indie Archive

David Wilcox didn’t start his life in Western North Carolina, but once the singer-songwriter discovered the region, he knew he had found his home. Thirty-seven years and twenty-plus albums later, Asheville remains Wilcox’s home, and living here informs his music in myriad ways. In celebration of the release of The View from the Edge, his

If one digs deep into the music on Arden and the Wolves’ Who Can You Trust, a clear occult undercurrent reveals itself. That’s certainly a somewhat unconventional perspective to take, but the fact is that most everything else about this five-song EP released in January 2018 is quite accessible and (in a good way) mainstream

The blippy synth lines that open “Boss Boy” suggest that Fovea’s Pencil Me In is going to be a synthpop album. But not; that impression is corrected after about, oh, three seconds. A gauzy wash of squalling guitars crashes over the synth. Okay, so it’s a shoegaze record, right? Wrong. The guitars recede, leaving behind

Vitelli’s crystalline, classically-inflected piano style and clear voice give the music on Head Above Tide a regal, refined feel that may remind some of Neal Morse-era Spock’s Beard crossed with early Billy Joel. There’s a deliberately dry production aesthetic to the songs that conveys a kind of immediacy; listeners will feel as if they’re right

Tin Roof Echo is the one-man “bedroom folk” product of Joe Hooten, though the multi-instrumentalist goes to some length to keep his real name off of his work. That’s puzzling, as the music is of a consistently high quality. Hooten seems to sell himself a bit short on occasion: though he’s an avowed R.E.M. fetishist,