Taste Test, Edition #11: Tiggi Hawke, Jeremy Rockler, Delafaye & more

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

“Alibi” by Tiggi Hawke

Ripping a page straight out of the Ariana Grande playbook, Tiggi Hawke tip-toes the high-wire of sun-kissed romance. “Alibi” is glued together with the sweet tang of R&B and her deliciously wry smile, an underpinning of guitar acting as a mask to her true feelings. When the drums and the melody pop into the sky, the newcomer finds herself trying to placate a lover and wrangle her own unwieldy emotions. “I need another alibi,” she sings almost to herself as much as a mountainous roar to the entire world.

“Magic Guitar” by Kyrylo Stetsenko

The voice of Kyrylo Stetsenko is utterly hypnotic. With only a lonesome acoustic guitar weeping down upon him, Stetsenko offers up a loose, vividly starry-eyed and magical interpretation of a 1960s Ukrainian ballad called “Magic Guitar.” He flies delicately like a moon in orbit across the melody, his preciously ethereal tenor allowing the listener to find an escape within the song’s soft folds. “The twilight sounded for another girl,” he sings on the final line, leaving a breathless incantation imprinted on the soul.

“Diana” by Jeremy Rockler

Heartbreak inflicts the kind of deep wounds from which many never recover. Folk musician Jeremy Rockler has been carrying around his sorrow for 10 years, at least in song form. “Diana,” off his new EP The Grand, The Sleep, The Dark, is a supple, yet lo-fi, excursion through his memories, as he winds through a dark alleyway that’s grown ever cold and icy in time and distance. Only a guitar accompanies his plain-spoken confessions, his voice warbling through the microphone and his heart exposed in the piercing moonlight. “What do you say to someone you hardly know / Outside of highways and hotel windows,” he sings in earnest.

“Riding Shotgun” by LENN

LENN’s lilting vocal crashes into the dance floor and bursts into a disco-ball-fractured display. “Riding Shotgun” defies all expectations, even as it is drenched in the chilly waves of classic electrodes. “I got my feet on the dashboard,” she coos, setting the stage for the vivid four-by-four, windows-down getaway down the coast. She makes her intentions known straight-away, and there is an invigorating pleasure in living so freely and boldly. “Your touch leaves my body aching,” she also admits over drips of lip-stuck synths.

“Take a Nap” by Orion & the Melted Crayons

The guitar is a soothing agent to calm the nerves, melting down the rough edges of life for a euphoric dream so potent you may never recover. “Got nothing to say,” singer Orion Faruque casts off, rather nonchalantly. A flurry of strings ebb and flow alongside the guitar’s steady hand, and Faruque’s voice is almost lullaby-like in texture, a gentle medication akin to a baby’s aspirin. The pitter-patter of drums drift outward in tiny ripples until it breaks and falls away. “Keep the wind in my sails,” he sings.

“Time and Money” (acoustic) by Delafaye

Americana musician and songwriter Delafaye wears his experience in his voice. It’s weathered exterior forces its jagged edges right into the veins. The acoustic reworking of “Time and Money,” from his Acid Tongue EP, is somehow even more wearisome and painstakingly moving. His voice is a pair of tattered workman’s boots with soles nearly completely gone, and he’s only left with crumbling shreds and a patch of leather. “Time and money isn’t real,” he moans, heaving his chest as if his life depends on this one last, exhausted plea. “I am…”

“Warmest Winter” by Linnea Ellis

We can run, but we can’t hide from our emotions. Cutting her teeth in Oslo, folk songwriter Linnea Ellis had to confront her own deep-seated feelings about herself and the world, uprooting her stubbornness as a way to acknowledge she desperately need to grow. “People are sure gonna stare / So, come dance with me / If you dare,” Ellis sends up a flair into a gust of wintry strings and percussion. It was only until she returned to Stockholm that she came to really understand herself, and “Warmest Winter” is knit with an unwavering determination to reclaim her dignity and full potential.

“I’ll Be the Fire” by Lakelands

Crackling between the sweltering flames of arena-sized Coldplay and the Avett Brothers, Lakelands cull drastic extremes on “I’ll Be the Fire.” The second cut on their new album, One Life, rumbles from the core as a traditional campfire folk tune before revving up with glistening handclaps and tribal drums worthy of stadiums. “I know I’m a stubborn soul / I broke rules and bones / I’ve got scars to show / And I’ll kick and fight until the end,” the band sings, situating their toughened skin and scars as a suit of steely battle armor. “I don’t need a reason to live what I believe in,” they later avow in the song’s hushed, stripped moment.

“Feel Better” by Fí

It’s so terribly easy to become numb in this world. We then turn to various vices to feel something, anything, again and untap a well of pleasure. For Dublin’s Fí, she searches the watery depths of electronica and dark-pop on “Feel Better” to try to engage her senses, scurrying down into some dive bar with the lights on dim and the drinks top-notch. “Spent too many days feeding your ego,” she reminds a scorned lover, whose cravings seem to resurface in her own muddied mental space. “What do I do this for?” she then asks herself, as the production bubbles around her. Somehow, in the corners of toxic forays, she climbs out far more self-aware and stronger.

“The Meaning” by JP Ruggieri

The air is on fire. Recorded live to tape, “The Meaning” illustrates folk musician JP Ruggieri and his band in their most natural habitat and is a primer for his forthcoming new album, Waiting on You (out next year). Guitar playfully slithers down a burning sidewalk of percussion, rhythms rattling like a cobra in the height of summertime and spitting venom at each melodic flick. “I can’t tell where it is that you end / And where it is that you beginning,” Ruggierier sings as he tries to balance the complexities of a musical and romantic partnership that is destined to crumble underneath his fingertips. His vocal is equally as poisonous but also carries with it a remedy of his own making.

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