New Year, new music.
This quick little romper comes courtesy of the band Spirit Kid, who looks like a younger, skinnier version of Peter Jackson. I don’t know much about this fella, other then that he is from Cambridge and that this song delivers a dose of energy that I needed on these frigid afternoons. Think Mikal Cronin/Burger Record style rock and roll. Quick, concise and fun. Check it out. The band’s album, Is Happening, comes out in March.
Much like Beyonce, the album A Kristian Kind of Christmas dropped without much advanced notice.
Okay, that’s a bit of a lie. Local up and coming singer-songwriter-producer Kristian Pedersen has been releasing Christmas albums every year around this time for the past half decade. This year marks the fifth edition of this yuletide tradition and it’s all available for download!
Being from Toronto, it appears that Pedersen has taken some inspiration from his bff* Drake and peppered in some local touches to his holiday songs, citing references to the largely ignored Bessarion subway station as well as sometimes music-writer Rob Duffy. Luckily for us, he resisted the urge to use the always popular Rob Ford as a cultural reference.
The album is free to download and stream, so check it out below. Let’s face it, if you hear Wham one more time this season, you’ll probably murder someone so why not try something new?
*unconfirmed
One of my favorite shows this year took place in what I assume was September. It was at the Dakota Tavern and just featured two well known songwriters – Joe Pernice and Norman Blake. It was a quiet and intimate affair but at the same time, it was quite glorious. I’m excited to learn that the band that they formed, The New Mendicants, are releasing their debut album in January. It is called Into The Lime and methinks it’ll be quite good.
Appropriately enough, they have released a song just in time for Christmas. “A Very Sorry Christmas” is exactly what you would expect from a Pernice penned track, and features the same tenderness that many loved in Blake’s Teenage Fanclub days. Do check it out.
So weird to see a band with the word “Summer” in it sing this track. But here we are. Summer Camp is a British duo that we have featured on our blog before. They share everyone’s fondness for Wham’s track “Last Christmas” which is basically unavoidable at this time of the year. Is it the last modern classic Christmas song we have had? Maybe Live-Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas but I don’t hear that in shopping malls everywhere. Anyways, despite the over saturation of this song everywhere, I still enjoyed their cover, and it comes off rather sweet. Check it out!
