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Michigander - Everything Will Be OK Eventually Sometimes, you hear a song and know it’s a hit right away. Such was the case last year when Michigander — the musical moniker for Kalamazoo-based songwriter Jason Singer — dropped an infectious pop-rock anthem called “Let Down.” Sure enough, the song took off, riding a wave of streaming success and strong word-of-mouth to a No. 8 peak on the Billboard adult alternative chart. The song, about entering a new relationship with equal parts optimism and pessimism (“I got high hopes, I got high hopes/But they let me down, they usually let me down,” Singer quips on the chorus), has the mix of easy relatability and big catchiness that used to allow this kind of anthemic rock music to pack crowds into stadiums. Perhaps it’s fitting that Singer has gone on record confessing that one of his big dreams in the music industry is to land a tour slot opening shows for a band like The Killers. With “Let Down” in his back pocket — plus the handful of just-as-propulsive tunes that fill out Everything Will Be OK Eventually — he might just get there.
Matthew Milia - Keego Harbor Fans of early 2000s indie rock, take note: The songs on singer/ songwriter Matt Milia’s second full-length solo LP, called Keego Harbor, sound like little time capsules from an era when classic indie-centric soundtracks like Garden State and The O.C. helped shape the music tastes of an entire generation. Milia’s songs glisten and gleam like the indie pop confections you probably played on your first iPod, circa 2004: Death Cab for Cutie maybe, or perhaps even Fountains of Wayne. Crafted during the pandemic, Keego Harbor simultaneously pays tribute to Milia’s marriage (he and his wife, Lauren, who provides backing vocals across the record, wed just before the world shut down) and to his hometown (the titular Keego Harbor, a tiny town located about 30 miles northwest of Detroit). The result is an intimate and deeply-felt piece of work — the perfect soundtrack for a dusky summer drive sometime this August or September.
10 • august 09, 2021 • Northern Express Weekly
Greta Van Fleet - The Battle at Garden’s Gate Hailing from Frankenmuth, Greta Van Fleet might just be Michigan’s biggest new musical export of the past five years. For a certain type of music fan (read: the classic rock obsessive), Greta Van Fleet are the future of rock ‘n’ roll. That’s probably because they sound so authentically like the past. The oft-repeated comparison is that Greta Van Fleet sound a lot like Led Zeppelin — thanks mostly to the high-pitched vocal wailing of singer Josh Kiszka, who does about as good an impression of 1970s-era Robert Plant as anyone this side of Y2K. The band dropped their second album, called The Battle at Garden’s Gate in April, and it landed at the top of the Billboard rock albums chart. Produced by Greg Kurstin, a major pop-music whisperer (he was the key collaborator on Adele’s record-smashing 2015 hit “Hello”), Battle pairs Greta Van Fleet’s ’70s-throwback bluesrock songwriting and guitar pyrotechnics with a solid dose of modern technicolor production and pop chops.
LVRS - Sitting with the Unknown If Greta Van Fleet is Michigan’s big proven success story in the music industry from the past few years, then the Jacksonbased band LVRS might just be the one to watch for the next few. Pronounced “lovers,” LVRS released their second full-length album, titled Sitting with the Unknown, earlier this year. A mix of indie rock, postpunk, shoegaze, and dream pop, the songs on Sitting with the Unknown recall everything from early U2, to ’90s slow-core legends Mazzy Star, to 2000’s critical darlings Franz Ferdinand. Vocalist and guitarist Olivia DeJonghe proves a chameleonic frontperson, equally adept at delivering presence and charisma on upbeat foottappers like “Different Meaning” and intimate vulnerability on gorgeous slow-burns like “Lost Kids.” That impressive versatility, when paired with an equally dynamic rhythm section (bassist Jedidiah Thompson and drummer Nicholas Chard, the latter of whom is currently honing his craft as part of the jazz studies program at Michigan State University) makes for a tight-knit sound that is already turning LVRS into one of Michigan’s must-see live bands.
