US indie Archives - Backseat Mafia

Album review: Beirut – ‘Artifacts’: a masterful and beautiful voyage through Zach Condon’s early years in EPs, Bs and offcuts

MISSION CREEP. One of those pseudo-economic terms that make the decent among us go “eeep”, defined in dictionary terms as “a gradual shift in objectives, often resulting in an unplanned…

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See: Alyssa Gengos shapes up for her 2022 album as a pretty awesome ‘Cheerleader Of The Universe’

LOS ANGELINO bedroom pop genius Alyssa Gengos is basically someone to completely watch in 2022. We’ve already nailed our colours to that mast on the back of her last single,…

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Album review: Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy & Bill Callahan – ‘Blind Date Party’: a rolling thunder lockdown revue of the Drag City stable, cast in cover versions

NOTHING at all, really. That, for a lifer musician with new songs in the back pocket, older ones to take out and share with fans on the road across the…

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See: Momma sign for Lucky Number and share the dulcet fuzz-pop of ‘Medicine’

THEY’RE creating more than a bit of a buzz in their adopted New York are Momma, the fuzz-pop collective of singer-guitarists Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten, bassist Kobayashi Ritch, and…

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See: Alyssa Gengos drops the lighter-than-air, bedroom pop caress of ‘Gothenburg English’ – the world may well already be at her feet

SHE’S already being touted in certain quarters of the music press as the first big thing of 2022. which seems quite an epithet to carry given we’re not even there…

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See: Empath’s ‘Diamond Eyelids’ is a dose of squally, knockabout, lo-fi fun

FRESH from a whole buncha dates criss-crossing the States in the company of Modest Mouse, Philadelphia’s cutely noisy foursome Empath have got all the feels extended for a new album.…

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See: Duquette Johnston flicks a dark period the Vs and forges forward with the six-string Southern indie-boogie of ‘Year To Run’

DUQUETTE JOHNSTON is a name that, if you’re a deep connoisseur of the US indie scene you’ll recall in association with one of those band whose star lit, arced, sputtered…

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See: Bill Callahan & Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – ‘Kidnapped By Neptune’ (feat. Hamerkop): a double album of collaborative covers follows from the pair

NONE gigs; none proper studio time; none nothing, except, perhaps, as Big Black once memorably put it, to “sit around home, stare at the walls / Stare at the walls…

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See: With their album out today, Cali shoegazers The Acharis announce a French and UK tour; see the video for the whispery fuzz gem, ‘False Positive’

HAILING from California’s Bay Area, and more specifically Oakland for the precision buffs amongst you, The Acharis may just have made one of the darker shoegaze gems of the year…

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See: Benjamin Lazar Davis drops the future indie-R’n’B gem ‘Snow Angels’

MY THOUGH, he’s quite the singular talent, Benjamin Lazar Davis, isn’t he? The multi-instrumentalist and composer (look, these tunes are so much more than plain written), whose day job sees…

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