Andy Fenstermaker is a music lover, writer, marketing professional, and entrepreneur who has dedicated his life to sharing his passion for music with others. He is the founder of FensePost, a renowned music blog that has been sharing the latest and greatest in indie music since 2006. Andy has always been fascinated by the power of music to connect people, and he started FensePost with the aim of sharing his love of music with others. Andy developed a passion for music at a young age. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Andy grew up surrounded by a vibrant music scene that left an indelible mark on him. He attended Washington State University, where he studied Communication and Business. He holds a BA in Communication and a Masters in Business Administration. After graduating, Andy started writing about music and created FensePost as the outlet. The blog has a strong focus on indie music, but also covers a range of other genres including folk, indie pop, psychedelic, garage rock, and experimental. Andy and the blog relocated to the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex in 2020.
I’ve been following Keep Shelly In Athens for some time now. Their new album, At Home has been on my playlist for about a month, and I’ve quickly come to love tracks like openers “Time Exists Only To Betray Us” and “Oostende”. Earlier this week, the band released a video for the latter. Read More »Keep Shelly In Athens: Oostende (Video)
On their announcement of their forthcoming reissue of Saâda Bonaire’s lone single from the early 80s, Captured Tracks made note to file the group under Why was this band not huge?. Makes perfect sense; listening to the band’s single “You Could Be More As You Are”, one is adorned with sounds somewhere between Kraftwork (the song was produced in their studio) and Stereo Total. Read More »Saâda Bonaire: You Could Be More As You Are
Since releasing Play Silver Nickels and Golden Dimes on Hardly Art a few years back, The Beets’ front-man Juan Wauters has focused his creative efforts on a solo project. He continues to possess a strong Lou Reed/Velvet Underground-meets-Syd Barrett influence. “Water” is the latest track to surface from Wauters and the first off his forthcoming early 2014 LP N.A.P. North American Poetry on Captured Tracks. Read More »Juan Wauters: Water
Spencer Krug returns with his next Moonface record, Julia With Blue Jeans On. Krug, as you may well be aware, has had a music career filled with diversity; if this is your introduction to Moonface, as it is mine, you may be surprised to hear Krug at his most endearing. Julia With Blue Jeans On consists only of softly pleasant, heartfelt piano-laden tunes. Read More »Moonface: Julia With Blue Jeans On
Last year, Burger Records released the first volume of The Wiener Dog Compilation. Yesterday, Burger announced the second volume, which again benefits William Keihn’s dachshund pop Ghoulie. And, like the previous comp, this one includes a slew of unreleased material by Burger-friendly artists. Read More »Burger Records Announces “The Wiener Dog Comp 2: The Ghoulie Tape”
Written by JB.
It took nearly a year to record his first proper LP (and almost twice as long to release), but Deathcard is the sweet fruit of singer/songwriter David Janes‘ tedious work. After a limited release of his Kill-a-man Sessions in early 2008, Janes spent months writing, recording, and mixing songs for the next record, only to scrap the majority of it and start anew. Backed by his live band, including Philadelphia studio-musicians Phil D’Agostino and long-time collaborator Nathan Gonzalez, as well as Rick Wise and Emily Shick, the nine songs on Deathcard represent a maturity in both sound and writing that Janes has undergone since striking it out on his own. Whereas previous songs tended to lean heavily on the more-adolescent musings of Ryan Adams contrasted by the dark-strum of 16 Horsepower, these tracks achieve an emotional gravitas akin to the material produced by Grant Lee Phillips and John Doe in their solo work. Read More »David Janes: Deathcard [Album Review]
Words and music by Jon Rooney, who records as Virgin Of The Birds.
To begin with a broad shot of dubious hyperbole, I declare that things have never been better than they were 1973. By things I mean popular art: art that was neither conventionally entertaining by modern tastes nor particularly coherent yet existed in some sort of hazy, avocado mainstream rather than the academy or the crevices of marginelia (sorry, Jazz). The early 1970’s, thanks to the persistent adolescent myopia of Baby Boomers and their now five decades of self-lionization, are often derided as being a hazy bummer – a depressing, cruel comedown from the halcyon days of Wavy Gravy and the war against the squares. In idealized retrospect, it doesn’t seem like there were any squares left by 1973. 1972 saw both Deep Throat and “Walk on the Wildside” become huge hits, signaling either a total collapse of traditional mores in the popular conscience or just a fashionable interest in lasciviousness. Either year, all bets were off by the following year.
Read More »Guest Column: In Praise of 1973 All photos copyright Sara Montour. Words by Fense. There’s a personality to The Album Leaf that is unquestionable. Their melodies… Read More »The Album Leaf: Seattle, WA [2010.02.06]
Written by Justin Ray Ross.
AristeiA‘s first full length album, You Give Me Strength, You Give Me Patience!, blends the jam-session styling of Built to Spill with the post-rock sensibilities of Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky, which the majority of their sound is influenced by. Floating melodies intertwine with pounding rhythms to carry you on a journey across winter soundscapes. Read More »AristeiA: You Give Me Strength, You Give Me Patience! [Album Review]
Written by Jon Rooney.
In the late 90’s and early 00’s, For Stars released four full-length CDs on small West Coast indie Future Farmer Recordings, whose claim to fame is surely the introduction of M. Ward to the world years before Merge and his ingénue duets, as well as one EP of outtakes on the impossibly fertile Spanish label Acuarela Discos. Bay Area-based For Stars made very sad, very clear and staggeringly sparse music marked by leader Carlos Forster’s soaring falsetto and vaguely Beach Boys-esque melodies. His songs were about loss, longing, aging, and decay in the simplest, most direct terms. Never resorting to decorate his lyrics with clever artifice or cloudy metaphysics, Forster instead charged forward with sentiments so honest and unselfconscious that they could be, and were, easily overlooked (see Pitchfork’s shitty review of the band’s final release, …It Falls Apart). For a band with five members, the song arrangements were roomy, mellow and, above all, pretty – jazz brushes on a snare, an old synth mixed low, a stranded electric guitar playing single-string lead lines, the like. For Stars based an entire aesthetic around the kind of lovelorn magic captured so famously in REM’s “Nightswimmingâ€; a sense of post-adolescent heartache and loneliness that should have made them the thinking and feeling person’s musical bookend to the Mountain Goats. Read More »For Stars [Feature]
