What do you get when Malian refugees decide to meet up to make inventive desert rock? The brilliant, heartfelt grooves of Songhoy Blues. Originally from Timbuktu, the four-piece make beautiful, eastern-scaled music not only born out of political unrest but also out of an unwavering love for a rich sound from their homeland, which wasn't being made in Bamako, the place where they had to flee. The lick-heavy, bass-pacing songs on their 2015 debut, Music in Exile, are like trapping the lightning of Ali Farka Touré, Bombino, and Tinariwen in a bottle and then setting it free. Drawing on a host of African roots and American blues influences, the four piece use a soulful and punchy dynamic to create a sound of their own. Check out their intoxicating in-studio performance and interview with DJ Cheryl Waters below to witness the much-deserved buzz of Songhoy Blues.
She may be young (she just turned 22 in March), but New York's Frankie Cosmos (real name: Greta Kline) literally has too many albums to count, in that, I tried, and I got tired of counting. With album titles like the landlord LOVES restaurants! (2011) and Collaborative Farting (2011), and song titl…
There's a new pop-savvy sheriff in Sub Pop town, and he goes by the name of Cullen Omori, and instead of having to wield a Smith Western to corral a crowd's attention, all he has to do is coo his name. Omori quickly became a wunderkind as one of the instrumental brains of the Chicagoan outfit Smith…
