John's New Music Blog

Today's featured band is Austin, TX's International Waters, a four piece consisting of former Voxtrot member Mitch Calvert on vocals and guitar, Ryan Hall on guitar, Alex Gehring on bass and Marcus Haddon on drums. The band describes their sound as "jangle pop" and cite The Smiths as one of their influences; Johnny Marr comes through in nearly every track. The band is streaming their album 1994 via their Bandcamp page as they look for a label to pay for a proper vinyl edition.


The video is for the song "1994," a song that's infused with surfpop and jangly guitar goodness that will have you listening to the rest of the album.


 1994 - International Waters from Mitchell Calvert on Vimeo.

Here is the rest of the album for your listening pleasure:




International Waters is currently working on new material and should be playing dates around Austin soon. In the meantime, their first EP, It Felt Like, is available for download from iTunes.

Today's featured artist is Nashville's Rachel Pearl, an extremely talented singer and songwriter who I had the pleasure of meeting this weekend at the Elephant Talk Indie Music Festival in Atlantic City. Rachel is the writing partner of Merry Ellen Kirk and she's released two jazz albums and is working on a pop album. Rachel's first pop single, "Like A Video," is a Katy Perry influenced song that hits all the pop song high note with none of the irony; she plays it straight and succeeds.

If you're familiar with Rachel's other albums (Love Extravagantly and Keepin' It Old School), you'll notice that this is a big departure for her and her writing partner Merry Ellen Kirk, but after talking with Rachel and Merry Ellen at Elephant Talk, there's a lot of experimentation going on in the indie scene with pop sounds and songwriting techniques and you'll be hearing more poppier sounding indie music over the course of the year. I've already started to hear it in what's coming over from the UK, it's a bit more upbeat and the sound is fresher and not as filled with despair and gloom that indie rock is known for. The video exudes fun and captures the completely mad aspects of pop music, it looked like a lot of fun to make.




Rachel, with the help of some generous friends, self-funded her album and as soon as I have more information on the release date and distribution channels, I'll pass it along. For now you can download the "Like A Video" single from iTunes and Amazon, as well as Love Extravagantly (iTunes and Amazon) and Keepin' It Old School (iTunes and Amazon). I enjoyed meeting Rachel and talking about the new trends in music and learning that Nashville's music scene is more than just cowboys who think they can sing and play guitar. Watch this space for show dates in the Philadelphia area, you don't want to miss the chance to see her live.

Photo Credit: John's New Music Blog Staff Photographer