Kevin Bronson on June 30th, 2022

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Packing a lot into one quick post: Rounding up new singles from sibling acts Cones and Echosmith, along with rockers the Big Pink and Possible Oceans.

CONES, “Big Bad”

Brothers Jonathan and Michael Rosen sound like a classic rock band firing on all cylinders on their new Cones single, “Big Bad.” It’s the second song from their sophomore album, “Almanac” (out Aug. 5). They shared the first single, “Malice Palace,” in May. “I wrote ‘Big Bad’ at the start of the pandemic,” Jonathan Rosen says. “At the time, I was listening to a lot of Cleaners From Venus and watching a lot of ‘Buffy.’ Just like most people, I was stuck in my home, where each day stretched into its own small eternity. A vampire is an infected creature, forced into an eternity of solitude — seemed like a perfect analog to our collective fears of contagion and isolation. We recorded the basic tracks live at Michael’s L.A. studio Honeymoon Suite, which was the first time I got to see people other than my brother in months. The saxophone (recorded in Australia by Zach Stolz) screeches like the brakes of a Cadillac, its melodic contortions perfectly capturing everything we hoped to convey in the song.”

ECHOSMITH, “Hang Around”

Speaking of sibling acts, platinum hitmakers Echosmith are back with “Hang Around,” a pop-rocker that forgoes a lot of the sheen of their 2020 major-label album, “Lonely Generation.” The trio — Sydney, Noah and Graham Sierota — go to great lengths in the announcement for the single to point out that the breezy song is the result of a self-contained creative process, with all three members of band doing the writing and Noah (along with brother Jamie, no longer in the band) credited for production. Whatever, the song is a charmer. “‘Hang Around’ truly defined and set the tone for this next chapter,” Sydney Sierota says. “The process of making the song actually reflects the whole meaning behind the lyrics. We wanted to talk about our relationships, and how when a love feels so right, there’s no way we could’ve planned it ourselves. So all you want to do is be around it. On a hot August day, we went into the studio and wrote ‘Hang Around’ in just a few hours. We listened back the next day and knew right away that this was the direction for our new music.”

THE BIG PINK, “Love Spins on Its Axis”

The follow-up to their “comeback” single “No Angels,” the new single “Love Spins on Its Axis” is the latest grandiose flex from electro-rockers the Big Pink. Co-written with Jamie T and the Kills’ Jamie Hince, it features the U.K. duo Dust in the Sunlight (Annie Rew Shaw and Billy Wright). “‘Love Spins On Its Axis’ is probably the most hopeful song I’ve ever written,” Big Pink man main Robbie Furze says. “My life got pretty confusing and I started feeling like I was in a bizarre surreal war that I was never going to make it out of. It was from the depths of that darkness that I had this moment of perfect clarity and calm. I started questioning ‘what’s most important on this journey that I am on?’ It’s love. Pure and simple. It has always been love. It’s about not getting distracted from that, not wasting a single moment on things that are not important, things we can’t control. Love is everything. That’s what we need to fight for. Let’s start that revolution.”

POSSIBLE OCEANS, “Dotted Lines”

Singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist Trevor O’Neill’s project Possible Oceans announced their debut album “Death by Midadventure” last month with the single “Throw the Knife (Again).” “Dotted Lines” is an insistent indie-rocker with an inviting groove, though it comes with a foreboding world view. “I’m making no advances / I’m in a scene that just repeats,” O’Neill warns, and too often that seems about right. Possible Oceans will be doing a residency every Wednesday in July at the Silverlake Lounge. The free shows kick off July 6.