From the early days of death metal, a hybrid of Sarcofago and Deicide adds its own flavor through a modern death metal style internal dialogue of riffs producing moments of great clarity from seemingly random visions of darkness.
The best death metal does this of course: it takes a few fragments of a scene, turns them into a living narrative, then has them fight it out and become a churning conflict that resolves itself not through human morality but supremacy of higher relevance to the end result.
While the percussion follows more of a European style akin to that of proto-underground bands, guitars clearly aspire to an Incantation or Immolation style of protracted, contorted riffs that give these demos a resonant feral obscurity.
Envers moi-même J’ai trop valsé Avec les crève-cœurs que je sème
On Clair-obscur, David Emme arrives with the rare self-possession of an artist who seems to have chosen his limitations carefully and then made them eloquent. The Quebec City musician works in a palette familiar to post-punk and new wave: trim bass lines, cool keyboards, percussion with a stern sense of purpose, a voice held at a slight remove. Across four French-language songs, he studies strain, yearning, and the small ceremonies of survival with a sophisticated poise.
Étranger opens the EP with a mood of self-estrangement that never slips into theatrical excess. Emme sings from within the debris of his own past decisions, sounding bruised, restless, and quietly searching for a path out of private ruin. The arrangement gives the song a graceful pressure, as if each part were tightening around a thought the singer cannot quite release. We feel the sense of someone trying to walk upright while carrying the weight of old damage.
The centerpiece, L’échine, deepens the record’s concerns and broadens its scale. Here, personal unease seems to touch the larger instability of the present tense. The instrumentation has force, though it is deployed with restraint, and Emme allows a thin strand of resolve to move through the song’s unease.
Brèche is the EP’s most tender offering, though even tenderness arrives with difficulty. Its plea is directed toward someone sealed within themselves, and the song circles the problem of emotional access with unusual delicacy. Sleeplessness, memory, fear, and longing pass through the lyric like weather fronts. Emme’s vocal carries an ache that never begs for sympathy. It simply stays close to the wound.
Then comes Encore, which introduces a more sensuous sweep without loosening the EP’s discipline. Its romantic hunger, touched by the polished drama of eighties pop, lends the closing stretch a lift that feels briefly transportive. Yet even here, desire remains entangled with grief and recurrence, bringing to mind Holy Wire and Stare Away.
Listen to Clair-obscur below and order the album here.
Though the record’s title, Clair-obscur, suggests contrast, David Emme is less interested in stark oppositions than in gradations of feeling. His songs live in intermediate states: affection under pressure, doubt dressed as discipline, hope appearing in narrow bands. The production, handled with Jeremy Cornellier and mastered by Francis Ledoux, favors depth over clutter. Synths gather like mist on glass. The guitars keep their edge without turning blunt or bludgeoning. The drums move with a steady insistence that gives the songs shape and forward motion, even when the sentiments inside them threaten collapse.
Clair-obscur is a strong first statement: elegant, unsettled, and persuasive in its understanding that feeling often arrives mixed, never pure, and almost never resolved.
Last year, Doechii presented Gaga with the Innovator Award at the iHeartRadio Music Awards. Now the rising rapper is joining forces with the pop icon for “Runway,” which was first previewed in the trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2. The track was written by Gaga, Bruno Mars, Jaylah Hickmon, Andrew Watt, Henry Walter, Dernst “D’Mile”…
When you grow up in a small town you learn young that one thing you’ll never have is anonymity. So you quickly figure out how to smile and be polite because you just can’t avoid anyone. That does not mean people don’t make bad decisions, and then live with the results of those choices. Krislyn […]
Superhero guitarists Joe Satriani and Steve Vai and their “Surfing with the Hydra” tour made waves in Long Beach at the downtown Terrace Theater recently and added new dimensions to their large catalog of music to please their loyal fan base. A very loud and passionate crowd greeted the SatchVai Band as they are billing themselves, like the welcoming of a beloved relative during the holidays. Plenty of shouts around the room of “We love you” were heard from my vantage point throughout the nearly two-hour set, which featured the two long-time friends sharing the stage for most of the evening.
After an introductory showing of a video, directed by Satriani’s son ZZ, for their latest single together entitled “Dancing” in which Satriani and Vai are sitting at a boardroom table, being lectured on ideas from an “artist manager” played by Brendon Small (Dethklok, Metalocalypse) who essentially tells the duo that they need dancers to spice up their act. Satriani and Vai, along with their outstanding band — guitarist Pete Thorn, bassist Marco Mendoza, and drummer Kenny Aronoff — then hit the stage and broke into their latest single, a version of Paolo Conte’s “Dancing” as the video kept playing in the background. It featured a variety of street and hip-hop style dancers and fit in well with the songs quasi-Latin style.
