Soundcheck

In the early 1990s, groups like Portishead and Massive Attack created dark, brooding atmospheres that reflected the hangover side of party music. Electronic dance music has evolved a great deal over the last twenty years, but its more down-tempo descendants still have that potent ability to evoke a bleary-eyed dawn. And it’s a sound that HÆLOS has perfected. The group's wide-angle new record, Full Circle, is the culmination of the three principals' multi-faceted careers: loud, dark, and determined. Click the player above to hear HÆLOS perform live on Soundcheck.

Toronto band The Strumbellas are the latest group to mine the folk-inflected, sing-the-chorus-with-us style that’s been popularized by Mumford & Sons and so many others. Their album Hope came out April 22, and a number of the songs have that ear-worm quality where they burrow into your head and demand your unconditional surrender. So! we capitulated and invited them to play live in our studio. Check out the video for leadoff track “Spirits” and see a willfully weird collection of costumes and masks (is that woman trying to look like Johnny Depp? Is that a lost member of Insane Clown Posse? Are you really supposed to have that much fun with a coffin?), plus a band that seems to have even more members than fellow Canadians Arcade Fire.

The Range is a Brooklyn-based producer (real name James Hinton) whose album Potential came out last month. The album is built on clips he found in some of Youtube’s less frequently-traveled corners. No Beyonce videos here. Instead you get obscure London emcees like Ophqi and Super Thought, whose Youtube clips provide the source material for the song “Five Four.” The song is a neatly-constructed blend of several different forms of electronica; and the video, shot in black and white, seems to be mostly about the mundane challenges of everyday life – The Range says “’Five Four’ is about the frustration of not being able to change the circumstances of a situation.” But the video also has a touch of magical realism: a distant, shiny light that promises nothing but suggests much. Click the player above to hear what else The Range's music suggests.

While writing the music for what would become Metric's latest record, 2015's Pagans in Vegas, front-woman Emily Haines traveled to Nicaragua and Spain, while guitarist Jimmy Shaw holed up at home in Toronto and fiddled with the knobs on synthesizers and pedals. The result of this mashed-up approach to songwriting is an album with tight, taut songwriting, but also the surface sheen of krautrock and 80s synth-rock idols. The band stops by the studio to play a few songs and talk about their latest approach to record-making.

Sixteen Tons is the new band from clarinetist Andy Biskin. In his first visit to the Soundcheck studio, Biskin implemented a jazz band to explore the legacy of Stephen Foster, the 19th century composer and so-called "father of American music." Biskin returned a few years later to play songs inspired by the labyrinthine contraptions drawn by the cartoonist Rube Goldberg. Now, with Sixteen Tons, Biskin is putting a swinging, brassy spin on the field music recordings of famed American musicologist Alan Lomax, for whom Biskin worked as a young man. Click the player above to hear Andy Biskin & Sixteen Tons play some of these songs and talk about Lomax's treasure trove of roots music.

Sons of an Illustrious Father is Lilah Larson, Josh Aubin, and Ezra Miller (who you might recognize from his motion picture roles in Trainwreck, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and more). They call their music "heavy meadow," and if you were to only listen to the first few minutes of their new record Revol, you'd probably emphasize the "meadow" part: singer-songwriter melodies with comfortable rhythm. But by the time a song like "Conquest" arrives, you're in the presence of a swaggering, loud, proper rock band with a keen political point of view. Plenty heavy. Click the player above to hear the band perform live on Soundcheck. 

Throughout the course of his career, Don Cheadle has played a genius, a con man, a moral crusader, and a superhero. In a way, his latest role is a little bit of all of the above: the great jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. Cheadle not only stars in the new biopic Miles Ahead (in theaters April 1), but also produced and directed as well. Rather than trying to tell the whole story of jazz's most mercurial and unpredictable visionary, Cheadle's film focuses on a period in the late 1970's when Davis struggled to find his musical voice again. And to achieve verisimilitude, Cheadle had to emulate the jazz giant's technical prowess on the trumpet.   

"Maybe I only ever got as good as he was when he was 9 or 10 years old," Cheadle tells host John Schaefer, "but it was still important to me that I learn those solos, that I write them out, and that I have a really visceral relationship with this music." 

Click the player above to hear Don Cheadle talk about crawling inside the skin of one of the 20th century's greatest artists. And click here to listen to our recent conversation with Ethan Hawke about his on-screen portrayal of another jazz great, Chet Baker. 

Shawn Amos released his first full length album in a decade, The Reverend Shawn Amos Loves You, in October. Like its immediate predecessor, the 2014 EP The Reverend Shawn Amos Tells It, it's full of stinging electric guitar, and soulful vocals — a joyful, exuberant celebration of the blues, in the vein of Solomon Burke or Muddy Waters.  And nothing puts a finer point on "exuberant blues" than the inimitable Blind Boys of Alabama, who feature on the lead-off track "Days of Depression." What the new record is not full of is the gospel-style preaching you'd expect of a man who uses The Reverend as part of his stage name. Amos refers to himself as a "secular gospel" singer — though he's still using music to move the spirit.  Here's a video of his "You're Gonna Miss Me (When I Get Home)" from the WNYC Studios: 
 

Ethan Hawke visits the studio to talk about his portrayal of the talented, addicted, and tormented jazz icon, Chet Baker, in the new film “Born to Be Blue.” The film, from writer-director Robert Boudreau, mixes fact and fiction, focusing in on a Chet Baker in his 40s, who attempts to stage a comeback and kick his heroin habit.

Hawke took both trumpet and singing lessons for the part, and insists that he was at his best when he made playing the trumpet sound really hard, as a Chet Baker who had to take great pains to get back to his former level. Far from moralizing Baker’s struggle as the jazz musician junkie to get clean and overcome, the film opens with Baker locked in a jail cell in Italy, depicts a drug deal gone wrong in which Baker's teeth get knocked out, altering his embouchure, and other lows. Hawke exudes the vulnerability and fragility of the question of  “can Chet even get through the song?” 

As Hawke relates, Baker himself knew he was no musical revolutionary like Miles Davis. Yet, ironically, in imitating Davis, he sold more records because he was young, white, and handsome. But here was an Oklahoma farm-boy who never read music and imitated his heroes, right down to their solos, who just wanted to be invited to play at the table with the greats. 

The film opens in limited release March 25, followed by VOD on March 31.  

As a band name, "Great American Canyon Band" sounds like one of those dozen-member, vaguely twangy groups that traveled the country by truck or train in the 1970s. Though you wouldn't guess it from the enormous sound it makes, it's actually the name of a contemporary duo: Baltimore-based Paul & Kris Masson. And the group delivers on the "canyon" part of its name: swooping sonics with an almost infinite horizon, aided by "wall of sound" production techniques (and a helping of crunchy shoegaze distortion). The songwriting obliquely name-checks another canyon sound — L.A.'s famed Laurel Canyon, home to '70s troubadours like Emmylou Harris, Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills and Nash... it's a sound that has found a welcome embrace from modern singers like Father John Misty and Jonathan Wilson. Great American Canyon Band's first full-length record is due out in April, but they play some of their recent songs for us in the Soundcheck studio.