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- Written by Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
Sometimes, some music producers tend to be hyper-cool about the artists they are working with and their records and often, they come out with grand adjectives to define a new body of work and the quality of who makes such records.
As an exception, producer Peter Collins got it absolutely spot on, when describing the time he was working with Rockabilly Heroes Stray Cats, on the making of their new album called 40, due to be released on 24th May, by saying: "There's something very special about Stray Cats; nobody else sounds like them".
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- Written by Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
The fact that a band would choose to name their debut album taking the cue from one of Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction satirical novels, the 1959 book The Sirens Of Titan, is already a very intriguing aspect in itself, even prior to listen to a highly entertaining record like Things I Remember From Earth, from the American quartet Maybird.
Released under Danger Mouse's record label, 30th Century Records, Things I Remember From Earth marries contemporary alt-rock and psychedelia in an irresistible musical combo that take the listeners in a fascinating journey into an imaginary, sonic outer space filled with many great compositional ideas.
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- Written by Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
For several years, contemporary American Hard-Rock has lived a limbo phase, from a sonic point of view, with many bands sounding pretty much in the same way and being incapable to offer new ideas or musical vigour to the genre.
Thankfully, the debut album of the Las Vegas quartet Bravo Delta, called Unbreakable, it offers instead a lot of promises, especially from a musical perspective, with the band being able to craft a melodic formula of muscular-with-melody Hard-Rock mixed with some highly interesting 70's Progressive Rock layers of sound.
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- Written by Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
It happened and still happens very often, within the global music business, that worldwide artists, through the years, have tried to create a specific sound style that would make it as their own trademark sound, something that would be so recognizable that it would be identified immediately to such artists.
The down side of it, though, consists in the fact that such distinguished sound style also becomes, through times, repetitive and sterile because the artists in question wouldn’t be too interested to apply any creativity to their music, for the fear of losing those fans that they so hardly have gained, through the years.
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- Written by Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
There is no such thing as Art not being related to freedom of expression, especially when it comes to music. Often, though, the will of an artist, in this case, a musician, at times needs to compromise between different factors, such as what an artist really wishes to express through music, what his/her fans want to hear from such musician and what the record label is prepared to invest on something that cannot guarantee necessarily a financial return, no matter the depth of quality expressed by the artist's record.
The concept of uncompromising Art expression is something that adheres perfectly to the vision that American Guitar Master and singer/songwriter JD Simo has of music. Simo is one of those very rare artists (in every possible meaning of the word) that, since the beginning of his career, has always shown through his records that he would never, at any cost, betray his musical heritage and trade it with something else that doesn't belong strictly to his personal taste and appreciation.
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- Written by Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
Often music artists decide to covers songs from other artists solely because they need to fill gaps on a new studio album that might need one-two songs to be completed, choosing tunes that might be close to the style of music that they play but not necessarily be emotionally close to their souls.
It is therefore rather refreshing that Texas-born Troubadour Jarrod Dickenson decided, through his new project, an EP called Under A Texas Sky, to pay tribute to some of the state's music icons that Dickenson respects and love.
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- Written by Giovanni "Gio" Pilato
There is no such thing as a relatively easy record to make, when it comes to Blues, neither for a pure Blues artist nor for a Blues/Rock one. The presence of Blues songs in an artist's album always requires a certain amount of passion, dedication and soul to be applied to them, some inner pathos that encompasses the tunes both musically and lyrically, elements that are all needed to make those Blues tunes to sound true and credible enough to every music lover.
After the great success of 2016's album Dust And Bones, highly praised worldwide by the Music Press and his many fans, American Guitar Maestro and singer/songwriter Gary Hoey wanted desperately to incorporate some solid Blues vibes in his next career move. The extraordinarily talented guitarist has always been a notoriously hard working musician for all his life, therefore he used wisely every moment of the last 18 months following the release of the Dust And Bones album, while on tour, not just promoting the record but also writing new material and cementing friendships with fellow, highly talented musicians like Eric Gales, Lance Lopez and Josh Smith, for example, in order to enable Hoey to build the right platform that would help him building the aforementioned Blues vibes he was searching for.