NYS Music 202​2

Tag: new album review

  • Ryan Luce Releases New Illuminating Record “Country House”

    Brooklyn Americana artist Ryan Luce has just released his newest illuminating record titled “Country House.” Ryan Luce explores the subtle nuance of everyday life and studies the inner dramas of fathers, sons, and daughters.

    Brooklyn Americana artist Ryan Luce

    This Americana record was written throughout the pandemic where Ryan found love, lost his backing back, and honed his songwriting abilities. “I had to get back to writing, to what I know is the only thing I’m good at. Those songs became Country House,” stated Luce. 

    “Offers a blend of country-western Americana and Pacific Rock à la Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers to paint energetic narratives with lasting visual effect.” 

    -Rhythm & Boots NYC 
    Brooklyn Americana artist Ryan Luce

    Country House is a ten-song collection filled with heartbreaking lyrics and timeless melodies; Luce certainly pulled from classic country to modern day Americana throughout these releases. 

    “Before the pandemic I was pigeonholing myself in the themes I wrote about. I think I used songwriting as a projection on my own feelings of longing and escape and that limited my abilities,” says Luce. “Writing these songs allowed me to throw away the old ghosts and achieve a caliber of songwriting and production I’d been searching for.”

    Unlike Luce’s 2019 debut EP California Gold, a loose collection of songs from hustling the New York scene, Country House is rather an artifact from his life frozen in time. “I always dreamed of making a record where the songs are from a distinct period, as a time capsule, I could dig up in 20 years and look back on someday.”  

    The world had taken a toll throughout the time of the pandemic, but lots of musicians found a muse throughout being stuck inside. “I think a collective forcefield was blocking artists from creating during the early days of the pandemic including myself.” His band had scattered to the wind as the pandemic began and now, stuck in his apartment, recording plans scrapped, he fought off Covid.  

    The album came together out of the motivation that Luce hadn’t written anything in months. “Something switched on, I had to get back on the horse and start writing songs again. I started playing in different keys and the first song I wrote was the title track.” 

    Listen to more of Country House and to check out more of Ryan Luce, click here.

  • New Album from CHRMR Is Confidently Their Own

    When does a band stop being up and coming? When they get signed, when they headline a tour, when they become famous. That’s certainly part of “making it” in the music industry. I would suggest though, that a band stops being up and coming when they understand themselves as artists. That to go from promise to realization happens when you know who you are creatively. CHRMR might still be up and coming in industry terms, but they’re fully established artistically.

    CHRMR’s second full length album, Low in the Glow, is hardcore rock that understands where it comes from and where it would like to go. Up and coming artists often only understand one of the two. They’re either so eager to shatter conventions they misunderstand the fundamentals of their genre or they’re ideas are so indebted to their inspirations they fail to deliver originality. CHRMR uses both the dark, occult conventions of doom rock and their own original songwriting to create an LP that elevates the band from aspiring musicians to creative thinkers.

    On the classic rock guitar led, Rites, CHRMR offers the tropes of devilry and mysticism associated with doom rock. “The priestess calls the demon/ and the shaman does the dance,” they sing about some dark ritual. It’s not real, though. It’s a fantasy, just some wish fulfilment for fans of the genre. Like rappers with money, or singer songwriters with breakups we rarely interrogate ourselves about why they’re present in our music or even care that they are, but we expect them, which means they have value. To run away from these ideas doesn’t “bust” the genre, it mischaracterizes it.

    By incorporating staples of the genre into their album CHRMR allows itself to push up against them as their own voice shines through their songwriting. On the album’s closing track “Grain Ark”, a young boy comes to terms with the solitude of growing up, he’s referred to as a “golden foal”. A deeply poetic line that evokes something fragile but precious, a precocious foal who may become a towering stallion. Its tenderness would be out of place were it not so confidently woven into the rapid guitar riffs and cacophonous energy of the drums on Grain Ark.

    Throughout Low in the Glow CHRMR’s artistic intention keep the album cohesive, propelling the listener from one track to the next. It establishes the band as artistically mature because they don’t ask themselves if a certain lyric, or down tempo rhythm might work, they know it will. And when people use the cliché “find your sound” that’s what they mean.