With the release of the single "Play Me A Christmas Song", Stephen Dowd manages to bottle the very specific, blue-hued silence that falls over a living room once the wrapping paper has been cleared away. It is a curious thing, really, how a melody can act less like a sound wave and more like the smell of a candle that was blown out five...

Matthew Phillips, the two-time San Diego Music Award-winning independent artist, takes up arms against our modern era's disposable romance on his new single, "Battlefield of Love." We live in an age where discarding people is terrifyingly easy. Phillips rejects that entirely. Writing, playing guitar, and performing with a fierce sense of defiance, he blends alternative rock urgency with sprawling cinematic textures to build a...