Greeicy is the professional name of Colombian pop singer, songwriter, and actress Greeicy Rendon, whose sound melds cumbia, Latin pop, tropical, and urban styles. Her sultry, always supremely melodic alto adds dimension and warmth to even the grittiest urbano jams.
It’s the “melodic” in that descriptions that brings her here, melody being a primary qualifying filter for us–above era, genre and even language.
Countercountry singer/songwriter/wiseass Robbie Fulks is an unconventional guy. And Revenge! is a typically unconventional live album.
The double-length CD package is divided into discs labeled “Standing” and “Sitting”. The first, with opening cut “We’re On the Road” setting up the premise of the live album in amusing fashion, features full electric performances from his long-serving live band, who rival Lyle Lovett’s for tight, high-energy performance and virtuosity.
The “Sitting” disc features a more stripped-down, acoustic set.
In both settings, the musicianship, both of Fulks and bandmates, is evident, as is the humor.
But the humor and the jaw-dropping guitar skills are only half the story: it happens that when it comes to songcraft there are few better, as many previous posts on this blog have shown.
If you learned Robbie Fulks grew up with a guitar-playing dad and an autoharp-playing mum it’d make sense. It’s just a bonus to hear he had an Aunt Mildred who played violin and an Aunt Stella who played banjo. I mean, really?
Young Robbie clearly absorbed plenty.
Fulks has backed Steve Martin on tour and on the Tonight Show. He’s recorded with Tim O’Brian. His bluegrass credentials are undeniable.
But he’s never felt constrained by genre. “Let’s Kill Saturday Night” is more Steve Earle than Bill Monroe. “That Bangle Girl” is hardly a banjo and mandolin workout. Fulks released an album of Michael Jackson/Jackson Five covers in 2010 that’s more pop and R&B than country and bluegrass.
2025’s Now and Then, which Fulks has described as “post-stylistic”, owes little to bluegrass or even traditional country.
And “Fountains of Wayne Hotline” shows his chops in the realm of parody, nailing the sound (and the formula) of that band brilliantly, not to mention being one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard, frankly.
If you like your music neatly categorized and you prefer artists to stay tightly locked in musical boxes, Robbie Fulks may confound you.
But if his mood-swinging, bi-polar, genre-hopping musical excursions keep fans on their toes, his consistently fine writing makes him an artist always worthy of attention.
But hey–enough of my yackin’. What do you say? Let’s Boogie!
Matt Duncan, who calls himself “the Elvis of self-doubt”, is a purveyor of tuneful soft rock that sounds like it ought to be playing from an AM transistor radio.
In a good way.
Though actual 70’s pop spanned a single decade, in the four-plus decades since we’ve been hearing people try to approximate its magic.
And though plenty of contemporary artists catch interest for their retro 70’s musical dialect, seldom does their mere facsimile of sound actually summon the aura of that decade.
Maybe the secret is to not try too hard.
Duncan acknowledges his first LP Beacon lived in the 60’s, and that his sound moved onward one decade for this, his second.
But while he cites Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell among others as influences, his music is never mimicry. Did you hear an Atlanta Rhythm Section groove in “The Keys”? A little Van Morrison in the horns on “Idle Hands”? The influences are hard to pin down because it’s all more evocative than derivative.
Duncan just tastefully employs a variety of elements: soulful violins, sax, scratch guitar, and harmony vocals span the album. He arranges with lots of pauses, breakdowns and tempo changes, ensuring that “mellow” never becomes “dull”. And it’s all done with an impressive overall gloss and sophistication.
Lyrically, Duncan avoids cliche territory completely, and a barbed line here or there is a pleasant surprise.
One might call this lightweight stuff, but so were Hall & Oates after 1980. Not everything has to be “Kashmir”.
Soft Times feels like a pleasant escape back to 1977 and a brief respite from our own hard times.
The 1968 cult classic Give Me Take You was birthed when producer Andrew Loog Oldham requested that Duncan Browne, formerly of failed folk rock band Lorel, record a solo record for Oldham’s Immediate Records label.
Collaborating with lyricist David Bretton, Browne crafted a baroque folk pop gem of a record, albeit not one with mass appeal.
Give Me Take You possesses a peculiarly English tint in much the same way the Kinks’ Village Greeb Preservation Society has an English flavour–but a rock record this is not.
The mood is more Nick Drake, but with a more antique sound. As for Browne’s excellent guitar work, Steve Hackett comes readily to mind. And the songwriting evokes some of Donovan’s flights of fancy.
From the first notes of the opening title track, with ethereal chamber choir, harp and woodwinds, the album creates its own sad, beautiful world and populates it with sad and beautiful characters.
On “The Ghost Walks”, sympathetic neoclassical guitar frames a portrait of an aging thespian replacing reality in his fading mind with a play of his own making.
“On the Bombsite”, the album’s unsuccessful single, places childhood games of make-believe (“we fought a war in time for tea”…“on snow white horses we rode right through our dreams”) against a backdrop of a bombsite as its lyrics hint at the inevitable impermanence of youthful innocence and imagination:
“But there came a giant I couldn’t fight, he was too strong“…“I wish that I had never left, now it’s too late”
And indeed, it was too late.
