Thu, 03/08/2018 - 6:39 pm

Plutinos, the project of Denver-based Nate Barnes, has released a new track, "Falling Away"

The tranquility of the guitar jangles and nonchalant vocals remind aesthetically of The Clientele, though with a more drawing dream-pop touch in the guitar reverb emerging around the two-minute mark.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Plutinos is the solo effort of Nate Barnes, formerly of the band Rose Hill Drive and drummer for artists such as Mary Chapin Carpenter and Ryan Bingham. After years spent making records and touring with other artists - in addition to writing for brands like HBO, Ford, and Target - Nate decided to venture into uncharted waters and to dive deep into writing his own meaningful songs and creating the sound and music he always wanted to hear and play. The result is equal parts dreamy and heavy with emphasis on driving rhythms and vibey, melodic guitars and vocals.

"Despite having been making records and touring internationally for over 15 years, this is my first release of my own material.  Most of my musical career was spent as drummer in the rock band Rose Hill Drive. We put out four studio albums and toured year round from 2002-2010, headlining shows and opening for acts such as The Who, Van Halen, Aerosmith, Stone Temple Pilots, Jane’s Addiction, The Black Crowes, and many others. Around 2012 I branched out on my own into freelance work and shortly after started playing with Oscar and Grammy Award winner Ryan Bingham. I drummed on his latest studio release “Fear And Saturday Night” as well as his live album “Ryan Bingham Live”, and co-wrote the score for the movie “A Country Called Home” with him and my former bandmate Daniel Sproul.

After that I transitioned over to playing with multiple Grammy winner Mary Chapin Carpenter, and have been her touring drummer for a couple years now.

I’m also a composer for TV, radio, and film, and have written a catalog that has secured placements with HBO, Ford, Facebook, Target, Great Clips, and others. Despite all of my projects I had going on I was still feeling creatively unsatisfied and felt an irresistible need to overcome some of my own personal insecurities and to buckle down and record and release an EP of my own music. I decided to venture into uncharted waters and dive in headfirst into writing my own meaningful songs and creating the music I’d always wanted to play and hear. The result is Plutinos and it was written, performed, and recorded entirely on my own at my home studio outside Denver, CO between October and December of 2017."

Sun, 04/15/2018 - 7:08 pm

The Giant Peach is an indie-art rock band from Middlebury VT. Their music captures a bitter-sweetness wrestled into songs late at night. United from disparate backgrounds in folk, blues, and jazz, the members of The Giant Peach came together to render these tales of stubborn love, mistakes, and repeated carelessness with a cutting honesty and an unexpected joy. Their debut record, Pulling Teeth, is due out on 4/21.

Pulling Teeth came about as easily as the title might imply. These songs were written over the course of a tumultuous and ultimately terminal romance, captured moments of the un-tempered excitement of first love – and its eventual loss. In a soft-spoken earnestness that cuts through swelling horn lines and crackling guitars, Pulling Teeth tells of the inevitable loss of innocence that accompanies lost love.

"It's a collection of songs that I wrote over the course of my first relationship and at its end," explains songwriter and frontman Harrison Wood Hsiang. "There's a lot of doubt in these songs -- questioning your past wants and actions, questioning your beliefs as your overturn them one by one by letting people down and being let down, and ultimately questioning the kind of person that you are."

"My best friend Max Shashoua and I came together to give these songs a final form. You know the gist of this already -- we recorded the whole thing in my dorm room with an SM57, a fact we're proud of, especially given how often people praise the quality of the recording these days. Maybe a fun story; we actually recorded the whole thing twice. The first time it just wasn't working. Max and I were still figuring out the details of the arrangements and the shape of the record as a whole, and as that became clearer we realized that we needed to do it properly and do it over again. So over the course of a weekend, we re-recorded the entire record (save "Coats," which we tracked live at Meadowlark Studios)."

"My longtime songwriting hero, Jasper Sloan Yip, lends his vocals to the first track, "Want." He and I connected after I covered one of his songs and he's acted as a real friend and mentor to me ever since. The first show Max and I played together, pre-Peach, was acting as Jasper's back-up band.