I'm not really sure how I missed this when it came out in April. Maybe it's the sheer volume of music. Or maybe I can blame it on Record Store Day.
The Convenience are a two-piece band out of New Orleans, Louisiana. They don't sound anything like the bands we've been slinging out of New Orleans (CPNPC, Twisted Teens, Silver Synthetic). Instead, The Convenience have an angular guitar sound that reminds me of bands like Field Music, Spoon or Parquet Courts.
"Like Cartoon Vampires" was released by Winspear. They have a new digital EP on Bandcamp too.
Daneshevskaya’s Anna Beckerman bolsters fragile art songs with big, resounding arrangements, her voice like a flower nudging up out of a whirlwind. Her last EP Bury Your Horses found drama in lush runs of piano. This time, in opening cut “Big Bird,” a massive wall of guitar rises up behind her musings about outsized feathered creatures.
It’s a nice bit of rock and roll energy in an art that often seems a little precious. Elsewhere Daneshevskaya croons and swoons against tea-dance orchestra sounds strings and piano (played by frequent collaborator Maddy Leshner). “Bougainvillea,” which Beckerman and Leshner co-wrote, drips glamour like a sequin-gowned chanteuse, improbably lavish around the sweet, pure, quiet intimations of the singer.
These songs waver between centuries and styles, shifting as you listen from Weimar cabaret nostalgia to modern baroque pop. “Ice Pigeon,” has a fey, antique lilt to it at the get go, its piano figures curving like flowers pressed between pages. But then the drums kick in, and it arrives, thumping, in the 21st century, though not exactly unambiguous about it.
The exotic-ness is part of the charm, clearly, but on the last cut “Somewhere in the Middle,” Beckerman pushes it aside. The track starts with straight indie guitar strumming and a bounding, pushing bass line. Here Beckerman’s lucid soprano sounds less mannered and more modern. She’s a hot house orchid elsewhere but more of a daisy here.
Beckerman spent some time touring with Black Country, New Road this year, and that band’s Lewis Evans drops by to add some sax to “Bougainvillea” and “Somewhere in the Middle.” It’s hard to imagine this band’s soft, fanciful tunes up against that sharper clatter, but here, by themselves, they blossom beautifully.
It's time for Beginnings, the podcast where writer and performer Andy Beckerman talks to the comedians, writers, filmmakers and musicians he admires about their earliest creative experiences and the numerous ways in which a creative life can unfold.
On today's episode, I talk to musician Amy Oelsner AKA Amy O. Originally from Fayetteville, Arkansas, Amy has been recording and releasing albums since 2004. In 2017, she began releasing albums on Winspear with the wonderful Elastic, which was followed up two years later by Shell and then 2024's brilliant Mirror, Reflect. Alongside her musical career, in 2019 Amy founded Girls Rock Bloomington, a music and mentorship nonprofit for girls, trans and non-binary youth that teaches positive self-esteem and self-expression through many events as well as an annual rock n’ roll summer camp.
(Photo by Anna Powell Denton)
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