Sound Check's Blog Posts Tagged 'R&B' (11)

R&B and soul took a dark turn when synths got good enough to almost realistically replicate the sound of a full orchestra in the late 80's. A sound more or less defined by raw human emotion and lush (AKA expensive) arrangements traded a big chunk of it's human element in exchange for “sure that sounds enough like a violin and just saved us a few hundred bucks in session fees!” So it's encouraging to see the triumphant return of the orchestra in R&B. The latest in this…

What do you know about Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings? Did you check their new song "Retreat!"? It's a cut off their new album 'Give The People What They Want', to be released August 6th. If you pre-order the album on iTunes you'll get the track "Retreat!" immediately.…

Toronto-based singer Melanie Durrant serves big voice and musical drama with her latest single 'Gone'. She basically tells it like it is to the "other woman": "he only wants you when I'm gone". Stream it below and let us know what you think. - L.…

Oakland's Afro-indie-pop quartet Bells Atlas released their debut EP this week and it's a beautiful beautiful thing. The band combines minimal beats with lush textures and the multi-layered vocals of lead singer Sandra Lawson-Ndu. The three songs and two remixes on the EP show a young band in complete control of their sound. With influences ranging from chillwave to samba to indie rock to Afrobeat, the Bells Atlas EP sounds like almost nothing else on the planet. It's rare that…

While Brooklyn wasn't paying attention, Oakland seems to have snuck up and stolen our crown as the center of adventurous independent music. Between The Seshen and the new Bells Atlas (not to mention longtime favorites like The Coup and Blood Sugar X), saying “we're from Oakland” is turning into shorthand for “you haven't heard shit like this…

The Seshen were one of my favorite new discoveries of 2012. The Bay Area septet(!) possess a rare talent for combining giant pop hooks with some seriously abstract and boundary pushing undertones. There's something magic when a band can make the experimental make total sense. They're currently working on their new EP and we just got a taste with…

50 years since the Beatles' famous performance on the Ed Sullivan show and their legacy is more complicated than ever. Were they the greatest song writers of all time, or massively overrated? Were they the band responsible for watering down rock and roll and making it safe for white suburban audiences or were they band responsible for pushing it radical new directions? Can they be all those things? (yes.) Every punk goes through a phase of rejecting the Beatles followed by a…

As a fan of the bands on the edges of the DIY world (I don't need to hear another band that sounds like Bad Religion, when I already have a perfectly good Bad Religion...) I spend a lot of time thinking about bands with pop aspirations who have embraced DIY ethos. Does the fact that an artist probably couldn't rattle off their top 10 favorite Dischord bands diminish them in our artificial hierarchy? “Oh, that's not punk rock, that's pop!” We say with a dismissive air about bands…

Singer/songwriter and AP member Tess refers to her music as “Hip Rock & B,” which even if it doesn't quite roll off the tongue, is at least a pretty solid description. She has the massive voice of a pop star, but an eclecticism and depth of soul rarely heard these days in Top 40 land. Though The Name is Tess is her debut EP, this isn't Tess' first time around…

British funky pop and R&B band AlunaGeorge's new track 'Just A Touch' is real groovy, don't you think? If you like what you hear, check out their debut EP, 'You Know You Like It' (out now on iTunes).

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