S.G. Goodman
“No one escapes the marks left behind when it comes to love or the absence of it,” says singer-songwriter S.G. Goodman, describing the inspiration behind her sophomore album Teeth Marks. “Not only are we the ones who bear its indentations, but we’re also the ones responsible for placing them on ourselves and others.”
When the Kentucky native released her debut album, Old Time Feeling, she was rightly coined an “untamed rock n roll truth-teller” by Rolling Stone. The roots-inflected rock n’ roll record saw Goodman lending her gritty, haunting vocals to narrate the dual perspectives of her upbringing as the daughter of a crop farmer, and a queer woman coming out in a rural town.
Now with Teeth Marks, co-produced by Drew Vandenberg (Faye Webster, Drive-By Truckers, Of Montreal) in Athens, Georgia, she picks up the threads of Old Time Feeling. But where her critically acclaimed, Jim James-produced debut zeroed in on the South, reframing misconceptions in slough water-soaked tones, her latest album pulses with downtown Velvet Underground electricity, shifting its focus inward – though never losing Goodman’s searing and universal point of view. Teeth Marks is what you might get if Flannery O’Connor and Lou Reed went on a road trip.
Drawing influences from the aforementioned Velvets, as well as Pavement, Karen Dalton, and Chad VanGaalen, Goodman brings 11 powerful vignettes to life, with a sound that ventures deeper into indie rock and punk territory than she ever has before. Though Teeth Marks is a love album, Goodman doesn’t aim her focus on romantic relationships alone. Instead, she analyzes the way love between communities, families, and even one’s self can be influenced by trauma that lingers in the body. Teeth Marks is about what love actually is, love’s psychological and physical imprint, its light, and its darkness. It’s a record about the love we have or don’t have for each other, and perhaps, more significantly, the love we have or don’t have for ourselves.
Marina Allen
Marina Allen is a once-in-a-decade five-tool musician: She writes beautiful melodies and brilliant lyrics, expresses her ideas with an unusual voice of extraordinary depth and range, thinks in fanciful arrangements, and constantly navigates the knife-edge between too much and too little. Allen’s fully formed and astonishingly confident debut, ‘Candlepower’ is a suite of seven songs that was released on Fire Records to critical acclaim.
A rare and super talented newcomer, Marina embarked on her first UK tour last year and across the US has been touring with Waxahatchee, Chris Cohen, Billie Marten, Mega Bog, and Bedouine along with some special performances at this year’s SXSW festival in Austin.
Based in Los Angeles, Allen is difficult to categorize, drawing from influences as varied as Joanna Newsom, the Beach Boys, loft jazz, Meredith Monk and the New York avant-garde, Joni Mitchell, Karen Carpenter, Karen Dalton and Fiona Apple. Her music is intricate, fierce, soulful, mesmerizing, warm and bold.
“I went into writing Centrifics knowing I wanted to give myself permission. I was fed up with hiding myself and a fierceness started to enter the songs, which I leaned into. The entire time I was writing, I just kept saying “yes”, that was my only rule. In a way, these songs became a bridge for me to get to the other side and so Centrifics became aspirational. I threw the stone into the ocean as far as I could and then figured out how to swim to it. Instead of trying to get it perfect, the album works as a ladder to confront and hoist myself over all the hurdles, walls, setbacks and suffering. In that way imagination became a tool I desperately clung to rather than a place to recede.”
Her newest masterpiece, ‘Centrifics’, will be released in September 2022.