Music spotlight: Jackie Simons & Harvey Bruce, The Indigo Echoes, Ho99o9, JayWood
Music that’s new, or new to us, or maybe should be new to you.
By the Chilltown Blues
In order of most newly released, let’s look at four musical projects.
Jackie Simons (JC’s own) and Harvey Bruce’s new EP, “finally,” dropped this very week.
We just listened to it a few times so far, but we liked the way this five-track project builds, starting off strong with “Right Here With You” and culminating in the collective highlight, for us, that is the last three tracks.
It’s rock in the mode of jangly, effervescent pop
You can hear “finally” on YouTube Music and Spotify. Find Simons on Instagram @jackiegsimons.
The Indigo Echoes dropped a new single on Friday, May 15, “losing you.” The song from the Swedish alt-rocker also features alt‑folk vocalist Nelleke on the chorus, and comes with a sound and wistful vibe that evokes Big Head Todd and the Monsters as well as The Church (“Under the Milky Way,” specifically).
It’s Americana in that specific music mold, evoking a kind of spiritual wandering through wide-open vistas and looking for something to anchor to.
“Losing you” builds on the release of album “How’s Everything?” in 2024, a very strong album where it felt clear to us the Indigo Echoes’ singing informs the music’s emotional keys as much as the instruments.
What Indigo Echoes does, he does very well, and “losing you” precedes a new album.
Check out The Indigo Echoes’ linktree — https://linktr.ee/theindigoechoes — for everywhere the song, with its YouTube video embedded below, has dropped.
There’s Americana as a musical genre, and there Americana conceptually and thinking about that gives us an opportunity to some music we’ve been thinking about in the latter context.
Ho9909 (pronounced “horror”) is a punk duo founded in Newark who released their latest album, “Tomorrow We Escape” in September.
“Tomorrow We Escape” feels like it was produced hoping to tread some things what passes most popularly for counterculture shies away from. There’s no soft approaches to what the album calls out, including a need for evolution that’s often inherently challenging, while also evoking horror tropes and the escapism of a cloak of fearlessness.
Ho99o9 makes punk rap and music that metal fans would appreciate, with punk-rap challenging the mold for both punk and metal. That’s worth checking out.
They’re far from an unsung band, having garnered the spotlight several times from what remain of (big industry-adjacent) indie music’s biggest remaining platforms for coverage. But that’s been the state of the world for a while now; where is there an interesting artist that keeps producing work who’s not doing so in a niche? One fertile or not so fertile.
Some of “Tomorrow We Escape” may not be the go-to cup of tea for someone who isn’t a fan of hardcore hip-hop, but it’s a well-crafted album full of headbangers and here and there is Americana in the Gil Scott-Heron mode … which brings us to ….
Along with songs from Dontique and CF201 on their respective albums, JayWood created some of the most engaging hip-hop songs/music we heard last year on “Leo Negro.”
JayWood’s music is in the alternative vein of rhythm and blues (somewhat in the Stevie Wonder mold, which is also rock, basically) as well as the aforementioned hip-hop.
No stranger to the alt-spotlight, JayWood is still an easy artist to not know about.
So let’s just look back to one of his earlier songs on 2022 album, “Slingshot.” That song is “Just Sayin,” and it begins:
“Just because you grew up in a dream don’t mean no harm, no foul. People don’t go out of their way to see the world on fire.”
With those two lines, our interpretation is that he’s speaking to two groups. People who get to live in what is relatively speaking a dream, and those who don’t — because, despots aside, who dreams of the world being on fire?
JayWood grew up in Canada, in the kind of pastoral place associated with renewal and peace and well-being. The kind of place many people dream of living in.
The chorus for this song proposes putting houses by the river of such a place, even if someone if broke. “Even if they don’t take a stand.”
It’s a song that tries to ground this housing proposal as a key to staying in the now as one tries to heal from the past and push on into a future that … well, no, “Just Sayin” is about knowing about the world’s challenges (being a “bluesologist,” as Scott-Heron called himself) and wishing a hell of a lot more people have a chance at grounding themselves in the moment through a house by the river than do; or, that’s what we’d say it’s about.
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