Despite taking their name from a Native American word meaning “Old Town” and calling their most recent record “Old Ways,” this is not a band that is facing backwards or hewing closely to traditional lines. Or at least not just one traditional line; their tunes are a rich stew of country, blues, and funk lightly spiced with shoegaze, the kind of thing that will warm you up and stick to your ribs at the same time.

These are three of my favorite songs from the record:

Old Brown Shoes: Because Meet me down at the Greyhound station / What have you got left to lose resonates in weird ways right now, mainly because I’ve spent a lot of time on the bus these last couple of months. Sometimes it’s been awful; other times it’s been shared hash browns and shared stories in the chilly light of dawn.
 

 
Riding With the Devil: I don’t ramble as much as I used to, but I’d still sing this song around a campfire, while toasting marshmellows for s’mores.
 

 
Minor Blues IV: It was a tie between this one and I’ll Be Damned; I finally picked this one to share to highlight the way they weave shoegaze shimmer and drone between funk bounce in deft and interesting ways.
 

 
And in conclusion, here are some pictures of them from a recent show at the Bowery Electric, in New York:
 

 

 

 

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Big Lonely are from Burlington, Ontario, Canada, and Stories With Recurring Characters is their first EP. They start out with a sweet indie pop-rock groove and then go careering off the rails in the best way possible right in the middle of a song, and it only gets better from there.

Here is the video for Poseidon, in which there are dead fish and the sea god rescues someone while wearing what I think might be a Burger King crown:
 

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If you watch it with the sound off it still makes perfect sense as a movie, which makes it one of my very favorite kinds of music videos.

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There are four songs on the EP, and it was hard to choose two to share because they are all just delicious.

I picked the first one, the title track, because it one has one of the best song-as-marriage-proposal-lyrics I’ve ever heard: Stay with me / just for one life / you can bring all of your books / and dress all in white.
 

 
And this one because it is a strange beautiful love story:
 

 

He’s headed out on tour next Monday; be sure to check his listings and get out to see him if he’s playing near you!
 

The post Two Songs from: Lance Whalen appeared first on Now This Sound Is Brave.

Nights & Weekends, the new record from El Sportivo & the Blooz, is aptly named; this could be music for the after-hours, for unwinding and spinning down. Or it could be company for the dark hours of the third shift. It definitely is high-quality smooth country funk – sippin’ whisky for the soul, if you will.
 

 

The songs have a sneaky hypnotic quality. Sneaky in the sense that days may pass between the time you listen to a song and the time you find yourself singing it to yourself while doing the dishes; hypnotic in the sense that it is easy to become wholly absorbed by the bright ribbon of pedal steel twining through the crashing guitars, and forget all about the dishes.
 

 
That’s okay, though, the dishes can wait, because it’s time to grab your sweetie and slow dance around the kitchen.
 

 
Other notes: El Sportivo (Daron Hollowell, co-founder of Black Iris and White Iris) is actually a man with two bands: The Blooz, on the West Coast, and the Dirty Palms, on the East. They play the same songs, though, and should either name appear in your concert listings this year, get out and see them. I promise it will be refreshing.
 

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The signs are provided by Stephen Torrence and friends; if you’d like a closer look at the signs, you can have that here:
 

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1) Our submission guidelines have been revised.

2) The reader survey: still happening. 10 questions which should not take more than 10 minutes of your time. Stand up and be counted and give us your unvarnished opinion!

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The survey is our attempt to get to know y’all a little bit better, partially because we’re curious, and partially because we do sometimes get asked who our audience is, and it would be useful to have some hard data to back up our suppositions.

There are also a few questions about mechanics – the hows, whys and wheres of keeping up with the blog – that are mainly there because I’m curious about people use organizational tools, like tags, and also how they interact with information sources in the context of social media. So far very few people navigate NTSIB with the tags, and the more people are subscribed to the NTSIB Twitter feed than any other of our social media presences.

It’s also a chance for you to tell us about things you like, and maybe would like to see more of, and things you don’t care for, and perhaps would like to never see again. For example, so far the “A Good Read . . .” series is super popular and the Video Challenges have gotten very little love.

In summary, to paraphrase the late Ed Koch: How we doin’?

A final word about numbers: My response goal for this survey is 140 people, or slightly less than 20% of our total Twitter subscriber base. (Which is now at a mind-boggling 770 people. Even allowing for certain percentages of bots/dead accounts, that’s still a lot of people. Enough to fill a small club!) So far we have less than 20 responses. Please stand up and be counted and dispense your unvarnished opinions!

The post One More Time With Feeling: The NTSIB Reader Survey appeared first on Now This Sound Is Brave.

This is I’ll Make It Worth Your While, and, darlings, THEY WILL. Click that button, you won’t regret it:
 

 
This is Seventeen, which takes a minute to get into gear but when it does it takes off like bounce and swagger-fueled rocket:
 

 

The post Two Songs From: Night Engine appeared first on Now This Sound Is Brave.

Their music is an effervescent combination of languages – English, Spanish and Portuguese – and styles, including Argentinian folk, Brazilian tropicalia, Cumbia (big brass band sound) and rock and roll.

Sea Monster is their second record, and it is a lush, expansive collection of tunes. It’s hard to pick particular favorites because I’m really fond of the whole thing, but highlights include Por la Luna, Darkest Hours and Es Dificil.

Here they are with their first single, Songs I Used to Love:

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