Tag: Arden DeCanio

Adeline Hotel Opens the Windows in Watch the Sunflowers| Album Review

November 25th, 2025

Written by Arden DeCanio

Music holds the power to wake us up, lull us to sleep, or transport us to dreamlike realities – Adeline Hotel’s new record Watch the Sunflowers unwraps a unique culmination of all three. In a long string of critically acclaimed releases out of Ruination Records, Dan Knishkowy is no stranger to the quiet spell it takes to create a record that feels dense yet holds the ability to float on air like this. Here, he’s less concerned with revelation than presence – the slow, patient art of noticing.

Where earlier Adeline Hotel albums drifted in the gentle haze of folk minimalism, Watch the Sunflowers feels almost meditative. Knishkowy sits somewhere between the fragile intimacy of Sufjan Stevens and the pastoral melancholy of Nick Drake. His voice, both literal and compositional, feels steadier, communal in spirit – like a speaker straight from the soul.

The opening track “Dreaming” sets the pace – as Knishkowy speaks directly to the listener: “some things take a little while”. A slow-building lattice of fingerpicked guitars that seem to shimmer in and out of sync. While Whodunnit’s openers were tentative, this one feels confident – an invitation that is reflective and authentic.

Stretching out the stillness, “Nothing” layers brushed drums and soft synth into something reminiscent of early Iron and Wine, yet with a maturity in the arrangement that hints at the slow and steady growth over the past few albums. The refrain feels like a heartbeat: steady and unhurried. While his voice blurs at the edges, a reminder that vulnerability can live in conjunction with strength.

“Swimming” catches you mid-current, tumbling you into its stream. Guitar fragments appear like sunspots, somewhere between longing and amusement. At the center of the record, it’s a track that could feel heavy handed. Instead, its light – buoyant in its sadness, as if noticing the color of the leaves as the storm passes through them.

“Ego” strikes differently. Accompanied by the sly tension of the piano, Knishkowy begs the looming questions of the human experience: “Do I need to be kind?”. It pulses, even slightly ironically – as if he’s testing whether or not you’re paying attention. The track introduces a shift, with hidden twang and undercover woes – it exemplifies a willingness to deconstruct and rebuild. The shift continues into “Just Like You”, which reimagines sound into the nostalgic experimentation of the early 2010s. You feel transported to somewhere serene, familiar, comfortable. It’s a kaleidoscopic experience that melts together into something nearly indescribable.

“Spaces” returns to the album’s homebody heartbeat, offering reflection on the gaps between moments and people. The instrumentation is sparse, allowing the space to resonate deeply. The final title track “Watch the Sunflowers” closes the album with a gentle crescendo, leaving a lingering sense of warmth and resolution – the perfect ending to a record that moves carefully between reflection and the light.

William Blake quotes “As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.” Knishkowy understands this intimately; Watch the Sunflowers isn’t about what’s seen, but how it’s seen. Stillness can sharpen sight, and the smallest moments can open to infinity.

You can listen to Watch the Sunflowers out now as well as order it on vinyl via Ruination Records.
Fragments and Feedback: Laveda’s Love, Darla | Album Review

November 19th, 2025

Written by Arden DeCanio

Laveda’s Love, Darla opens in a haze – distortion pushing against reality, vocals in between presence and distance. A feeling only capable in the fading summer hours of this early autumn album. The Albany group is no stranger to working in pieces, creating records that stand on a strong hill of no resolution. For duo Ali Genevich and Jake Brooks, instability is not a flaw so much as it is a pedestal – shaping every note, every pause, every moment that pushes against the noise.

The record unfolds starting with “Care” – which doesn’t provide so much as the title may suggest. The guitars are ragged, distortion pulled nearly threatening collapse, with vocals sounding half-dubbed from an alternate tape. It sets the stage as a mosaic of disorder and shoegaze revivalism. Not unlike the rawer moments of their influences like Paper Lady and Holding Hour, Laveda chases the sensation of the unsteady. The impulse extends with high velocity into “Cellphone” and “Strawberry”. These songs feel made for the VFW Hall, the local house show, the dusty dive bar where the PA system will blow out.

It’s the quiet moments, however, that complicate and bring a certain fragile depth to the album. Songs like “Dig Me Out” slow the frame, with admissions like “I know you’re gonna kill me / I need your love it’s endless” cracking the worship of volume with matter-of-fact clarity. It’s not a plea, but a Didion-like observation. It’s one of the only times we find comfort in the record, in a bizarre way – as the honesty feels buried within us, too. The almost hushed nature reappears in the closing track, asking “when you come around, will you think of me?”. Beneath a rock hard surface, the album ultimately serves as a love letter.

Yet, lyrically, Laveda avoids the temptation towards confessional sprawl. The words arrive clipped, anchoring the sound rather than explaining it. Self doubt, dislocation, the struggle to inhabit one’s own life; they’re all present themes, but rendered bluntly, almost sparsely, while the guitar does the emotive work. In this way, this record is separated from the melodrama of its peers: the restraint is sharp and cutting.

Laveda’s Love, Darla feels like the kind of record you stumble into sideways: half-buried on Bandcamp, just caught on your college radio that still gets it right now and then. This record belongs to the East Coast DIY circuit, where distortion is structural and vocals barely cling to the surface. Give it a listen on Bandcamp and check out their current tour dates!

