Wax Pig Melting, the Vegas grunge-rock outfit helmed by frontman Brian Gibson, recently took a step away from the band’s signature sound to release an acoustic four-song EP. Recorded in just two hours, Reverse Conundrum showcases Gibson’s voice in a way we’ve never heard—at the forefront of the mix instead of buried, which is how we should always hear him from now on. Last month, the band also released a lyric video for “Noise Meditation,” a Nirvana-esque track that harkens back to the ’90s in the best of ways.
Luzana Flores, better known as Olan, has always been a jack-of-all-trades. The Georgia-born producer, DJ, multi-instrumentalist and singer grew up in a military family, honing her craft and picking up influences from her travels along the way. Driven by her appreciation for all sorts of genres—from electronic and R&B to rock and Puerto Rican music—Flores cut her teeth DJing and remixing before releasing her first original track in 2017. Even her stage name is a nod to her deeply cultured upbringing—she was drawn to the word “olan” in a Finnish airport, and the four letters soon became her stage name for all of her creative endeavors. After blending her experience as a producer and DJ and fine-tuning her live performance (she has played at Life Is Beautiful and opened for The Joy Formidable and Neon Indian, to name a few) Flores’ next step was to enter the studio for a full-fledged release.
The result is the October-released EP Heaven, a four-track record that swells with Olan’s poetic vocals. Combining lush guitar-based orchestration, Latin rhythms and dreamy synth beats, Heaven is neither purely indie rock nor R&B, instead straddling both worlds—and adding something entirely new to Vegas’ musical framework.
Hardcore-metal band World Tension just released its new self-titled EP on cassette through local label Running in Place Records. From the instrumental intro of opening track “The Brightest Spark (Queen of Hearts) to the melodic ferocity of “Monumental Demise,” World Tension sounds searing and stinging—a brand of “desert-baked crossover thrash” that demands to be played and heard, loudly.
