So full disclosure I run a record label and I’ve come to an agreement with Blood Makes Noise to let me promote releases every week. The idea is every week I will present a playlist with some new Mint 400 Records music and what I think inspired our songwriters. This week it’s pretty indie pop with some of the staple people that have been with the label a while. From Asbury Park NJ, Mike Chick of Yawn Mower fame and his solo project, This Bliss from Boston and a remix of their debut album, and finally me and my band Fairmont with our newest single from our forthcoming album.
I had a conversation with Mike Chick this week about his new songs and his upcoming video and he admitted that this new video and music is very inspired by The Life Aquatic. You can here right away with the first track that it’s very reminiscent of the Mark Mothersbaugh stuff created for the movie. It’s like they shared a studio to record the tracks. I also compared the vibe to Coconut Records, in a weird way it seems the songwriting influences are coming from a similar place to create mellow indie rock/pop.
This Bliss always gets the direct Portishead comparison because lead singer Jessica Baggia has a similar voice and is working within the trip-hop genre. I would say This Bliss does introduce other elements though that aren’t really present in the Portishead stuff like a tinge of modern pop. I had a hard time comparing the remix of Believe to another song because with the guitars that were added in a weird way it almost became Evanessence-ish and I didn’t really want to put that on my playlist. Frou Frou was the best I could come up with when thinking indie rock mixed with elements of trip-hop.
For the Fairmont tracks it’s much easier for me to know what inspired the songs because I wrote it. With High Water Mark as we got ready to write our newest album I wanted to mess around with chord structures and was listening to John Coltrane’s Giant Steps and trying to emulate in an indie rock song using the circle of fifths. Well, I figured out some of Giant Steps on guitar and couldn’t get it to feel right by meshing it with traditional pop song writing so I kept working with that idea until it became what it is. It’s pretty different for my band since the chorus that comes up over and over has no lyrics, it’s more like an interlude between verses. The b-side is a cover of our dear friends The Minus Scale. We covered the song for a live reunion show they did and had it laying around. Initially it was going to be on our cover album but we figured it would get a little more attention this way, so we hope enjoy it as well as the original.