You can listen to Love, Darla out now as well as get it on vinyl and CD.
Somewhere Between the Cosmos and the Porch Light: Motocrossed’s Self-Titled Debut | Album Review

October 20th, 2025

Charlotte’s own Motocrossed – a seven piece made up of members Blaire Fullagar, Carolyn Becht, Colin Read, AJ George, Todd Jordan, Austin Currie, and Sofie Pedersen – make sounds that make me miss the southern music scene so deeply. Recorded mostly in bedrooms and basements, you can hear the closeness in every take. It’s humid and handmade; a mosaic of rural quiet and cathartic noise. As if the fragile spaciousness of Florist met the unpredictable nature of Advance Base, it settles into the scene with a precision rarely even touched on the first try.

The opening track, “A Mouse in the Field of Our Benefits” unspools slowly, tracing a feeling of smallness into something beyond our reach. Fullagar sings with a voice that is simultaneously definitive and searching with gripping lyricism, begging questions like “were we meant to see these lives play out on screen?”. The song’s pacing is omniscient of the classic slow-motion folk – unhurried, modest, but piercing when it lands.

“Crows Come Down” is brief but essential. The stripped arrangement gives the lyric space to breathe; “something’s gotta grow, if you water at its roots”. It feels less like a studio snippet, and more of a field recording, transporting us to the vast lands under a Carolina sky.

Songs “Drown (Country Grl)” and “Yearning” show range with restraint. The form aches with late-night jam energy, like a Hailaker track warped by the heat and eaten by the cicadas. “Yearning” certainly drifts towards dream pop, guitar melding together until the words are barely held. There’s a teetering between confession and abstraction that carries the soul of the south without leaning heavily into nostalgia – think more Dear Nora than Dolly.

Ten-minute track “Possum Dog” serves as the record’s center of gravity; messy and gorgeous. It moves like a childhood fever dream, parts shimmer, parts collapse. The moments are caught rather than built, making a statement in the strum, clash, and twang. It carries an emotional sprawl where memory feels half-erased, never gone.

By the closing tracks – “Motocrossed” and “Under the Moon” – the band leans into the looseness. The title track feels like friends tumbling through an inside joke, while “Under the Moon” exhales everything, and leaves nothing to be unsaid. It’s patient, unresolved, and strangely comforting in its indecision.

But Motocrossed isn’t just another lo-fi diary from the south. It’s sharper – more deliberate in its unraveling. These songs don’t wander out of lost conscience, but a search for something greater. Each cracked voice, creaking bass, crawling beat – it all feels right. This is a debut that doesn’t beg for attention, and rather earns it through intimacy, through the courage to stay small in a world of high gloss and sheen. In a space that can be dominated by the artificial, Motocrossed makes the quiet, confident argument for the deliberate in music.

Motocrossed was released on October 3rd via Trash Tape Records. You can listen to Motocrossed anywhere you find your music!

Written by Arden DeCanio
Marble Teeth Finds Poetry in the Power Bill | Album Review

September 23rd, 2025

Singer-songwriter Caleb Jefson, best known as Marble Teeth, has always made music that sounds like it could fall apart at any second – that’s exactly why it matters. there was a huge crowd of people gathered in the street reads small, uneven, and at times uncomfortable. Yet, it’s one of the clearest statements from a project that has built a world on imperfection.

Five songs, acoustic at their core – this EP extends the small central Illinois artist’s commitment to small-scale intimacy while pulling harder on collage and interruption. Memory fragments, incidental noise, disjunction; it’s a continuation of the lofi folk lineage that runs through Phil Elverum’s The Glow Pt. 2 and the early Alex G. cassettes – but also belongs to the current ecosystem of Bandcamp folk that refuses polish as a matter of principle.

“Celebration Story” plants its feet in a space that feels domestic and immediate: guitar and voice in close proximity, neither heightened nor diminished. The voice reads in a tone reminiscent of Shel Silverstein, folk stripped to its infrastructure. Following into “Power Bill Blues”, the EP’s stakes are made clear: everyday life not as metaphor but as material. Like Daniel Johnston or Jeffrey Lewis, it insists that the banal is narratively significant.

The center of the record – “Sudden Remembrance, Unfinished Business” – stretches the form outwards. The intrusion of collage, half-baked thoughts, disruptions of fidelity, places Marble Teeth closer to the restless experimentation of Told Slant or Lomelda than to any cleanly defined folk category. “When the Water Broke the Dam” serves as an interruption to the streamlined melodic twang that follows through the record, dropping octaves into a sharp, decisive burst that may or may not land with the listener – yet packs that punch necessary at the core.

Closer “Big Glass… The Lousy Lifetime of a Lowly Cog (icantseemyfaceinthemirror)” sprawls without release. It circles the anxieties with no exit strategy, pulling the listener into its own sense of exhaustion. It fully embodies the EP’s refusal of resolution, staying raw, unadorned, uncomfortable.

This is music less designed for playlists and more designed for personal archives – the kind of record that gets passed from hand to hand on blogs and reviews sites, accruing weight through repetition rather than reach. Marble Teeth isn’t making folk to scale up; they’re refining its scale down to the point of friction.

You can listen to there was a huge crowd of people gathered in the street anywhere you find your music and you can purchase the album now on bandcamp.

Written by Arden DeCanio