Browsing Tag

Kings of Leon

Fauna recollects on disillusionment in pre-COVID times in their alt-indie-rock anthem Didn’t Wanna.

Fauna

With so many big names springing out of the Manchester music scene, breaking alt-indie-rock artist Fauna have some stiff competition but their latest single, Didn’t Wanna, establishes them as an artist worth a spot on your radar and in your gig diary.

Didn’t Wanna was written during lockdown while the fourpiece recollected on those nights out that aren’t worth the Uber fare because the minute you find yourself in a crowded room, there is no place you would rather be but home. Despite the relatable disillusionment, Fauna succeeded in creating a fervent earworm out of Didn’t Wanna. Every introvert will want it on their feel-good playlists.

With sonic angular riffs sweeping through the soundscape that was constructed through influence from Kings of Leon, Peace and Foals along with instrumental stylings of 70s rock and 60s psych-pop, Fauna’s sound in their fourth single hit the airwaves as an endlessly distinctive one.

Instead of crawling out of a mould cast by Manchester icons, Fauna’s constraint-less sound breathes an air of ingenuity into Manchester’s music scene, often stifled by Joy Division, The Fall and the Smiths assimilators. If you needed any additional reason to love the pioneers, they also brewed their own Didn’t Wanna IPA to coincide with the release.

Didn’t Wanna hit the airwaves on May 21st; you can hear it for yourselves via SoundCloud and Spotify.

Connect with Fauna via Instagram and Facebook

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Did I Hear Dare? – timeless alt-rock with ‘I Can Feel (You And I)’

Hailing from Columbus, Ohio, Did I Hear Dare? smash out that brand of mid-Western alt-rock that seems timeless and at the same time bang up to date. ‘I Can Feel (You and I)’ could just as easily be from 2001 as the first month of 2021, and that’s no bad thing at all. Think Killers, Kings of Leon, and maybe a little Arcade Fire for good measure. There’s a definite Brandon Flowers touch to the vocal, a cracker of a bouncy lead guitar line, and a perfect pop-indie-rock lift coming into the chorus, itself an absolute earworm of a radio-friendly-unit-shifter.

The follow-up to their 2020 EP ‘The Ghost Stories’, ‘I Can Feel (You And I)’ is a perfect prelude to 2021 for Did I Hear Dare?.

You can check it out on Spotify now, and follow on Facebook.

Review by Alex Holmes

Dream-Rap? Is That Even A Thing?

Even with the amount of new music being made every day, with sheer weight of collective imaginations, the genre splicing experiments, the fusing and fusion of styles Garrison Carver seems to be on to something new here. Yes, there is a trippy trap beat, a cool R&B vibe and a rap delivery but that is then cocooned in something totally unexpected. Around these more expected elements he wraps a dream-pop haze, chilled psychedelia and electronic washes.

It’s confusing, but experience tells us that is a good thing, expectations are made to be subverted, rules are made to be broken and new musical horizons are their to be explored and DD does all of those things and more. Blissed out hip-hop? Ethereal R&B? Dream-rap? Are those even a thing? The fact that you have to invent whole new genres to put the music in is an indication of just how original this music is and how singular and lateral Garrison Carver’s thinking is.