Jo Marches

This is for all those who know the all-too-familiar experience of falling in and out (and then in and out again) of love. Let the velvety visuals of Jo Marches soothe your soul a little and send your spirit drifting in a pink haze, while the catchy but confronting lyrics of the Utrecht-based band have you “waking up from the dream before it dies.”

Jo Marches’ sensitive sound is brought to life on Silver & Gold through mellow swathes of synths wrapped in seductive melancholy, accompanied by sweet-toned visuals. A sparkly heart—handmade by the talented visual artist Geeske de Graaff aka Gees Voorhees—breaks open to release a million golden particles. (If only all human hearts were this soft…)

More than anything, the swooning sound of Jo Marches and its complementing visuals send you off on a heart-bearing expedition, led along by Johanneke Kranendonk’s blissful mix of sophisticated pop, psychedelic rock and hazy electronica. - Glamcult

Last week the dreamy debut by a new band from the Netherlands was released. The band is called Jo Marches, and is the brainchild of songwriter Johanneke Kranendonk. She has been writing songs and playing the piano for a long time. With her new band she finally found an outlet for her songs to be intimate and having a raw intensity at the same time. “The Night” is the beautiful first result.

Johanneke Kranendonk is a songwriter from Utrecht, the Netherlands. She has been writing songs and playing the piano for a long time, but she had a hard time finding a way to make her songs work. On her own, she wrote while playing the piano, and then performed them together with a band. Somehow this didn’t work for her, the songs didn’t seem to fit.

“Playing my songs in a band didn’t always do justice to them, but at the same time I missed the intensity and ‘rawness’ of a band when playing them on piano”, she explains. So she was looking for a combination of those two elements. And then she met producer David Hoogerheide.

“When I started working with David Hoogerheide I soon realized that a good pop song may hurt a little and can sound dirty. “The Night” is the first result of our collaboration.”
Next to Johanneke (vocals) and David (synths) the band consists of Gijs Coolen (guitar & bass) and Thomas Bosveld (drums). Important sources of inspiration for the new band are Tame Impala, Lykke Li and Portishead. And we have to agree: when you put those three together you get a dreampop song with a psychedelic touch and haunting vocals, which “The Night” is, for sure.

But there is definitely something more. Other key elements are the lush synth-melodies and the hazy guitars which make this a classic sounding dreampop/shoegaze song. Every single sound is at it’s place, and together they pull you in immediately. Once you are in their world, you’ll be mesmerized. Best is to listen to this gem at night, being it the perfect time for traveling in mind and music.

The artwork and photography are done by Mathilde Karrèr. The accompanying music video is by illustrator Iris Deppe and has the same atmosphere as the song. With deliberately vague visuals of a night walk and using ‘neon’ colours like pink, purple and blue, she created a beautiful music video that emphasizes the best time to lose yourself in the music: in the night. - Indie Popups

Like Blondie or Sade, Jo Marches is one of those musical acts with a deceiving name, the kind that often tricks people into thinking entire bands are just a solo, female vocalist. And those kinds of assumptions aren’t totally out there – Debbie Harry is famously blonde and Sade Adu’s moniker clearly inspired the name of her best-selling band.

Likewise, the Jo Marches alias takes from Johanneke Kranendonk, the vocalist of the indie pop quartet hailing from central Netherlands. Together with David Hoogerheide (keys), Max Abel (guitar), Rinse Visser (bass), and Thomas Bosveld (drums), Kranendonk handed over Jo Marches’ short-and-sweet first EP Silver & Gold last November.

Characterized by a balance of gloomy synthpop and colorful psych rock, the EP sounds like the promising product of a hypothetical Pond and Tennis collaboration. Today, Atwood Magazine is proud to premiere the music video for “Silver & Gold,” a synth-bubbling lead into Jo Marches’ debut.

My hands close to your sleeping eyes
Wake up from the dream before it dies

Somehow we’ve seen all this before
Are you losing control or gaining more

“During the making of Silver & Gold, I was fascinated by the different stages of love, and how different relationships in life seem to take the same direction and blend into each other up to the point where memories become a blur,” Kranendonk explain to High Clouds during a November 2016 interview. “All (the EPs) songs are about a different moment in a relationship.”

Whatever happened will just happen again
Will happen again, will happen again

I scratch the silver in my search for gold
Did all I could but my love’s turned cold

While Silver & Gold explores the multifaced circularity of romantic love, its title track focuses on the intersection of unrest and curiosity. “Whatever happens will just happen again / it’s a backwards race you could never win,” warns Jo Marches’ frontwoman in a reverbed inflection layered over hypnotic drums.

In the song’s clip – a brainchild of visual artist Gees Voorhees – Kranendonk is accompanied by a sparkling, makeshift aorta that explodes, showering her in flecks of gold. This is the video’s most visually charged moment, and it fits perfectly with both the song’s title and its instrumental break of expansive synthesizers and fuzzy guitar. Fans of “Silver & Gold” are sure to enjoy the rest of Jo Marches’ cohesive first EP, out now on Palmboomsok. - Atwood Magazine

Without a doubt, the biggest surprise of the week is the debut single by Dutch woman Jo Marches, which is the project of Johanneke Kranendonk. “The Night” is absolutely stunning. The whirling synths and Kranendonk’s sweeping vocals turn this “The Night” into a dreamy, psychedelic-pop tune. Imagine Memoryhouse or early Phantogram being fronted by Karen O, and their output would likely be this lush and gorgeous single.

It is unclear when Kranendonk will share new material, but she is planning to release her debut EP later this year. If the mini-album is anything like “The Night”, then we will have one of the great hidden gems of the year. - The Revue