Noele Flower’s Debut EP “Wait For Me” is a Stunning Retrospective
image: Luca Pearl Khosrova Noele Flowers’s debut EP, “Wait For Me” is a journey, a diary, a biopic – a testament to letting go of regrets and holding onto hope, and ultimately? A damn good listen. Ranging from optimistic, bright surf pop, to heavy-hit ballads and soft forest-folk, Flowers has taken inspiration from the path […]
Imagist Poetry & “Tik Tik Tik” by Airin Daniella
Sometimes all a song needs is a beautiful voice, simple lyrics, & an easy arrangement on acoustic guitar. In fact: if songwriters and singers are the gardeners of the musical land, I’d say sometimes we get over-involved in the way we nurture the seed of a melody – we talk to each other about what […]
New Year’s Blues & HANRORO’s “The last stop of our pain”
HANRORO’s (한로로) “The last stop of our pain” is a love letter with many lovers. It’s a love letter to herself, to someone lost, to the New Year, the many who are just struggling to make it to the next, and even to Time itself. I know – it’s a big claim. But this is […]
Sayonora Ponytail’s “Morning Sun” & Transformative Self-Expression
Sayonora Ponytail’s (さよならポニーテール) ninth album All Night Thing (夜の出来事) is funky citypop with a drop of melancholy, solemnity, and slowness. Which is saying a lot about the maturity of their sound considering the band has been nearly nonstop pop for over a decade now. In particular, the finale song, “Morning Sun” (朝日のように君は) has significant depth […]
Miru Song’s “You’re Doing Great” Has a Message We All Need to Hear
If any song could recreate the feeling of a gold star sticker on your kindergarten homework, Miru Song’s song (yea, a bit of a tongue-twister) “You’re Doing Great” might just be it. With his home in South Korea, but his heart in the UK, Miru Song’s travel between the two inspires his English discography. This […]
Western Kite’s “I LOVE YOU” Ascends Blue Skies
Let’s just get it out of the way: Western Kite is my favorite find of the past year. A solo project of Park Seo-yeon, Western Kite (웨스턴 카잇) is her main project alongside her feature alias of “Kite Park”. Born in 1992, she debuted in 2017, taking off in the Hongdae indie scene in Seoul, […]
Mirabelle Skipworth’s “The Narrator” & Reverberating Voices
You never really know the difference between vanilla ice cream and vanilla bean ice cream till you have it. One is bright, fresh, icy and sharp, while the other creamy, luscious, aromatic. But it’s all kinda made-up: you just know. So how do I describe a voice, a sound, that is vanilla – not plain […]
Colin Parker’s “With the Wind” & Embracing Peace
Colin Parker’s latest single, “With the Wind” makes me nostalgic. Some of the harmonies take me back to my youth, where I was First Aid Kit, Fleet Foxes-obsessed kid, discovering Bon Iver for the first time on La Blogotheque harmonizing in the foyer of a Paris apartment building. In fact: confession. My older sister has […]
Ahn Heesu’s “Always With You” & the Power of Karaoke
South Korean singer-songwriter Ahn Heesu (안희수)’s new single “Always With You” is a soft pop rock ballad of hope for love lasting, and disbelief for having found it in the first place. At the start of the song, he confesses to feeling like he’s in a movie, wondering how love could be real in his […]
Parkland’s “Trainwreck” is the Perfect Amalgamation
Human memory is a funny thing. Every New Year I go in positive. Then every January I remember how horribly cold, dark, and depressing those days can be, and how a task list of a million new ways to change my life is unsustainable. Next year, though? I’ll do it again. You could say this […]
