Wilmington acts Marlowe, He Is Legend and Gay Meat release new music – StarNewsOnline.com
While we’re all stuck inside getting rained on by Hurricane Ian, it’s a good time to rock some new tunes by three of the best, and best-known, musical acts the Wilmington area has to offer.
Hip-hop duo Marlowe, heavy metal band He Is Legend and the pop-punk songwriter Karl Kuehn, who performs under the name Gay Meat, all have new albums coming out later this year. This month, all three have dropped musical previews of those records in the form of singles, songs that are as musically varied as they are uniformly awesome.
Hear here:
Marlowe
This hip-hop duo Marlowe boasts more than 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and has a big following overseas, having playing a recent tour that included sold-out shows in England.
Comprised of Wilmington rapper and lyricist Solemn Brigham and former Wilmington producer/beatmaker L’Orange, who now lives in Asheville, Marlowe has so far released two singles from its upcoming third album, “Marlowe 3,” due out Oct. 28 from Mello Music Group.
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In August, Brigham and L’Orange were in Wilmington shooting a video for “Past Life,” directed by longtime Port City filmmaker Bo Webb. The video came out Sept. 15 and features Brigham rapping at such locations as the Wherehouse furniture warehouse off Market Street, a couple of downtown Wilmington alleys and some piney woods near UNCW.
“Past Life” features a catchy, swing-bouncing hook from L’Orange and choice lyrics from Brigham, whose uses a hard-slinging nasal twang to deliver such lines as, “I can tell you all about the game and what I found/ Met a couple gangsters, met a couple more clowns.”
The song’s got a low-slung, effortless cool that’s at-once old-school and contemporary.
The second single from “Marlowe 3,” “Royal,” featuring the California rappers Blu and Joell Ortiz, came out Tuesday. It’s got a jazzy, horn-infused vibe set to Brigham’s rapid-fire rhymes, followed up by the muscular, no-nonsense contributions of Blu and Ortiz.
Strong stuff, perfect for rocking at your next house party.
He Is Legend
The longtime Wilmington rock act, which has been around for close to 20 years now and gets nearly 150,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, released two new songs from its upcoming album for Spinefarm Records and Universal Music, “Endless Hallway,” on Sept. 23.
The album, due out Nov, 11, will be the band’s seventh full-length record since 2004’s debut “I Am Hollywood.” The band is comprised of singer Schuylar Croom, guitarist Adam Tanbouz, bassist Matty Williams and drummer Jesse Shelley.
New single “The Prowler” picks up right where the band’s past output left off, with fast-charging guitars and drums along with Croom’s well-honed vocals and doom-filled lyrics that feel at once celebratory and apocalyptic.
The second new He Is Legend single, the epic, deliciously titled “Lifeless Lemonade,” is a self-directed takedown, with razor-sharp lyrics that proclaim, “I have everything/ I want everything … We can do anything/ But I break everything.”
Two songs that were built for blasting, so blast ’em.
Gay Meat
Nobody makes feeling miserable sound quite as wonderful as Karl Kuehn, the songwriter behind the pop-punk band Museum Mouth and the solo act Gay Meat. (After all, Kuehn does have a very wonderful song called “Happy In Hell.”)
“Heart Shaped Flail,” the new single off upcoming Gay Meat EP “Bed of Every,” due out Oct. 28 on Charlotte’s Self Aware Records, continues Kuehn’s tradition of making super-catchy singalongs about hating how you feel.
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To thick, swirly synths, Kuehn sings about feeling “30 going on 19.” Then an absolute banger of a chorus kicks in: “There it goes again/ Swingin’ my heart around my head.”
It’s pop music with an emotional edge, an upbeat soundtrack for stumbling headlong into the abyss.
Contact John Staton at John.Staton@StarNewsOnline.com.