As the Immediate label collapsed, Oldham cut the sessions for the album short to save expenses. Browne was ultimately billed for 2,000 pounds to cover recording costs.
Give Me Take You remained unavailable for two decades until its first CD release, which was patched together from several vinyl sources due to the fact that the master tapes were missing at the time.
In the 2000’s the album received more suitably reverential treatment, with expanded reissues on specialty labels–mastered from tapes, not vinyl.
Listeners again have the opportunity to appraise a quietly introspective baroque folk record created by a relative unknown barely out of his teens.
The Dear Hunter: Act IV: Rebirth in Reprise (2015)
The Dear Hunter are rather like the Suave Shampoo of rock bands.
You’ve seen Suave in your supermarket hair care aisle, in myriad varieties packaged to mimic more expensive brands. It accomplishes the same goal–squeaky-clean hair–without the extra cost.
Providence, Rhode Island progressive rock band The Dear Hunter display great ambition, masterful songwriting, engaging melodies, stellar vocal performances adorned with rich harmonies and compelling orchestration, all in a wide variety of styles.
In other words, they’re a great band–but without the recognition factor of the “name brands”, none of the love-’em/hate ’em preconceived notions of those legends in the Rock Hall or on the cover of Rolling Stone. (They do still put rock bands on the cover of Rolling Stone, right?)
The band known as The Dear Hunter originated in 2006 as a side project of Casey Crescenzo, whose day job had involved another group called The Receiving End of Sirens, with whom he’d come to a parting of the ways. Crescenzo soon after released the first volume of a planned six-album concept project telling the story of the life of a boy (known as “The Dear Hunter”) born at the dawn of the 20th century. Yes, this guy is telling a story that will be six albums long. Take that, Ian Anderson.
To literally make a long story short, installment IV, Rebirth in Reprise, was released in 2015 and was unequivocally one of the best rock albums released that year.
Crescenzo is a confident composer who possesses a deft hand at complex orchestral arrangement à la Brian Wilson, whose Beach Boys harmonies seem to echo here and there on the album as well. At other times you may hear a touch of ELO as backing vocal wallpaper, or the quirky pop smarts of 10cc, or the over-the-top theatricality of Queen, or the genre-flouting intrepidity of Swedish prog band A.C.T. This album veers and careens stylistically in dizzying, spectacular fashion.
It’s a heady mix, but requires a bit more patience than the average rock record. Rebirth in Reprise is a 74-minute musical bounce castle of an album that probably won’t reward the typical listener fully before at least half a dozen plays. (Twice that if you have kids in the car.)
But as with all great records, the time investment yields a substantial payoff–at least, if you consider unrelenting earworms to be a desirable thing.
The elegiac ballad “The Line”, one of the album’s quieter and most sublime moments, is not to be missed. With its moody, acoustic guitar-driven arrangement, plaintive vocal and theme of denouement, it’s reminiscent of the perennial Kansas concert encore and Bic-magnet “Dust in the Wind”. Majestic, sad and elegant.
With other projects, such as the multi-volume Color Spectrum collection, continually pulling his attention away, it remains to be seen whether Crescenzo ever completes the intended 6-part saga.
But even if you only hear this portion of the story, or disregard the story altogether, the great musical moments here make for an impressive melodic progressive rock record.
Listen to: “The Old Haunt“
Listen to: “Waves”
Listen to: “Is Anybody There?”
Listen to: “The Squeaky Wheel”
Listen to: “The Bitter Suite IV and V: The Congregation and the Sermon in the Silt”
As the title of her latest album K de Karma (K for Karma) suggests, Kenia Os has come a long way from social media influencer dogged by body shaming and controversy to Mexican pop princess, and a reckoning is due.
Editors of the Wikipedia page of the actress/singer/superstar would be well served at this point to update its rather snarky introductory paragraph, which reads:
“Kenia Guadalupe Flores Osuna (born 15 July 1999), known professionally as Kenia Os, is a Mexican social media personality. She rose to “fame” as a content creator on YouTube…“
That “fame” now encompasses three and a half billion Spotify streams, over 26 million fans on TikTok, 18 million on Instagram, dozens of awards and nominations (including a Latin Grammy nomination for Best Long Form Video) and a record-breaking live streaming concert.
I think we can remove the quotation marks around the word.
Influencer-to-pop singer is a tough route to the top credibility-wise, more so in Mexico than the US. Kenia faced the additional challenge of dealing with weight fluctuations due to PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome) and endometriosis. Some “fans” were cruel in their comments.
She says she has been able to “heal from within”, and that her struggles have only made her stronger.
Perhaps her experience has informed her videos, which regularly feature performers of a variety of body types:
Fans have responded positively to the fact that Kenia’s new music broadens the musical palette. Perhaps she carries enough weight as a musical “influencer” to signal something of a shift away from the recent dominance of reggaeton on the Latin scene.
Or perhaps not. But one thing is certain: the disco, rock and sensuous pop sounds are a welcome respite.
K de Karma is a titanic pop record with clean-sounding production and immediate vocal performances that go right for the corazón. It demands speakers, not earbuds. Vinyl, not mp3. Play it loud.
Every Moment Has A Song 