Now Hear This: #001 – Kendall Lujan, La Faute, healthyliving & The Meteoroids

Spotify uploads 60,000 new tracks daily, a Mount Everest-like, or if you prefer going the other way, a Mariana Trench-like quantity of new music. Or, if you’re fond of scatological depictions, we’re talking a shitload of music. Mindboggling!

The sheer volume of new music begs the question: How can you isolate and identify music worth anyone’s time and attention from so much new music? While admitting to a certain degree of arbitrariness, we can nevertheless, in good conscience, define the criteria that, in our mind, establish music as significant. Grandeur, creative genius, a sense of mystery, and harmonic balance.

With that in mind, we offer the following under-the-radar and largely unnoticed new music released in the last six months as meritorious. We’ll bring you a new post each week, songs from which will regularly be added to our accompanying “Now Hear This” Spotify playlist.

Kendall Lujan – Kendall Lujan

Portland-based Kendall Lujan’s self-titled debut EP, a blend of folk-rock, pop, and country flavours, reveals the singer-songwriter’s insightful lyricism and knack for bewitching melodies. Most importantly, the EP highlights Lujan’s luscious, natural vibrato vocals, capturing a Leon Russell-like operatic twang, gliding on graceful sonic strands.

La Faute – Blue Girl Nice Day

An album of dark, transcendent beauty, Blue Girl Nice Day showcases the soft, Siren-like voice of La Faute, aka Peggy Messing. From French, La Faute translates to ‘the fault.’

Amalgamating classical surfaces with wistful dream-pop, La Faute’s compositions offer layers of shimmering, floating colours, at once shadowy and oh-so mesmeric. Speaking subjectively, entry points include the title track, “Watercolours,” “Magician’s Assistant,” and “I’m Finding Out.”

Commenting on “Watercolours,” La Faute shares, “I was partly thinking about movie scenes that I love that are covered in rain, like the doomed romance of ‘In the Mood for Love’ or the tears in the rain scene from Blade Runner.”

healthyliving – Songs of Abundance, Psalms of Grief

Made up of Amaya López-Carromero (vocals), Scott McLean (guitar, bass, synths), and Stefan Pötzsch (drums), healthyliving’s album, Songs of Abundance, Psalms of Grief, reflects elements of post-metal, psych-rock, and Gothic industrial.

López-Carromero’s elegiac voice imbues the lyrics with allusive, provocative timbres, ranging from soft and eerily nostalgic to melancholic wails expressing profound emotional torment.

The Meteoroids – “P-22 | Boss Angeles”

Reminiscent of Dick Dale and The Ventures, with hints of Spaghetti Western constituents adding sticky, exotic tangs, The Meteoroids recently dropped a pair of singles, “P-22” and “Boss Angeles.”

Although surf-rock pretty much lost popularity with the onset of the British Invasion of the mid-’60s, The Meteoroids encapsulate the SoCal surf culture in their latest release, utilizing beaucoup spring reverb and dazzling tremolo picking.