New Tunes 3.3.2023

Hello music lovers! 🎵

A new dose of #newtunes suggestions for the weekend is upon you! Eight new music suggestions to brighten up your weekend!
Well-known and lesser-known musicians are trying to win minutes of your attention.
Every stream counts in the fight for the throne!

So, take a few minutes of your precious time to listen. It costs you nothing.
But if you don't like it, feel free to skip it.

Music4life!

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Cuco - Best Disaster

California singer-songwriter Omar Banos, who has been called Cuco since childhood, a new name for me, has a very unique musical path. He debuted at the age of 17 with the "Heavy Trip" EP (which you can still download for free from Bandcamp). As a multi-instrumentalist playing guitar, trumpet, keyboards, bass, and drums, in short all instruments for the band, he has played a lot of things, from jazz, Spanglish hip-hop, and Latin rock.
Well, when he met Tame Impala and Ariel Pink, it was (in his own words) clear to him what direction his work would take.
So far, he's recorded over 200 million streams on Spotify and over 76 million views on YT, and these numbers are surely only going to increase with his new album "Fantasy Gateway". Recommended.

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Rich Ruth - Taken Back

Rich Ruth, or Michael Ruth, is a musician from Nashville, USA, who works with ambient and meditative music. He has already attracted public attention with his first album "Calming Signals" in 2019.
His ambitions were of course bigger after that but were stopped by the coronal crisis. Well, about half a year ago he released the album "I survived, It's over", on which he recorded and produced his own music at home during the pandemic. The rest of the band played their spots at their own locations.
Mostly, as the album's name suggests, the theme is self-questioning in the form of a psychedelic jazz fusion journey that insulates us from the madness of modern society as a protective layer.
I can only welcome this process of self-healing and sharing with the rest of the world in the form of ambient sounds and meditations.
The song Taken Back is an improvisation, recorded live, from different locations at the same time.

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Proto Tip - Svet se menja

Proto Tip is a younger Serbian rock band from Belgrade, which, after listening to their previous releases, could be categorized as a traditionally noisy guitar band from an urban Balkan environment.
Well, the latest album, actually the debut "S ivice sanjanja" (In English: "From the Edge of Dreams"), shows us a slightly different, more sophisticated image. The band has done probably the most radical thing a garage band can do: it has swapped screaming for singing. Btw: here's my recording from last year.

The song "Svet se menja" (In English: "The World is Changing") is the official single from the album. The excellent production, the slightly less guitar sound, and the focus on the vocals touch the listener, no matter which generation he or she belongs to. If you ask me, that is already a sign of quality music.

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Mette Henriette - I villvind

Mette Henriette is a Norwegian saxophonist, composer and improviser. Her new album is called "Drifting". The music is based on sound and the philosophy of free improvisation with a strong European undertone. I'm thinking here in particular of the undercurrents of experimentalism, the proliferation of instrumentation, familiarity, and form as a "white" counterbalance to African-American spiritualism, traditional identity, and the emancipatory role of music.
The aggressive, fast passages of the saxophone are replaced by long, quiet, and slow, even meditative variations and the expression from the jazz tradition moves much closer to the milieu of contemporary composed music.

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BRUXA MARIA - God Gun Scruples

The London quartet Bruxa Maria is in its seventh year, but they are a new name for me. In these years on the music scene, they have produced two albums and a few short and compilation releases.
At the end of January, their latest album, their third, "Build Yourself A Shrine And Pray", was released. They call their style noise punk. With guitar distortion in every song, an industrial sound, and caustic vocal outbursts from singer and guitarist Gill Dread, it's more than not a packed metal rock, a noisy collage of riffs, drum robbery, and at times synth.

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Let 3 - Mama ŠČ!

The frenzy that gripped the whole of Croatia with their Eurovision entry "Mama ŠČ" continues to spread. Let 3 is a controversial Croatian rock band from Rijeka, very close to me, and I know them personally because they have performed several times in the club where I record performances. Recently, since Croatia is in the EU, they have started to expose more and more the absurdities of the environment they live in, like Dubioza Kolektiv from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their performances are usually in the form of cabaret and are very original. I mean, you have to have a good understanding of the background of what they are singing about.
Well, to cut a long story short, the song is getting more and more views, it is a direct criticism of war and dictatorship, as well as the incompetence of a Europe gone mad, wrapped in rock opera and anti-war parody. The song and the whole show are full of sublime visual messages, and musically it's almost like a kind of bouncy song. Here's the official remix, which I'm sure will take them to even greater heights than the original video and maybe even make them famous.

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Lil Yachty - Running out of time

Miles Parks McCollum, the American rapper, songwriter, and composer known as Lil Yachty, has released five albums to date, first becoming known online in 2015, and only later in the mainstream media.
This year he released his sixth album "Let's Start Here", from which this track is taken. A fusion of 80s funk, rap, orchestral music, and the ubiquitous psychedelia.
The new album is a kind of conceptual reconciliation of different generations, those whose starting point is 'The Beatles and Stones', and those whose starting point is Minecraft. I was also amused by one listener's comment:

Whoever gave this guy psychedelics needs to give him more 😁

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Gruff Rhys - I Want My Old Life Back

And finally, one soundtrack, for a change. Gruffudd Maredudd Bowen Rhys, or Gruff Rhys for short, is a Welsh musician, composer, and director. He has released ten albums to date, his latest project being a double album of music for the film "The Almond and the Seahorse", based on the screenplay of Kaita O'Reilly's play of the same name.
It's the story of an archaeologist and an architect and their struggle to re-imagine their future after traumatic head injuries to their partners separating them from the people they love.
The soundtrack complements the film: the drama of the subject and the interpersonal relationships are balanced by the movie's wry humor and lightness, which is reflected in the different tracks and styles of music and Gruff Rhys' compositions.