Sammy Tenuta's just released Acoustic Sleepover EP is a four-song collection that showcases two very different sides of the singer-songwriter. Two of the tracks, "Places" and "Sweet Goodbyes", are melodically beautiful pop songs that tell personal stories, but stories that almost everyone has lived. Compelling and emotional, both tracks have the haunting melodic touch that is a hallmark of many of Tenuta's songs. The other two tracks on the EP ("Liberty Falls" and "Til Then I Wait") show the harder side of Tenuta's writing, even in this acoustic setting. Acoustic Sleepover was recorded by Art Rento, who also produced the four tracks with Tenuta, and the two manage to find a careful balance between the simplicity of the acoustic format and the appeal of tastefully added arrangment.

The release party for the project is Saturday, June 18 at The Playroom, (773 625-5300), and aotpr.com favorite Allison Wonderlin will open the show (starting around 8PM). She'll be playing a number of her originals, like "I Believe" and "Hopes Will Fall", and it just might be the last chance to catch her live before she leaves for Nashville.

Sammy Tenuta plays again on June 24 at noon at the Thompson Center, 100 E. Randolph, and Acoustic Sleepover is at cdbaby (CD and mp3), and at Amazon.

Hay Perro's Record Release is at Quenchers, Friday March 11. Thunderunderus and I Love Rich! are there too, starting at 9PM. A great chance to check out what The Illinois Entertainer called "the sound Hay Perro has crafted during its five-year existence: intricate heavy-metal — dual-guitar harmonies everywhere — played with madcap punk-rock ferocity." If you want to, you can look up some of our other stories on Hay Perro while you're waiting for the show to start.

South By Southwest runs March 11 through the 20th in Austin, and Black Light Saints will be there to play Cedar Street Courtyard on Tuesday the 15th, after which they head to San Antonio for a show at Limelight on the 16th. Their Impossible Picks album is getting heard alot in alot of places --- I just listened to it again when Britton Wetherald and Dan Agosto stopped by Heart & Soul to do a podcast, which we'll have in a day or so. There's a new release from the band at dopecouture.com called "Research The Obvious" (along with a great write-up) if you can't make Austin or San Antonio.

Hay Perro's "Eastern Ideas of Death" is out now, and the word about it is starting to go around. Here's an excerpt from a great interview with Chris Grubbs, lead singer for Hay Perro, that just appeared in The Illinois Entertainer: "Hay Perro is unknown to most of you right now, but you’d be doing yourself an enormous favor by changing that and listening to the scorching Eastern Ideas Of Death ... the absolute essence of the sound Hay Perro has crafted during its five-year existence: intricate heavy-metal — dual-guitar harmonies everywhere — played with madcap punk-rock ferocity."

Divide-and-conquer compartments are perfect for large media organizations; they can take polls, confiscate private information, and hire focus groups, and then use all that data to make entertainment they own outright and can market to death --- but it's definitely not the best way to make music. Hay Perro may be a metal band that leans toward punk, or maybe they're a punk band that loves metal, but whatever they are, they play what they play because that's how it ended up when they made the music. Here are a couple of examples of the music they make, both from the just-released Eastern Ideas. First, more of a metal vibe, from the title track, "Eastern Ideas of Death":

Then, more on the punk side with this excerpt from "He's From Norway":

For a nine-song ride through Hay Perro's world of punk-metal genre defiance, check out "Eastern Ideas of Death", at Amazon or iTunes, or get a copy you can really own at the Release Party at Quenchers at 9PM on March 11. Besides seeing a great band, you can enjoy this part too: nothing defies the media dictatorship more successfully than being open-minded.

Blackened Blue is returning to Philadelphia's Trocadero for the Troc's New Years Eve show, this time playing with a killer band called Halestorm. I'm just checking them out now for the first time, courtesy of the link from Blackened Blue, and listening to Halestorm, this could be a great show --- the two bands definitely have complimentary ideas of multi-textured guitars woven into dynamic, imaginative arrangements. Speaking of arrangements, Blackened Blue are in the studio working on two new tracks, and they've just finished doing an interview on Philadelphia's Gas Light radio. We'll be working on links to the new tracks and to the interview as soon as they're available. Until then, for more info check out blackenedblue.com, and while you're there, take a minute to go listen to Halestorm.

