Taste Test, Edition #23: Gillian Nicola, Just Whiskey & more

Welcome to Taste Test, a review wrangling of SubmitHub-only gemstones.

“Night Comes to Call” by Gillian Nicola

Gillian Nicola paints with every crisp shade of folk tradition. Her voice is very much rooted in the earth, its salt strengthening her chords into a meaty hide. “Night Comes to Call,” another appetite-primer for her debut record, Dried Flowers, out this spring, cleanses the wounds inflicted by a brutal world, and she remains calm through it all. “The song has been sung / The lines are the same / And everyone knows that it’s all just a game,” she crows with a near-porcelain affect, charmingly sweet and soothing. In quieting the noises rattling her skull, pouring over into her everyday life, she comes much closer to understanding true joy and peace. “Nothing has phased me,” she later coos, stars shimmering in her eyes.

“O Death” by Just Whiskey

The Grim Reaper casts a stunningly harrowing shadow across our lives. There’s no way we can ever be ready or escape its spooky, ever-vanishing clutches. “You hurt my body / You make it cold,” singer Emily Kidd depicts with merciless strokes, the darkness seeping into her core and leaving her even more doomed than when she first began. Alt-country group Just Whiskey (rounded out by Dave Austin Derrick Whiteside and Russ Sternglass) ready themselves for the end-of-the-world and the impending ravenous transition from the physical to the spiritual. Life clings to their bones, the flesh liquidating and falling in puddles to a barren countryside that aches to be replenished, and as the sun teeters over the edge, they hang their heads. “You run the life right out of my soul,” Kid chirps, her vibrato fully engaged with the sorrow swell up in her. “O Death” is lifted from the band’s new two-sided release Secondhand Songs, also including “Cocaine Lil”

“Dark Carnival” by A New International

Biff Smith lets his body float and bob. Mayhem gurgles and thrashes in a sick, devilish cauldron of theatrics. “Dark Carnival” slides up and down snowy ivories and electric guitar, gargoyles licking their chops and dragging their fingertips across the sandstone. Smith leads his band of mischief makers (also featuring Caroline Evens, Craig Laurie, Mark McSwiggan, Steph McGourty and Jo Shaw) through a hell-raising revolution, and as the title cut to the self-prescribed “tragi-comic pop-opera,” a Tim Burton-worthy extravaganza and torrent of icy dark-pop and funkadelic slides, it’s the kind of chilling musical number that’ll give you sleep paralysis. The musical venture, set in a ghoulish, fiendish graveyard setting, is mounted in conjunction with Glasgow theatre company Vanishing Point.

“Lost in Nola” by Among the Acres

Blog favorite Among the Acres, an airy folk-rock quartet out of Hartford, curl a new link of iron to their chain of ongoing singles. “Lost in Nola,” which seemingly cuts the chord from the ground, allowing them to fly up into the clouds, refocuses colossal effects of tragedy with a lens of earnest hopefulness. “The time is hours,” frontman Michael Day sings. His voice is illuminating, angelic in the way he absorbs the devastation wreaked upon New Orleans; while his psyche is soured, for a time, he soon collects himself and forges a new way through the bleak winter. Alongside bandmates Sean Lemkey, Erik Lindblad and Greg Ganci, the group medicate the tense cultural landscape with a song that both carries a sting and the anecdote. “I can’t seem to adjust / So, we’ve lost,” Day situates the baseline for the inevitable redemption. And we, the listener and human beings just trying to get by, are given a new lease on life, as well.

“Song for the North” by Adam Winn

Adam Winn is the everyman. He’s a stalwart, brawny fireman out of northern British Columbia, and while he’s certainly paying a heavy price for humanity, his knack for melody and hand-sewn lyricism should be admired just as much.  A bluesy, boozy front-porch anthem for the working class, “Song for the North” twirls between the reeds of some backwoods wheat field, a heart-warming examination of one typical Canadians’ way of thriving. “In the winter, it gets cold / But the sun’s still shining through / This is the place where I’ll grow old / Oh, it’s home / You can keep your rainy coast / I’ll stay right here in the north,” he sings, rallying his fellow compadres for a night of celebration. The drinks fill up, and sure, the everyday problems will still be there in the morning, but for now, it’s time to really live.

