Whenever you stumble upon new music that you want to show someone, you create an elevator pitch for that act. It's not enough to just say "hey, listen to this, I enjoy it" anymore. Every artist needs to have a mythos that's easily constructed into a soundbite that you can communicate to potential fans. Most of the time this is done through the hilarious (but lazy) device of combining two existing popular acts into a portmanteau of talent, which leads to people improperly classifying acts like Rita Ora as "Rihanna meets (someone wholesome)." This does, however, make for a fun parlour game when you reverse engineer it and try to make your friends guess which artist you're talking about. Anyway, my point is that music is now largely narrative driven and that sometimes, that's a good thing.Take the HellShovel album that was sent my way this morning. I would probably not have pressed play had I not read a sentence about their album having "the sound of Johnny Cash drowning in a pool of cough syrup." Fuck yeah. Turns out it's a painfully accurate description of what this album is, with the whole project's distorted sonics somehow coming together to sound good. The band is led by Demon’s Claws frontman Jeff Clarke, and features Dox Grillo sharing the strings/vox duties with Bloodshot Bill. So in case you needed another reason to listen to this, two out of three of the members of the band have great names (sorry Jeff).Catch HellShovel preforming in Toronto this Wednesday.@SlavaP is in the year 2014 where there is no Cash and no Hope, but codeine is just an Instagram like away.
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