Joe Satriani and Steve Vai
Immediately, the crowd reacted, and the energy in the room was infectious, as the band continued with their 2025 song “I Wanna Play My Guitar” that featured Mendoza on vocals, which were originally recorded by Glenn Hughes. Mendoza did a fine job, and his bass playing was rock solid all evening. Continuing with their latest release, Satriani and Vai traded licks on the fabulous “The Sea Of Emotion Pt 1” as the hilarious video of the two dressed in retro wigs and clothes playing in a retro house’s kitchen played on the video screen behind the band.
Vai, all six feet plus of him, stood center stage as Satriani and Thorn flanked him at first, before Satriani joined Vai center stage and the two virtuosos ripped power chord after power chord to the delight of the crowd. Vai then brought out a gorgeous semi hollow body “purple-swirl” colored Ibanez guitar and dipped into the 2022 “G3 Live” material with the performance of “Zeus in Chains” as well as the very progressive “Little Pretty” which showed off so many of his guitar solo skills. The awestruck audience gasped at what they were witnessing.
Joe Satriani
Joe Satriani then re-appeared onstage and introduced the band members before cranking up “Ice Machine,” a play on the combination of Satriani’s “Ice 9” that melded with Vai’s “The Crying Machine.” It was incredible to see these two fabulous guitarists, friends from high school, adding harmony guitar to their individual compositions. It was like re-writing a masterpiece, and it continued almost the entire set. The smiles of joy from both guitarists were infectious, and spread to the audience, who were loving every bit of output from the huge stage.
Satriani’s driving “Flying In A Blue Dream” as well as the shred of “Surfing With The Alien” were not only spotlighting the guitars, but the rhythm section of bassist Mendoza and the rock-solid drumming of Aronoff especially, kept the tempos on cue. Satriani’s fingers literally blazed across the fingerboard of his Red Ibanez guitar, with the skill of a pro surfer cutting across a wave. The crowd rose to their feet in approval.
Steve Vai
Vai rejoined the band onstage to duet on Satriani’s dreamy “Sahara” then took over to perform his bluesy, “Tender Surrender,” a track from his 1995 Alien Love Secrets release that spotlighted plenty of his many incredible techniques, from finger picking to a host of others in his arsenal of tools, as well as ending the number with a liberal use of his tremolo bar.
“Teeth of the Hydra” had Vai unveiling his multi-necked elaborate “Hydra” guitar, which was anchored to a stand onstage. Vai’s hands effortlessly flew between the necks with the skill of a surgeon, and again, the crowd roared at songs end. Joe Satriani then returned and stormed the stage with his excellent “Satch Boogie” and even finished the song by playing his guitar with his teeth. From “Teeth of the Hydra” to “Teeth of the Satch.” All the more reason to love these guys!
Marco Mendoza and Pete Thorn
Satriani’s “If I Could Fly” is always such a joy to hear performed. It has a wonderful melody and has been used for many action videos that I have seen online. You may remember that this song was also completely ripped off by the band Coldplay a number of years ago and they had a hit with it. Steve Vai joined in on it tonight and again, brought the song to another level. To see these two play off each other as they improvise on each other’s material is really what this night was about for me and many others in the audience.
Vai then dipped into a track from his 1990 Passion And Warfare LP with “For The Love Of God.” The songs soaring guitar runs were absolutely hypnotizing. His fingers effortlessly caressed the neck of his guitar that unleashed incredibly smooth sounds that had the “air guitarists” in the crowd who were trying to keep up, completely exhausted by songs end.
SatchVai Band
Joe Satriani and Steve Vai finished up their set with a duet on Satch’s lovely ballad “Always With You, Always With Me.” To hear Vai add harmony to this beautiful song was definitely “worth the price of admission” as they say, and the part when they were both using the “hammer-on” technique was, again, enough to make anyone stop what they were doing and bear witness to the talent of these two gentlemen.
They thanked the crowd and songs end and the band slowly left the stage to yet another huge applause, and a standing ovation. They soon returned and encored with Satriani’s “Crowd Chant” from his 2006 Super Colossal collection of songs and the crowd reacted by clapping along, stomping their feet and mimicking Joe’s guitar sounds, just like on the record. Satriani stood there with his mouth agape, clearly pleased with what he had created.
