Buzz Blog

We’re bundling up some singles releases, letting you know about new music coming from MELO and Tim Tincher this time out.

MELO, “Broken Hands” and “The Self”
MELO is made up of Zakk Hale (vocals and guitar), Jordan Davis (drums) and Mikey Collard (bass). They’ve got a full album’s worth of material written and recorded, though they’ll be releasing these in short bursts. The first two songs to appear on Spotify were both recorded in the band’s home studios.

The group, which wrote and recorded throughout the pandemic, has some deep roots. That includes a time as a larger band, Melodramus, which released album in 2007 and 2010. With a trio of players back in town and available to tackle a project, MELO came together organically.

As Collard writes, “After each of us went our separate ways, we eventually all found our way back to the Salt Lake area and each other to create this new band and music, over 15 years after we first started making music together. Feels like fate. We started playing together again during the pandemic, wrote a bunch of new songs, and are excited to now release them to the world and start playing more shows.”

Collard says of “The Self” that it’s “about my self-destructive personality. I deal with raging imposter syndrome and never quite feel like I ‘deserve’ the good things that happen in my life. I consistently have this mindset that some good things are out of reach, and so when certain good things happen, I almost get this uneasy, bad feeling, like this can’t be right, right? Something’s gotta go wrong, right? My battle with my self-destructive side has had its moments, but I feel like I’ve been coming out on top more so in recent years.”

Hale adds these thoughts re: “Broken Hands”: “It’s about going inward to work on all of the ugliness we accumulate through the ups-and-downs of the human experience. Beethoven called it ‘Storm and Stress.’ We need to suffer a ‘broken heart’ or some ‘broken hands’ in order to create a meaningful and genuine artistic expression or ‘to play the guitar.’ But first we must know who we really are. ‘Do you know who you are?!” This cannot be achieved by looking outward, hence the line ‘Today, take a trip to outer space.’ I would hope this song would mean different things to different listeners. The music to ‘Broken Hands’ has some subtle yet effective modal interchanges from chord to chord. The bass guitar being the anchor, the guitar being the different combinations of tonal colors.”

Hale says that the next tracks of the dozen recorded will play with variants in the group’s songwriting approach.

“The next two songs to be released are a bit more diverse in instrumentation and style,” he writes. “‘Nothing More, Nothing Less’ is an aggressive pop song that is driven by a hypnotic drum loop played on real acoustic drums. The vocal melody in the verse never repeats the same turn of phrase or melodic curve, lending more effectiveness to the chorus. This song has massive guitars and bass, but they never overpower the melody. It also utilizes an open tuning to add to the hypnotic effect. Again, this is a Mikey lyric that I absolutely felt at home with. It deals with coming to terms with challenges of any kind… ‘It is what it is,’ ‘Nothing more nothing less.’

“‘Calling A Change’ is an ‘aggressive pop’ song in the vein of Michael Jackson mixed with the aggressive side of Jeff Buckley. It employs great hooks a la pop, but has a R&B/jazz swing. The format of this song is very creative. I relate this song to being the mature older, wiser and more clever brother of a Melodramus song called ‘Bringin It Down.’ The lyrics are all about A.I. and surveillance and getting away from relying on computers for everything and getting back to the Earth. Every song we write is different and pulls from everything from hard rock to metal to alternative to pop to classical, R&B and jazz… you name it, it’s all in there. But it all ends up sounding like MELŌ.”

The idea of a Jeff Buckley/Michael Jackson melding, well … we’ll look forward to that.

The band can be found on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Tim Tincher, “pray4rain”
SLC’s Tim Tincher describes himself as “a dreampop singer-songwriter, influenced by artists like Lana Del Rey, A.G. Cook, Charli XCX, and more.” He’s working on a full-album for release later in 2022, his sixth. As a teaser, he’s released “pray4rain,” which arrived on various digital media platforms recently, dropping on March 25.

Tincher writes that the base of the song is very much about, yes, rain. “Without getting super deep into it,” he writes, “last summer was a very chaotic time with droughts and wildfires across the western US. It was definitely affecting me on a physical and mental level. I think you can remember that one day where SLC had the worst air quality in the world? That was only a few days after I recorded the majority of this song. There were conversations about praying for rain but not really any concrete action plan about alleviating the drought or dealing with climate change. This kind of triggered something in me to write about how we all have ways of coping with feelings of hopelessness or loneliness. Creating this song was a release that got me through what was an eerie few weeks of uncertainty.”

Suggesting this song is a bit of a departure from prior work, Tincher says that “I've noticed on the last few projects I've released that if I'm feeling more anxious, I create songs with elements that lean more into distortion and feel more chaotic. When I started writing this song, I was originally working on a project that felt much warmer, breezier and organic but this song felt like a big shift. I moved over from doing all of my production on a Windows PC with this DAW called Reaper that I've used for years (with a lot of virtual plugins and soft-synths) to a Macbook with Logic Pro. That unlocked a lot of possibilities that I hadn't explored earlier on.”

Largely creating on his own, Tincher says that “I've kept a pretty small group of people over the years that I'll show stuff to. It's been fun to share clips of new songs and projects with friends over Discord and iMessage. It's cool to bounce ideas off of other creators, get their thoughts on what I'm doing, or even riff on projects they're working on. I'm hoping this will also lead to more collaborations soon in the future! I'd love to see this happen more locally here in Utah too, right now it seems like a lot of the music I've been listening to and making mostly exists online but I know Salt Lake's music scene is growing every day with tons of new sounds and vibes.”

Tincher will be playing with the Logan-based Good Color over the next few months. You can find him on Instagram and “pray4rain” at Spotify.