Best under-the-radar music with exclusive comments from the artists
Tuesday, September 22
Album Review: The Como Brothers — Whisper in the Wind
Their dad writes down the setlists. He's been doing it for years — comes to the shows, helps carry the amps, writes down every song his sons play into a notebook. The dad's name is James Como, and he used to be a drummer in a band called The Words, around New York in the late seventies. They had a following and even opened for Blondie at CBGB once. James's brother Lawrence wrote most of the songs. Matt and Andrew grew up on those songs. Not only on records of them — on their father and uncles playing them in the living room, every time the family got together, which was often. They thought The Words were famous. They also thought The Beatles were on the radio right now, because that's what was in the car. When the brothers hit fourteen and fifteen, James started a family Beatles tribute band. Him on drums, Lawrence on bass and Paul's vocal parts, Andrew as George, Matt as John. They played for six years, two or three nights a week, bars and restaurants and town festivals. That's how Matt and Andrew learned what a song is — from the inside, by playing the best ones over and over until the shape of them got into their hands and under their skin. Lawrence stayed with the nephews after the tribute band ended. He'd come to shows and tell them honestly how it went. Which songs were working. Which ones he thought were hits. He said "I Don't Like You" was a hit (we'll get to that song later). Lawrence was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2022 and kept coming anyway, sometimes driving ninety minutes each way, despite the treatments that would take everything out of him. He died in July 2023. He was sixty-two. There's a song of his on the band's new record "Whisper in the Wind" — we'll get to that one later too. But not just one — uncle Lawrence is present on every track, in a way. The brothers say they still ask “what would Uncle Lawrence think or do” when they’re writing songs or playing live. The album's called Whisper in the Wind. It's amazing — I'll tell you why as we go.
Sunday, April 19
Album Review: M4TR & AJ Solaris– Reimagination: The Remixes, Vol. 1
AJ Solaris has been doing his thing under the M4TR banner for the better part of a decade — blending new wave, synthpop, disco, and funk into something that doesn't fit neatly into any one box, which is probably the point. Working out of Washington DC, he's quietly racked up 2.7 million streams across 4,000 playlists in 150 countries, and last year's Love Is the Revolution crossed a million on its own. So when it came time to figure out what to do next with that album, he did something pretty reasonable: handed it to two producers who know exactly what a dancefloor wants — and in doing so, found a way to carry his music, and the emotions packed inside it, into corners of the world it hadn't quite reached yet. Those producers are not small names. Philip Larsen — Grammy winner, with credits alongside Kylie Minogue, Erasure, Soft Cell, and OMD — takes four of the five tracks and essentially rebuilds them from scratch, keeping the emotional bones while pushing everything else into club territory. Mr. Mig, who's worked with Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Justin Timberlake, gets one song: Hooks, which he drags gleefully into Ibiza disco-funk and somehow makes it feel like it was always meant to live there. Every track comes in two flavors — radio edit and extended version — which is how you end up with a 10-track album built out of five songs. It makes sense when you think about it: the radio edit is the song that fits into your day and invites to AJ Solaris's party; the extended version is what's waiting on the other side when the party turns out to be so good you stop checking the time.