Monthly Roundup: July 2018

August 03, 2018

Monthly Roundup: July 2018

Highlights of the highlights:

This was definitely the month of bands either returning from a long hiatus or returning to form. A month of fine returns.

First up! Dirty Projectors came back with a nice break from their horrid foray into "weirdo R&B" and brought back some light hearted songwriting with some fairly tropical sounds. Consider this the lighter brighter counterpart to the last self titled album.

Liars came back to make a brutal soundtrack for the movie "1/1". I havent seen the movie but I can only imagine it must be pretty insane to have this as the soundtrack. Very different than anything the Liars have ever done before. Much more electronic than most of their output so far.

Pram came back after an 11 year absence and slid right back to what they've been doing excellently for years. More of the jazzy exotica weirdness we are used to. Think of Stereolab on acid dripping onto your brain and earlobs and you get kind of a good idea of what to expect.

One half of the classic proto indie rock band the Dbs(Peter Holsapple) returned to give us an excellent slice of power pop. Nothing too deep on this one, just good hooks and poppy melodies.

Now onto the new stuff:

Simon Love gave us a near perfect slice of poppy singer songwriter tunes with his new album.

Ovlov gave us a crushing post rock and shoegaze influenced indie rock band. Crank this one to get the full effect of the guitar onslaught.

Finally, Tony Molina came back with another brief slice of power pop, this time he kind of brings a sort of renaissance era music sound to the tunes.