BEST NEW MUSIC: NOVO AMOR - UTICAN
We’ve covered just about every Novo Amor song released in the past three years. So if at this point you still can’t tell that we’re serious fans, you probably have to get your glasses or brain (or at least your internet connection) checked. I hope you love him as much as we do and we’re not just shouting this into the Echo Chamber for no reason.
Novo Amor is a Welsh singer/songwriter as well as an accomplished multi-instrumentalist and producer who makes some of the most beautifully haunting indietronic folk music I’ve ever heard. And that is in a genre that is exclusively populated by beautifully haunted music. Seriously, it’s ALL happy-sad-spacey-glad-complexity. So intense. Is that why it makes us feel so much? Is that we connect so deeply to songs like “Utican?” 'Cause this one has been on loop in my apartment all day while I feel all the feels I’m able to feel. 6That’s what good music is supposed to do, right? Make you feel something for once in your goddamn life?
Novo Amor really is the whole package. He not only can write the songs, but sing them and play them on whatever instrument tickles his fancy too? Name me one other person who’s able to do that. Okay, but how about doing it this well? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
NOVO AMOR - UTICAN
Novo Amor is a one man band of wintery depressive vibes, and the perfect mood music to soundtrack an emotionally self-reflexive day or even week-month-year-life. He’s not pure sadness captured in a bottle and drank down for full effect. There is some hope to his tunes. The drums, strings and horns on “Utican” paint an incredibly full picture of uplifting positivity that shows more about the swings of life and the human condition than any song I’ve heard in a dog’s age (and since my dog is one and a half and seven years equal one dog year then I guess that means eleven years--- which is actually ironically when the first Bon Iver album was released, an artist who shares many similarities with the one we are discussing right now.)
“Utican” is the third in a series of new tracks from Novo Amor, following up both “Birthplace” and “State Lines” that are just as excellent as this newest release. All three come in the wake of 2017’s Heiress, Novo Amor’s full-length release with Ed Tullett that was also quite good in it’s own right? But this good? I don’t know everybody is different, get off my case. Whatever the case this guy weaves gold. And here he does it all by himself! Will there ever be a song by Novo Amor that isn’t absolutely stunning? I really don’t think so…
From deep within the murky depths of the Los Angeles River emerged a creature: 50% raver, 50% comedian, 10% Robotcop. Kurt Kroeber doesn’t own a dog, operates Soundbleed (the world’s only dance party comedy talk show rave), and is down to party with you. Come up some time and say “Hey dude!” But definitely make sure to casually drop the secret Illuminati password.