a world-wide audience over the span of the next three years, leading into the release of their sophomore album titled “Ces’t La Vie” in March of 2020

Raine Stern is a 23-year-old singer/songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist from Madison, WI. Raine was a contestant on season 20 of The Voice, has been featured on PBS’s 30 Minute Music Hour, and most recently was featured in NPR’s “Best 2021 Tiny Desk Contest.” When Raine first picked up a guitar at 11 years old, she found a home for the stories she had always felt the need to tell. Her lyricism is potent and poetic, and her arrangements fill in the cracks that language can’t. As a teenager, she spent her evenings playing at blues clubs with musicians three times her age. Now, she writes and arranges all the parts for her own 9-piece band. Raine’s timeless pop sound paired with guitar skills well beyond her years have earned her comparisons to music icons such as Prince. Whether writing, producing, or performing live, her talent is met head-on with an undeniable sense of purpose.

Yam Haus invites everyone into the embrace of their neon-hued, dancefloor-tailored alternative pop. The Minneapolis quartet—Lars Pruitt [lead vocals], Jake Felstow [drums], Zach Beinlich [bass], and Seth Blum [guitar]—fuse together intimate songcraft with stadium-size ambition.

They graced bills with the likes of Kacey Musgraves, Tori Kelly, Adam Lambert, Bishop Briggs, Andy Grammar, AWOLNATION, lovelytheband, JOHNNYSWIM, and more. Not to mention, they emerged as hometown heroes by packing the most hallowed venue in Minneapolis: First Avenue. At the same time, their personalities shined during hilarious vlogs as they amassed over 13 million YouTube views.

After independently amassing nearly 170 million total views and streams, playing to sold out crowds, and building a fervent fanbase, they continue to release new music in 2022, including the EP “WHATEVER IT IS”, with producer Mark Needham [The Killers, Imagine Dragons]. “Phoning it in” with Producer Simon Oscroft and Mark Needham is due out June 2022.

NBC’s “American Song Contest” announces the 56 artists from across the country competing for the best hit song. YAM HAUS TO REPRESENT MINNESOTA. NBC and Atlantic Records announce exclusive partnership to release the songs featured on the show. The Yam Haus track “Ready to Go” is one of the front runners for streams, nearing a half a million streams. All-Live Music Competition Series is Hosted by Snoop Dogg and Kelly Clarkson.

Yam Haus hit it the road on their first headlining run mid-May 2022.

Rubblebucket

“I’ve been coming a thousand years / you could call me the endless fuck,” goes the memorable opening line of Rubblebucket’s Earth Worship, a groove-forward, joyously layered collection of songs which work to dissolve the imaginary lines between the natural world and its human inhabitants. The prolific group’s newest record, it’s an album with renewed shimmer, showcasing Rubblebucket’s intricately sparkling beats, hushed-yet-hooky vocals, and irresistible melodic complexity—a celebration of togetherness, environmental curiosity, and the pleasure in doing what you love.

Kalmia Traver and Alex Toth, the group’s front persons, co-writers and co-producers, first began a friendship as jazz students at the University of Vermont. Soon after, they formed Rubblebucket, using the project to delve into pop, funk, dance and psychedelia; performances have spanned Bonnaroo to Glastonbury to their self-curated Dream Picnic Festival, and they’ve collaborated with kindred genre-blenders including Arcade Fire and Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears. But before their musical relationship, Traver and Toth initially bonded over another shared passion: the two were part of UVM’s Sustainable Community Development program.

Sustainability is still a part of their lives: Toth communes with nature as part of his morning routine, and Traver is adept at foraging in the band’s adopted home of New York City. Yet songwriting explicitly about environmentalism in Rubblebucket has felt immaterial—besides, the band has shared its beliefs over the years by inviting anti-fracking, reproductive justice, and other organizations to table at their shows. But Traver was interested in writing love songs for and from the natural world, and both were inspired by their parents’ work in ecology and community facilitation, from which they saw a throughline to music’s communal healing. Traver suggested “earth worship” as a lyrical prompt for their sixth record, and with this concept at its core, the duo began writing an album titled after that very theme.

