Until he left New York in 2012, Gabriel Miller Phillips was a fixture in the Brooklyn music scene and an outstanding songwriter from the great American school. 

For two long years when he could not leave the house for health reasons, Miller Phillips kept company with an acoustic guitar. The result was the fine folk album "One For The Crow" -- a delicate album of gently picked guitars and pop songs with country notions -- and several tours of the United States.

Now home is a few thousand miles away. Time and experience brought Miller Phillips to a new place: "Mirror Mirror" is that album. Written in Munich and recorded in Brooklyn, the album includes Nico Muhly, James Preston (Zachary Cale), Jared Tankel (Budos Band), Thomas Unish (Arp) and others. 

These new songs have a captured power. Indie-pop hooks and smart choruses snare the ear. Guitar burn. A wanderlust breeds new sound: no lost offering.

Those who knew his exceptional, previous songwriting will be surprised. So will those who hear Miller Phillips for the first time and take in his loose reconciliation of pop, indie and folk.

In 2008, when singer-songwriter Adam Hooks relocated to Albuquerque, NM from South Dakota, he had a question: What the hell happened to Rock & Roll? Hooks was fed up with the shoe-gazing, self absorbed pablum that passed for modern indy rock and with the relentless dumbing down of the middle of the road "punk rock" being pawned off on yet another generation of kids at the mall. Where were the 21st century equivalents of The Kinks...The Replacements? In a time honored rock tradition, Hooks answered his own question by taking action and forming a band that rocks, sweats, plays hard, has fun and puts on a great show doing it. In 2009, at a recording session, Hooks, a former member of The Dim Bulbs and All She Wrote, met a couple of like minded souls who were yearning to take up the banner: Stephen Siegrist, on bass guitar, a veteran of the original London and San Francisco punk rock scenes who has played, toured the U.S. and Europe from festivals to club gigs and recorded with the likes of Thin White Rope, Eye Protection, The Surf Lords, The King Rays and The Messengers and Albuquerque native Sam Nesbitt, a hard hitting drummer who has worked with R&B legends The Temptations and The Four Tops as well as playing with The Betternauts and the Albuquerque Jazz Orchestra. Jamming in the studio, the three immediately realized that they were dreaming the same dream. Adam Hooks & His HangUps was born and the band set about completing their first album "Little Lies", released in early 2010. In the short time they've been together, AH&HH has played dozens of shows, from house parties to club dates and universities and has gathered an intense fan base along the way. The trio's sound is an intriguing mixture of stark, prairie Americana veering into slamming, garage rock and roll, alternately twanging and drenched with Hooks' white noise guitar underpinned by Sam's sophisticatedly aggressive drumming and Steve's punchy, melodic bass playing. All this combines to define the songs themselves, haunting narratives from Adam's dark but somehow joyful subconscious that never fail to rock. Hooks' clear, direct vocals with sparse harmonies from Steve and Sam result in songs that hit the listener like musical Rorschach tests whose images and emotions will settle themselves into the memory for a long, long time.

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