How do you make music that is at once soul searching yet accessible, reflective yet anything but melancholic, poignant yet marked for popularity, enigmatic yet infectious? I bet New Sky has at least some of the answers but then they are hardly likely to give away their secrets . For Son is just such a song, it is all those things and more. It is a song that delivers a wonderfully intimate narrative but one that is also a universal and relatable message about what it is to be a man, a gentleman, a decent person…a human being. Morality, ethics, character after all is just about common sense and honesty, you don’t need a politician or a religious leader to tell you what the right thing is and it is such a message that sits at the heart of Son.
It runs along a soulful groove but you wouldn’t call it a Soul song in the generic sense, similarly it is bluesy but not blues, it is built with an integrity and solidity that few rock songs have and is addictive in a way that your average throwaway pop song could only dream of. Do we need a new genre or should we just accept that the best music doesn’t need such artificial and largely journalistic devices? I vote for the latter.
It is the sound of basement soul gatherings blending into back street Chicago jazz clubs which in turn become the sound of illicit blues parties and underground gigs. It is the sound of an alternative, underground path that music took when it should have become the mainstream. It is the sound of a midnight ritual designed to re-animate the zombie corpse of the muse of music that mattered, still matters and will continue to matter, long after the current boy band wannabes have returned to a day job where the main concern is asking the customer if they want fries with that!
What is so great about Son, the real underlying charm it effortlessly exudes, is how wonderfully loose it feels, how relaxed and conversational whilst being anything but sloppy. And that is the art of such music. Get things too together and it sounds like an uptight recital, too loose and you sound amateur and unprepared. But get the sweet spot and you sound both professional and chilled, competent to the point of relaxed. It goes without saying that here the New SKY hits the sweet spot dead centre.
I’m going to break out one of my go-to and possibly made up words now. Ready? Groovesome! I’m not sure if you will find it in the dictionary but it is exactly the right word for 
There are some bands that make music which sits in a wonderfully, non-generic middle ground. I don’t mean that in dismissive way, suggesting perhaps there is something middle of the road or predictable about these bands. Quite the opposite. I’m talking about bands whose sonic creations seems to touch a wide range of genres without fully committing to any one, who’s songs seem to be more about the art of songwriting than any generic gimmickry or playing to the gallery of the devoted. 
Ooh, I love a bit of old-fashioned, honest-as-dirt rock, so it’s with refreshing delight that Bath band 
It’s very easy to judge books by covers, or in this case bands by titles and upon seeing both the name of the band and the album, I have to confess that thoughts of some sort of dreadlocked, hippie-esque, stoner alt-dance did immediately set off warning bells in my brain. And whilst they do occasionally work some wonderfully heavy and pulsating, psi-trance style electronica through the middle of their songs, there is so much more going on here.
I didn’t realise that bands were still making music like this but I’m rather glad that they are. In an age where punk seems largely about rose-tinted nostalgia trips, alt-rock is all about getting just the right brand of skinny jeans and the this week’s complicated hair style and metal has long become a parody of itself, it seems as if the heavier end of music has been subsumed by imposters and chancers, retro-gazers and pastiche plunderers. Thankfully bands like Bitter Grounds pop up with just enough frequency to give us heart and stay true to the ragged, rock and roll cause.
Revelling in the past is all very well and good but the best music, or at least the most original, seems to be made as people move things forward. It’s evolution, it’s forward-thinking, it is the way the world turns. 
Music is made for many different reasons. It can be fun, celebratory and throw-away, it can be deep, meaningful and poignant, it can be everything in between. More and more often I am find an increasing amount of music coming my way that feels driven to comment on the nature of the world around us and I ask myself why that is. Is it that the world is indeed a darker and more unequal world these days, is it that injustices are better reported and so is informing the man in the street in a way that wasn’t possible in the past. Is it because many artists are again seeking the power of a platform to make themselves heard rather than merely chasing the hollow and transient music industry rewards. I suspect that the answer is all of the above.
It is one thing to use the age old line that music saved you, acted as a form of redemption and was the catalyst to turn your life around. It is a concept that has become so linked to the back story of a middle-class, comforted and closeted pop wannabe on TV talent shows that it has lost a lot of its meaning. But when 
Imagine if jazz had evolved from the New Romantic synth experimentation of the late 70’s or that punk had been instigated after the invention of the affordable synthesiser or even that computers had been programmed to write acoustic pop songs. All unlikely scenarios for sure but each of those does say something about the three tracks that make up 
