Now That’s What I Call Hope Fest (Vol. 3)
A musical preview of tracks we love from Hope Fest 2023 artists.
Two-for-one! Mallcops join up with Layzi to craft a pop punk jammer. There’s a love story in the mix, and a misunderstanding that turns on a half-heard phrase. “Loving you is easy”? It might be anything but, though the protagonist doesn’t sound like he’d have it any other way.
The P.A.’s
Straight outta Lowell! You call this “garage rock”? What garage could contain the epic dimensions of our highlighted track “The Glowing One”? It’d have to be one of those 50-car garages that the Kardashians fill with meat freezers to store the bodies of deceased servants. The P.A.’s (that’s a lot of punctuation for three letters!) deliver an action/adventure howler. The energy is very cinematic, like we’re knee-deep in the climactic battle between hero and villain. And shades of Celtic metal? The guitars are loud incantations breeding something new in the universe.
Nectarine Girl
The six-strings are fed through some type of jangly noise filter to give the chord progression an iridescent glow on our highlighted track “Your Picture”. Either that or tin foil has been wrapped around individual strings to give the notes an otherworldly metallic shimmer. You ever tried that? Sounds cool, but it’s sort of a pain to unwrap, so you end up having one weird “tin foil” guitar that sits in the corner collecting dust until the next time you have a hankering to play your “tin foil” song. Strong altpop vibrations from Boston’s Nectarine Girl. Extra points for the vocal polyphony to close out the song.
Cozy Throne
Guitar progressions run like wild horses at the start of our highlighted track “Circle The Drain” by Cozy Throne. But the center of the song is the foregrounded vocal, which drops ciphers with a storyteller’s instinct. It’s an alt rock jam that‘s grown out of singer-songwriter, folky soil. Plug it in for a sound that’s outgrown the coffeehouse and needs a club-sized PA rig to find its true measure. Extra points to Amara for having one name like Madonna or Snoopy.
Tatooine Punk Scene
It’s hard to get past this band’s name, which rocks, and think straight about the music alone. It’s Tatooine Punk Scene! So does that mean we’re going to hear a punk band playing punk music? Or is it a humorous bait-and-switch? Listen to our highlighted track “Appetite” and decide for yourself. This definitely isn’t VFW-Hall-in-Albany-New-York-in-1987-style punk, but it’s got some bite. Watch out for big sweeping sounds, these guitar progressions stretch for miles, laying out a long road of pop tarmac for a tense meditation on appetite oppression.