Spring has sprung, and the unpulled pages of my Far Side desk calendar are many. Along with nine weeks of old cartoons to catch up with, I have a list of new music by local artists I’d been sitting on that only gets longer by the week. In the interest of catching up (and also hoping to find Gary Larson’s notorious, debatably funny “Tethercat” cartoon in the past two months of unread Far Sides), here are some new tracks I liked a lot that debuted since the first of the year.
At the end of January, country artist Summer Dean released an even-groovier-than-the-original cover of the 1980 Terri Gibbs hit “Somebody’s Knockin’,” vamping in the video across a landscape of late-night, late-’70s dancehalls and watering holes, dodging the lariat of trick-roping legend Ketch Weaver. If you wanted to time-travel back to when Billy Bob’s was new, this track (and its video) is an effective portal.
If, however, you would prefer to revisit the era of scene hair, Evanescence shirts, and A7X tattoos done at the kitchen table in someone’s cousin’s apartment, check out Self (Titled), the debut EP of Still Echoes, a newish project of former Deaf Angel members Scott Van Slyke (drums, vocals), Tina Grace (vocals), and Jeremy Mewbourn (guitars). Still Echoes’ take on melodic metalcore is forged with technical drumming and delicious, djent-y guitar crunch tempered with brief interludes of moody keys and drum loops. The sound builds a heavy, pummeling stage for the dramatic interplay of Grace’s soaring, hooky melodies and Van Slyke’s raspy growls, and by the end of the EP, you’ll find yourself grabbing the flat-iron and racoon eyeshadow again before you go out.
Singer-songwriter Claire Hinkle was born some time in that era of racoon eyeshadow and skinny jeans, but I don’t know what her affinity for the era’s music and fashion might be. Would a toddler have enjoyed a Devil Wears Prada CD? Perhaps while wearing an As I Lay Dying onesie? I bet there are people who became parents in the early 2000s who gave that a try! But anyway, Hinkle, who is no stranger to loud rock, having fronted a loud rock band called Tiny Giants, has pivoted back to her Americana roots with her new solo material. She dropped a new single at the end of January called “Bender,” a bruising, funny, don’t-give-a-shit honkytonk ballad about the thought process leading to regrettable decisions at a bar. Recorded live at Billy Bob’s, the track is a great showcase for Hinkle’s voice — her delivery has a gorgeous, old-soul quality to it that hits the part of the road between heartbreak and laughing about the scars it leaves. “This is Day 2 of a five-week bender / I got your pleas, I returned ’em to sender!” she sings in the chorus, and for the rest of the song, you’re kind of like, “Oh, shit. What’s she gonna do next?” Hinkle is playing shows at South-by-Southwest, so maybe “Oh, shit. What’s she gonna do next?” is a good way to think about her music moving forward.
Christian Carlos Carvajal, another local singer-songwriter whose music occasionally drifts into the misty, indefinable, know-it-when-you-hear-it realm of “Americana,” is also moving forward, having just released an EP of his own on March 1. Called 300 and recorded at the home studio of producer Reese Murphy with backing musicians Johnny Hatcher and Tyler Martin (both from Grady Spencer & The Work), it’s been in the works since 2021, finally wrapping up in 2024 with additional backing parts — Jeff Dazey on sax, Simone Nicole and Sam Anderson on backing vocals, and Bubba Bellin on pedal steel. This six-song collection of the live set Carvajal has been performing over the past few years will undoubtedly be familiar to fans. But given the added heft of a studio band, his musings on disillusion, heartache, and abandoned faith will hit even harder than the first time you heard them. That’s probably an odd thing to say about a local songwriter with a friendly demeanor and hopeful message, but then again, he also just added a Motörhead cover to his live set.
Speaking of hitting even harder than before, electronic-music producer and DJ Richi Taylor, a.k.a. IAMKRT, also dropped an EP on March 1, though with eight tracks of pumping, polyrhythmic dance music, it could easily stand on its own as a vinyl LP. 00128 puts Taylor’s aesthetic — a blend of disparate sounds that merge into cinematic runs through the mech-tronic corridors conjured by his beats and samples — on brilliant display. The samba-fied house track “NAHNAHNAH” that leads off the record gets abruptly abducted into a pounding sci-fi purgatory of what Taylor describes as “pure electronic underground techno.” With 00128, Taylor, himself influenced as much by ’90s-vintage video game soundtracks as Frankie Knuckles and/or Carl Craig, crafts the score for an imagined world of high-velocity late-night travel from one underground dance spot to the next.
Matthew McNeal is about to drop his fifth album, High Lonesome, on April 4, and in anticipation of that, he released a second single on March 7, following “Chipped Teeth,” on Feb. 14. The new one’s name is “Sad Songs,” and in the way that Richi Taylor’s techno sounds like the score to a Playstation mecha-combat game that doesn’t exist, “Sad Songs” reminds me of a hit from the soundtrack of an Academy Award-nominated (Best Director, Best Actress, probably) indie comedy-drama from the mid-to-late-’90s (that also doesn’t exist), and that is specifically because of the optimistic tone of the keyboard that kicks off the horizon-looking sweep of this country-tinged jam. It’s perfect, and when McNeal gets to the lines, “Starting the song over when it doesn’t make me cry / What’s going on behind my eye? / I feel the need to walk outside in the pouring rain / The hurting makes me feel alive,” you really get a feeling for why the hypothetical music supervisor of this nonexistent, Oscar-baiting, career-making film picked “Sad Songs” for the big climax. On this imaginary OST, there’s probably a Blues Traveler song over the credits, but McNeal’s world-weary voice and the emotive heft of his guitar make this track really stick out to you.
Finally, the Fort Worth Police Department put out a diss track this week in response to a recruitment ad purchased by the Dallas police, found on a South Freeway billboard not far from the FWPD’s headquarters. Repurposing Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-winning, Super Bowl-halftime-slaying single “Not Like Us,” Officer Terrence Parker raps about the superior virtues of law enforcement in the 817, and the nicest thing I can say is that his flow is tolerable for about a minute before it starts to remind me of MCs like “Rappin’ Granny” and Jim McMahon in “The Super Bowl Shuffle.” You can watch the video yourself and find plenty of other things to induce second-hand embarrassment, assuming you can get past the weirdness of cops performing in a genre that became even more massively popular after 1988’s “Fuck tha Police,” as well as Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 hit “I.”
Art by Richi Taylor
