Band of Skulls - Love Is All You Love - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Reinecke / Widaszek / Tomaszewski - Reinecke Chamber Music for Clarinet / Horn and Piano [COMPACT DISCS] date 10/14/2016

Naked Skull is the project of Los Angeles vocalist/guitarist Kirk Nebel, who is a former member of the Portland band 17 Reasons Why, and current member of the Hollywood based alt-rock band Radius, which has had numerous songs licensed for use in network television shows, commercials (Victoria's Secret) and movies on ABC, CBS, and syndicated programs (Prince William, AFP). After spending the majority of his musical career as a lead/rhythm guitarist and backing vocalist, Kirk spent a good portion of 2002 involved in the process of writing and recording the tracks for this record, for which he performs all vocal and guitar parts (with the exception of one song). Produced by Portland native Chris Nolan, the majority of the record has a definite acoustic indie-rock sound, with several of the tracks veering into a heavier layered power-pop sound. Melodic, tight song arrangements predominate, and Kirk's breathy vocal qualities are reminiscent of artists such as Elliott Smith and Bob Mould - combined with the textured guitar sounds of bands such as Coldplay, Vertical Horizon, and Travis. Bittersweet lyrics echo the sting of lost relationships â? yet the music has an upbeat and resolved sound that serves as an apt counter-balance to the melancholy words.

Stimulation is easy to come by these days. Streaming platforms and social media offer us endless fleeting moments of diversion that keep what we call the Inchpleasure zonesInch of our brains lit up morning till night. But for such a supposedly hedonistic time, real pleasure-the kind that feeds our soul rather than draining it, that makes us feel good instead of just distracting us from the fact that we feel bad-is in shockingly short supply. The second LP by Brattleboro, Vermont's Thus Love is full of that kind of nourishing euphoria. It swoons, shakes, and swaggers with a combination of grit and sensuality that's been hard to locate in music lately. It fills your brain with barbed melodic hooks that once they sink in don't budge. It punches at the clouds and makes you want to do the same. It's called, fittingly, All Pleasure.The album came out of a period of dizzying growth and transformation for the group. When they began work on it, vocalist/guitarist Echo Mars (they/them) and drummer Louie Racine (he/they) were still reeling from the runaway success of their 2022 debut full-length, Memorial-a set of rich, elegant post-punk that brought praise from The FADER, the NME, and the Guardian, plus a leap from quiet Brattleboro to stages across the US and UK-along with processing the departure of founding bassist Nathaniel van Osdol. Meanwhile, new bassist Ally Juleen (she/they) and guitarist/keyboardist Shane Blank (he/him), longtime musical partners, had uprooted their lives to relocate to small-town Vermont and join a band that was a month away from recording the follow-up to a cultishly adored album.InchWe were all coming together to make this new thing and take a new step,Inch Mars says. InchWe've all been making music for a while, and we've all been confronted with aspects of it that are grueling and not pleasurable.Inch When the group convened in a barn in the woods