Kenny Aronoff
Kenny Aronoff’s familiar intro led the band in a rave-up cover of Led Zeppelin’s classic “Rock And Roll” with Marco Mendoza again taking the vocal. They then ended the evening with a rousing version of Steppenwolf’s biker anthem “Born to Be Wild” that had everyone in attendance singing the chorus along with vocalist Mendoza, as well as Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Kenny Aronoff, and Pete Thorn. It was indeed a fun way to end an incredible night of music featuring the cream of the crop of masterful musicians onstage.
Opening act Animals As Leaders played a very interesting nine-song set that featured guitarists Tosin Abasi and Javier Reyes trading multiple notes on eight-string guitars. So many in fact, that combined with drummer Matt Garstka being in a constant state of syncopation and keeping an almost impossible pace, it was almost making me dizzy.
Animals As Leaders
The song “Ectogenesis” seemed to me like all three band members were laying down a separate solo that magically met up in places, before exploding into yet another direction. “Physical Education” had much more of a groove, and, although the drum patterns had a number of stops and starts, it had many in the crowd bouncing their heads in unison, obviously getting prepared for the guitar pyrotechnics that would be happening soon with SatchVai Band.
As you can imagine, it was quite an evening of supreme musicianship on display from some of the masters of their respective instruments. To add to that, again, seeing Steve Vai and Joe Satriani playing in the same band, for the entire show was something that this fan will not forget. Their love of what they do, shone through the many notes played onstage, and the joy they expressed translated into a very happy and pleased audience. Thank you gentlemen for an outstanding evening.
A photograph is supposed to preserve a moment, but it can just as easily poison one. People look at an image and begin stuffing it with private meaning, projecting hunger, fantasy, grievance, or need until the person inside the frame is no longer seen as a person at all, but rather a portal. Anyone can become prey that way. It happens in bedrooms, on phones, across city blocks, inside social feeds, and in the mind’s own locked theatre, where admiration curdles into fixation and distance breeds delusion. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but plenty of those words are dangerous, and The Shelter’s Flesh shows exactly how fast they can turn feral.
Flesh comes at you like a lipstick smear on a broken mirror: glamorous, sick at heart, and fully aware that desire can slip from devotion into delirium before anybody in the room has time to call a doctor. This Mexican band has already built a name on dark romance and high-stakes emotional drama, but here they hit a sweetly poisoned peak, turning obsession into theater and giving it enough muscle to stomp around the stage in high boots.
Written by Elías Gameros and produced by Gus Oberg and Johnny T, “Flesh” has the kind of reach that makes you think of Peter Murphy, Bauhaus, Interpol, Koudlam, Trisomie 21, Iron Maiden, and David Bowie; the song lives where glam excess, gothic pageantry, and post-punk severity collide in one beautiful traffic accident. The guitars slash and gleam with a cold edge that keeps the song moving with real menace, while the rhythm section drives everything forward like a bad impulse dressed for a coronation.
And then there’s the voice. Gameros leans into a croon that swells into something feverish and nearly feral, a performance big enough to fill a theatre and strange enough to make the back row uneasy. So when the lyrics move into that dangerous territory, where wanting somebody curdles into wanting to vanish inside them, he sells it with enough conviction that you might overlook its sinister undertones.
The lyrics revolve around the instant when attraction stops asking for closeness and starts fantasizing about total merger, body to body, nerve to nerve, self to self, until love becomes invasion. A photograph sparks the fixation, then the fixation grows teeth. The song circles voyeurism, fragility, devotion, and bodily ruin without sounding coy about any of it. It stares straight at that psychic split where tenderness and danger start sharing the same bed.
Watch the lyric video for “Flesh” below:
Listen to Flesh via Spotify below:
The Shelter have already played with heavy hitters, toured hard, and worked festival crowds from Tecate Pa’l Norte to New York’s New Colossus Festival, but Flesh feels like a statement of deeper intent for the band. It is an intriguing single, leaving us wanting more.
Photos by: Maxine Thomas Words by: Cory Stevenson The air was thick with excitement this Wednesday as fresh faced fans, elder-emos and their children unite in line for the highly anticipated first show of Pierce The Veil’s I Cant Hear You Australian tour. If the traffic jams and mobs of people walking in hordes of […]
Photos by: Maxine Thomas Words by: Cory Stevenson The air was thick with excitement this Wednesday as fresh faced fans, elder-emos and their children unite in line for the highly anticipated first show of Pierce The Veil’s I Cant Hear You Australian tour. If the traffic jams and mobs of people walking in hordes of […]