photo credit: Julian Burgeño

Filipino-American singer Yeek (aka Sebastian Carandang) shares a new music video for “Lumbago,” a track from his latest album Valencia.

The track begins with a deceptively cheesy-sounding electric organ intro, the kind of organ music you’d hear in your grandmother’s house. But before long, the track blossoms into a luxurious bed of steadily grooving drums, deep bass, and Yeek’s delicate yet soulful vocals. It’s a simple combination, but Yeek makes the most of the minimalism and fills the spaces in-between with deep wistfulness. Lyrically, it’s a mellow ode to family vid memories of the back pain Yeek experienced as a young boy. As such, it's appropriate that his mother, his brothers, and his cousins are all embedded in the lyrics, making this a truly family affair.

The video, meanwhile, is a homespun collage of slice-of-life scenes, shot with a “Super 8” film look, and with many of the shots crossfading over each other, lending a slightly psychedelic vibe to the work, and enhancing the languid, melancholy, but deeply funky atmosphere of the track. Gabe Hernandez

photo courtesy artist's bandcamp page

Out this week is the single “Loser,” by New Jersey-born, L.A.-based artist CARR (Carly McClellan), along with an accompanying music video that takes on the perils of modern dating, the art of indecisiveness, and the disillusion behind today’s gut-wrenching romantic expectations.

The track begins with a stuttering hybrid electro-acoustic drum rhythm before CARR’s slightly languid, pleasingly vulnerable double-tracked vocal enters, along with muscular, ever-so-slightly distorted rhythm guitars, immediately evocative of early 2000s pop punk. They offer CARR’s vocal an interestingly muscular counterpoint, delivering the right amount of barely-contained aggression and spite. The pre-chorus adds a bit of hauntingly airy synth pads for emphasis, before the explosion of the chorus unleashes full, crunchy guitars and cacophonous drums, complete with cymbal bell clangs. Meanwhile her lyrics viciously call out an archetypal douchebag boyfriend, attacking everything from his lack of talent for lying, lack of friends, history of broken promises, and even his small penis.

It’s a throwback pop-punk sound in the vein of Avril Lavigne and All-American rejects, to be sure, but it’s more insular in its sound, and refreshingly free of the clichéd rock posing and guitar-slinging those acts performed. Here, the genre is used as a perfect aesthetic vehicle to express CARR’s disgust with partners who lie, cheat, or otherwise shatter her romantic hopes and expectations. In the process, she somehow miraculously transcends the tropes of the genre while being an exemplary example of the punk-pop genre.

Meanwhile, the video (directed by Natalie Leonard & Rachel Cabitt of POND Creative) is a comical—if slightly gonzo—affair, with CARR portraying a blood-soaked serial killer disposing of her most recent victim: a young man who has apparently done something to earn her ire, just one name on a list of the many male victims she’s killed an dismembered. it’s bold, but never overtly graphic, and evokes the sound and spirit of the song expertly. Here’s to hoping CARR keeps delivering top-notch, catchy guitar-powered anthems in the future. Gabe Hernandez