I don't know if I've ever met anybody whose band had a cooler story than Youngblood Brass Band. I ran into Joe Goltz at a party last summer, and ever since then I've thought that I should tell somebody about YB, which is a nine-piece horn band that pretty much defies any further description. I'll just post a few links so you can see (well, and hear) for yourself. I don't really even know if they're nine-piece; I can't ask Joe because it took me so long to write this article that they all left the country. They do that every year, because their completely unprecedented approach to brass-driven music is radio-ready, sell-out material all through their European tours.

We're following a band from Philadelphia called Blackened Blue, and we've just posted a recent recording of one of their newer tracks, "High Tide", in our On The Side section. Blackened Blue's music is unique in a way that will often stay beneath the media radar for awhile. They're unusual, and unusually musical, but not in any of the ways that will usually attract immediate media attention. One of the really unique qualities they bring to their original music is that their song arrangements showcase a vibrantly creative respect between the four musicians. It allows them to put tracks together that are precisely crafted, but that move effortlessly --- and often surprisingly --- across a range of musical boundaries. You wouldn't usually hear a blistering metal passage as part of a groove-based song, or a lyrical passage in the middle of hard alternative track, but Blackened Blue go wherever they want to go, and somehow take you with them. It's not so much that they defy established conventions, it's more like they just see right through them, ignore them, and move on. There's much more to hear and see about Blackened Blue at blackenedblue.com, and their album A Brief Moment Of Clarity is available at Amazon, Last.fm and iTunes.

Just found out about a band from Philadelphia called Blackened Blue -- this is a new song of theirs (available soon) called "High Tide".

There's not too much that's more real than walking onto a small stage in a club you've never been in before to play your guitar and sing your songs. Not a lot of room for posing, nowhere really to hide, an acoustic set is usually just you and a cafe full of strangers, and hopefully a few friends who came too. It's a hopeful, challenging, intimidating chance to do what you love and find out if anybody else loves it, likes it, or even watches it when there's a TV over the bar they can watch instead. Last week I saw Sammy Tenuta and Allison Wonderlin trade sets in a friendly place called Club Amore (how can you not love that name) and take turns making everybody in the place stop everything else and wait for every word, every note.

You wouldn't usually get the chance to see such a study in complementary differences. Sammy comes out of successful Chicago rock bands that headlined the biggest rooms in Chicago in the nineties, returning after ten, fifteen years with his originals and favorite covers, doing them just to do them, playing and singing just because he's so good at it. He doesn't seem to care that he can command the undivided attention of everybody in the place, that he can move easily from tracks he wrote to songs everybody knows without leaving anybody behind. He just starts at the beginning and leads everybody along, from song to song, with nothing but his voice, his guitar, and a musician's attention to all of the details that make non-musicians keep listening.

Allison is from the opposite end of the world. She's just starting out, except like those few artists who are completely immersed in really unusual talent, she seems like she's done it a thousand times. She doesn't seem to care that she can inspire surprised admiration from everybody in the place, that she can move effortlessly from songs she's written to tracks that everybody knows and get everybody to go with her, she just walks up on to a small stage and takes the whole room wherever she wants to go, until it's Sammy's turn again.

Here's a new acoustic track by Sammy Tenuta, called "Somber the Fact". A few years ago, Sammy and Mario Licciardi were in a band called Wildwood, one of the best around. Just before all of the complications that catch up with bands caught up with Wildwood, they did get into the studio with producer Johnny Nevin to record a track called Live Life Right. It's a carefully-crafted, multi-colored jam that was one of the tracks from the Heart & Soul days that we went back and signed when we were starting the All Over The Place label.