#MusicMonday Review - October 2024

[osornios]

#MusicMonday is the hashtag I've been using for quite a while to share music recommendations from up-and-coming artists. Always fresh, and always different, trying to look for trends before they become one. You can check September's review for more music.

Hello darkness, my old friend. In this issue, we explore how heartbreaks are a source of inspiration, in multiple genres, for artists from all over the world. Give them a listen, with a word from the artists themselves.
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For Closure – Hazy Mourning

How I was looking forward to meeting our son on that day
Everything seemed so right, but was I the only thing wrong
Zero to fifty has come and now that I'm gone evening has come

And was I just a dream, a thoughtless memory

Know that I loved you with all that I was
I wanted it to be me and you and our son

We begin this month with a hard hitting Punk Rock track, coming from Los Angeles, CA. The subject: a big heartbreak, and its aftermath at home with an unfulfilled dream. Vocalist Gizz explains:

"The song is personal to me from a past relationship with someone I thought would be 'the one'. Well, that didn't happen!

It's a story about feeling a connection with someone and wanting to do things you've never felt like doing before. For me having no children or ever wanting any then meeting a woman who made me like I was finally ready to be a father only to lose her like the rest of the women in my lifetime and once again losing that trust in another someone special.

All in all, I still do miss this woman, but I now know it'll never work again."

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Heat Wrays – Heat Ring

I awoke from a dream in which I was trying to find my way back
A sightless kid accosted me with urgent ramblings, something about a bomb
I got up to take a pee, head throbbing, the walls came crashing down
I'm spilling out, I'm spilling out
I didn't want my wife to know

Weeks pass I watch the victim count rise
A military illness, senseless, contrived
Where do you go when the stakes are so high?

I'm just a boy whose finger got caught
Degloved at the height, ambition cut short
Morphine talking in the back of the ambulance
I asked myself: 'Could it be a dancing plague?'

Keeping the Punk motif, we move to Leeds, in the UK, for some Garage Rock about a rare medical condition that can lead to balance and cognitive problems, insomnia, and headaches. But what may be the cause?

"The lyrical inspiration for the song came from reading about the condition known as Havana syndrome, but also experiences of being ill in bed with flu in a hallucinatory sort of state.

It's a narrative driven song which moves between different narrators and most of the sections don't repeat, which is perhaps an odd choice as the album's opening track, but I think it serves as a way of introducing some of the album's musical and lyrical themes that reoccur later.

Musically we were going for a bit of a 'Sonic Youth meets garage punk' thing, and because of the odd song structure we would tend to refer to a particular section of the song as 'the Sonic Youth bit'."

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Miky Mendozza – Todo Va a Estar Bien

Ya seguí el manual de como cerrar ciclos
el pelo me pinté de colores distintos
Ya dije en terapia lo que a nadie le había dicho
Porfin hago las pases conmigo mismo

Me gusta lo que veo en el espejo,
Mi historia te la cuentan mis tatuajes,
Nunca olvidaré de donde vengo
Me siento más ligero en este viaje

Hace tiempo que ya voy sin equipaje

We continue with more heartbreaks in Mexico City, MX, with a Latin Pop song that tells us that, even if your world is upside down, you have to keep flowing with life, like water flows through the sea, until everything's fine again:

"It is like a symbol, in that month for the first time in my life, I painted my hair like closing a cycle with myself and with an ex girlfriend, so, the main hymn of the song is that everything will be OK eventually if you close the cycles that you know you have to close 🙏🏼"

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Gypsy Road – The 7 Stages Of Grief

And you said I was never a stranger
And I'll live with that
Cause I don't hate you

We fly now to Melbourne, Australia for an emo track dealing with being in denial when processing a break up, and the vulnerability you feel afterwards:

"The last break up that I had heavily inspired the track, I went through so much and when things came to an end in that relationship I felt so lost but also a sense of hope. I guess this song captures my hope and when I was feeling at the time I feel like this track is an ode to being hopeful and it's an ode to moving on.

In terms of the musicality and how it all came together, I guess I probably freestyled most of the song as I was writing it for the first time and I really had liked what came out of my mouth and I had to just put it down in my notes. When James come over (the drummer of the band) we honestly just belted out the track together and really liked it. Just a couple of tweaks really perfected it to what we had to come to with. 😊"

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Long Call - Oak Tree

I'm cloudy, I'm shaky, and you are an oak tree
I'm 5am dew drops, and you are the sea

I'll grow you around me, I'll roost in your branches
I'll bind me with rope so the wind can't loose me

at first sight, you shone like the sun through a keyhole
and I tumbled in like a bee in the spring
now at night when my ghost gets shook free from the bones
you cradle the vessel 'til the spirit comes home

We end our trip in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, for an Alt Folk love song that strays into the dusk, and then comes back. Singer Avalon explains:

"A few years ago when I wrote it, Oak Tree was a love song and an exploration of the long term relationship that I was in at that time—the beautiful things and the struggles.

More recently when my brother and I recorded and produced it after that relationship had ended, it became a time capsule of both the knots that existed in that relationship that I didn't know how to untangle while I was in it, and a bittersweet testament to what I feel grateful for still."

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Listen to them and much more on the complete Playlist

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See you next month!