Since their last full length, 2018’s Sun Machine, Rubblebucket’s songwriters have recorded extensively with other projects. Traver, usually a saxophonist, poured dance sensibilities into Kalbells, a rhythmic indie quartet in which she plays keyboards. Toth, who dove into punk catharsis with his band Alexander F, went interior for Tōth, a solo project inspired by Arthur Russell’s serendipitous sparseness. “By doing multiple records on our own and together, you just get better and better at understanding the process,” says Toth. That process includes “song-a-day” workshops, an ecstatic endeavor the band likens to “spiritual upheaval.” Across two week-long sessions in May and November of 2020, the pair wrote 28 new songs, later trading production duties on each others’ compositions. ‘Toth introduced a new musical direction for Earth Worship: disco. He felt restored by a series of Italo disco and ‘80s Detroit parties thrown by activists he’d met at summer protests, simultaneously drawing huge influence from Resmaa Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands. On a parallel plane, Traver was awestruck by NYC DJs Rose Kourtz and Miss Alicia and revisited the whispered delivery of Blondie’s Debbie Harry. She also brought a fomented sense of creative confidence after seeing an exhibition of abstract painter Hilma af Klint.

Rubblebucket recorded a significant portion of Earth Worship at their homes, tracking Juno 60, Yamaha DX7, flugelhorn, trumpet and saxophones—all atop an electric bass and percussion-heavy production template Toth devised to evoke his vision of disco. In March 2021, the group moved to the Catskills’ Spillway Sound alongside their live band: bassist Ryan Dugre, trumpeter and keyboardist Sean Smith, and drummer Jeremy Gustin, who incorporated chopsticks into his playing to produce otherworldly beats. They reunited with beloved engineer Eli Crews (Tune-Yards, Deerhoof), whose keen taste for Russian drum machines and unusual microphones brought multidimensionality to overdubs like timpani and cassette-processed horns. After eight days of studio bliss, it felt difficult to return to reality. “We had so much fun and it was super inspiring, but it was Alex and I back in a pressure cooker,” says Traver. The duo realized they had to unlearn old patterns in their working relationship, and over the next 10 months, they developed a new language for mediation and repairing creative boundaries—which helped them round Earth Worship’s final corner. Mix engineer Claudius Mittendorfer (Parquet Courts, Weezer) brought striking finishing touches to the record, much to the band’s delight. “It’s a cool way to let go,” says Toth. “The music’s not done when Kal and I are done.”

Levity is unmistakable on opening track and lead single “Earth Worship,” on which Traver embodies the timeless lust of our planet’s entanglement with humanity over outer space synths and thundering toms. On “Geometry,” Rubblebucket uses no wave guitars and bursts of saxophones to deliver an impressionistic narrative about being trapped in a painting; “Let’s make geometry,” goes the sunny chorus—a cherished sentiment about the resilience of the collaborators’ friendship. “Cherry Blossom,” an addictively catchy blend of warbling keys, soft horns, and sugared piano, sees Rubblebucket’s singers in octave-stretched unison—one of their most unique vocal collaborations yet, as they attempted to copy each others’ inflections across over fifty takes. “You look exactly like a cherry blossom / life is full of paradoxes,” goes one triumphant verse by Toth; “It melds the object and the subject in a way that takes my breath away,” says Traver.

“Back in the day, Rubblebucket was so confusing for me,” explains Toth. “We’re interested in so many things musically. But to have no set bumpers is torturous.” Both artists agree that their extra-Rubblebucket outlets have allowed them to explore their tastes in a way that leaves them rejuvenated, better prepared for the singular beauty of their collaboration with one another. “The process, to me, is what the album is about. The songs are just an artifact,” Traver effuses. Earth Worship uses vibrant sound and glorious harmony to worship our planet and the people who live on it—in Rubblebucket’s world, those two concepts aren’t so different.

Spaceface

Spaceface (led by Jake Ingalls formerly of the flaming lips) is a self-described “Retro Futurist Dream Rock”. Over the course of eight years, the collective has toured all over the United States, as well as Canada, with stops at international festivals such as SXSW, Desert Daze, Canadian Music Week, Treefort Music Fest, Hangout Music Festival, God Save The Queen City and Distorsion Psych Fest. Always equipped with a state of the art light-show and/or projectors, sometimes accompanied by weirdish stage props and/or gadgets, the ever-evolving American act provides their dedicated following with thrill-inducing D.I.Y. performances that only get crazier as they perfect their experimental craft.

Their latest musical broadcast, Sophomore LP “Anemoia”, is the result of Jake and friends spending several months at Blackwatch Studios in 2019, working with Jarod to write and produce new material. The objective remained the same: to offer an innovative interpretation of psychedelic rock, blending transparent ’70s references with striking modern indie and pop-rock elements. it is a slew of beautiful musical oddities ranging from dancy indie ballads to modern disco anthems. This collection of postmodern dance floor scorchers promises to be sonic stardust to psych aficionados, what intergalactic transmissions are to stargazers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_MIFEvrVeA