It’s Friday, which means it’s time for Spark’s music expert and iconic L.A. radio DJ Nic Harcourt to weigh in on what new music he’s got on repeat at the moment.
Kassidy: Don’t Worry
Bands come together, bands fall apart. Well duh, isn’t that like any relationship? Excuse the whimsy, but what happens after the breakup? Most broken relationships do not reconcile and most bands don’t get back together. As individuals, we experience at least a little shaky ground and then we regroup and move on; new loves and lives unfold before us and time benefits those who are able to grow. That isn’t to say you should track down your ex on Facebook, but for bands and the musicians in them, sometimes with the right circumstances, things come back together. Maybe it begins with a charity reunion show, or a songwriting session, and look, everyone’s “matured,” so onto the logical next step: “Let’s get the band back together.”
Glasgow four-piece Kassidy comprised of multi-instrumentalists Barrie-James O’Neill, Lewis Andrew, Hamish Fingland, and Chris Potter released their debut album Hope St ten years ago in March 2011 when they were all in their early twenties, capturing them at their youthful passionate best. It’s an album that wears the band’s influences proudly, from acoustic folk-pop to blues and country and with some spectacular vocal harmonies the album finds the band musically somewhere between Kings of Leon and Mumford and Sons. The press loved them, they were on the cover of many a music magazine, scored radio airplay and hit the festival circuit. Kassidy were primed for success, and well, it didn’t quite work out that way. After a second album James O’Neil left and moved to Los Angeles, the band splintered into various side projects and solo careers and that was that, for then anyway.
Eight years later and Kassidy are back, at least for the rest of 2021. Last summer all four original band members met up in a bar in Glasgow, and as Barrie-James O’Neil recalled “We got talking about the fact that it was approaching ten years since we released our first album, so we thought we had to celebrate by doing one more show” adding, “ we’ve had a couple of jams to work on harmonies”. The one-off, home-town reunion show, at Glasgow’s Barrowlands on Thursday, December 23, sold out in one day. Adding to the celebrations, they are re-releasing Hope St (on vinyl for the first time) this September, and just this week dropped a new single “Don’t Worry”; a song that was left unfinished a decade ago. Vocalist and guitarist Hamish Fingland says, “We didn’t see each other for quite a while over the years, so we thought it would be nice for this release to celebrate with a new song we always loved but never finished. It sounds like the Kassidy we all loved and would fit perfectly onto Hope St.” The song’s writer O’Neill added, “We felt now was the perfect time to release it, to help spread some joy and peace.”
Check out “Don’t Worry” on this week’s playlist; It’s my favorite new release this week and I’m sure I’m not alone in hoping for a reunion lasting longer than nine months.
For fans of: Elbow, Biffy Clyro, Frightened Rabbit.
Tincho: Across The City
Tincho is the nom de plume and brainchild of one Marty Kaleta. Starting out in Chicago as a solo project, Kaleta relocated to Seattle and released a couple of EP’s before forming a quartet under the same name and recording the first Tincho album Home Today in 2017. The album has a raw, organic feel with choppy guitars and vocals mixed low— a streamlined take on 90’s indie pop with catchy vocal hooks and a dream-pop update on shogaze. The album didn’t get a release until 2019, largely because the members of the original band scattered across the world, including Kaleta who headed south, way south: South America. Kaleta’s first new music from his sojourns in Rio de Janero Brazil and Buenos Aires Argentina, is the single “Across the City”. Opening with layered acoustic guitars and the lyric “Are you still around haunting this ghost town, or have you finally closed it down, I thought that I saw you, it was only your perfume”, the song slips quickly into a melancholic pop groove and ramped up production values, luring us into a fractured tale of procrastination and missed opportunities. It’s my favorite kind of pop; sweet and glammy on the outside, dark and just a little sour on the inside. Listen to it on this week’s playlist and/or go buy it at tinchomusic.bandcamp.com.
For fans of: Alvvays, Death Cab For Cutie, Deerhunter.
