Webcuts Music

For those of you who resided in Sydney, Australia in the Summer of 1992/93, Evan Dando‘s presence was a ubiquitous one. On a night off in Sydney, Dando recorded a set of songs in his Bondi hotel room featuring tracks that would later appear on Come On Feel The Lemonheads, along with covers of Love Positions and Smudge songs. Having recently unearthed the cassette, Dando deemed it worthy of release and the album, Hotel Sessions, is due out on January 9, 2012.

HTRK have always been a difficult band to love. Once you got used to their decaying minimalism and the anonymity that pervaded their artwork, you realised they weren’t a band seeking attention, merely like-minded souls to tumble down their rabbit hole. They weren’t looking for you, you were looking for them. They ply romance as being one of their tenets, but their music is neither romantic nor seductive. More confessions of bitterness and jealousy from a self-loathing voyeur unable to look away from what attracts them, or the last words of a dying emotion.

From her isolated upbringing in rural Wisconsin, comined with a passion for opera, philosophy and industrial music, Nika Rosa Danilova aka Zola Jesus has created a name for herself as being a successor to the great Diamanda Galas and Lisa Gerrard with her haunting, otherworldly vocal style. Over the past three years Danilova has reached the point in her career where she is no longer an experimental, teenage noise-maker but an internationally celebrated electro-pop artist. Her third album Conatus is her most accomplished work to date, pushing beyond the dark melodrama of Stridulum II toward something that is emotionally breathtaking.

Folk bands are slowly going the way of the emo bands — cookie-cutter, predictable, uninspired, and inevitably becoming a parody of themselves because music is a business and the market dictates that consumers will always want more of what’s popular. The Beggar Folk fall nicely into the afore-mentioned folk music genre, however their music doesn’t seem to follow suit with the folk status quo. These are ballads and hymns, carved from trees and molded from soil. This music demands your attention and effortlessly passes any authenticity tests. It conjures up what real Americana and country music should conjure.