“1988” by Swimming Bell

Katie Schottland is a magnetizing treasure. Predominantly crafting her syrupy mixtures of folk music by ear, which gives her even more wiggle room to play, the Swimming Bell mastermind wraps herself in the past. “When I was young, they were calling me home,” she weeps rainbow tears, delightfully melancholic over spiraling, tender piano. “And I tried to turn but fell on the stone.” But what you might expect from your typical slow-burning campfire song, Schottland flips and rearranges with sepia-doused tones and textures, often finding herself meandering through echoing halls of alt-rock and glorious soft-pop. “1988,” which scrapes her tongue clean, raises the bar to set the stage for her new album, Wild Sight, out April 5. While the song quickly ascends before devolving into a psychedelic spread, her voice soars as an eagle in flight.

“Diamond in Her Eye” by Brian Bayer-Larson

The Massachusetts folk purveyor twitches with anticipation for the future. Its uncertain nature gnaws at his heels, chipping away at his ability to hold steady, and along with his acoustic guitar, the lo-fi “Diamond in Her Eye,” an essential from his 2017 studio record, Time to Go Home, is a brittle, cracking ode to Mother Nature and her fickle, well-intended ways. “She’s got the diamond in her eye, and the sunrise in her hair,” he sings as a painter to canvas, a sculptor to clay, a carpenter to a freshly-harvested piece of wood. The craftsmanship stimulates the mind’s eye and draws the listener into a story that feels familiar but carries with it a unique perspective. “She’s a lonely mother crying / The children are the poor,” he later sings, turning the story outward and beyond the sun’s borders for gut-punching stories of sadness.

“In a Phase” by Aerborn

She just turned 18, and she was already faced with a reality she could never have expected. Singer-songwriter Ebony Bowen-Saunders looked around her and soon realized a life of drugs and blackouts were taking a severe toll over her, nearly strangling her from the potential that was there in plain sight. “This is something you can’t be shown / You feel it’s something you’ve always known,” she admits to herself. “In a Phase,” her first release in two years, sprouted from an ingrained need to get better, and so Aerborn ripped back the reigns over her mental and physical health. The accompanying visual, which was filmed in reverse, a symbolic creative choice to highlight the evolutionary underpinnings, gives Saunders even more command over her storyline. Instead of a bleak future thick with poor decision making, she has planted herself at the center of a burgeoning pop storm. “In a Phase” squarely hits the heart and signals a remarkable turnaround.

“The Future” by SK Shlomo

Synths and percussion ping inside metallic bubbles. Simon Shlomo Kahn has been cast asunder, practically drowning on tears, but the music issues a cathartic release. The tectonic plates beneath him shift and crash, soon fragmenting into a thousand glistening shards into the Milky Way. “The Future,” which is built from then-unquenchable pain, turns the screws for hope and a future yet-unexplored or even fully understood, allowing every drop of pain to dry up in the blink of an eye. “I’ll tell the truth / It scared us all,” he whispers in conversation with his son about an unborn sibling. Such cataclysmic thematic material rarely examined in fizzy synth-pop, and Shlomo’s candidness is touching. “We made it through,” he later comforts his son but also nudges himself forward to be strong. “The Future,” leading into his new album Surrender, out March 29, hinges on universal experiences of pain and healing. You’d be hard pressed to find someone nearly as honest.

“Mad Eye” by Chris Ayer

Heartache is a funny thing. It leaves you numb, as a part of yourself has been removed and pulled out with the tide, and the sticky saltwater fills your lungs by the gallons-full. Walking a delicate musical high-wire, folk singer-songwriter Chris Ayer struggles against the ocean’s unpredictable and hazardous waves. The pangs in his chest are almost too much, but he manages to paddle to shore. “There’s a damage done in pretending,” he wails in gentle stretches. In giving up and giving in to the reality that’ll be there before him either way, he unlocks a beautiful new stage of life. The misery will linger on, and the brokenness will take time to heal ⏤ but at least he knows. “Mad Eye” relinquishes the past like a prayer on Sunday morning, a songbird zipping off into the sunset, and Ayer’s confession rends the remnants and crushes them into the dust. “If it’s over, say it’s over,” he heaves one final blow. And with that, he finds freedom in all the hurt.

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