The Answer Is In The Beat

SALES: EP (self-released, 2014)

December 19, 2014 at 6:12 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

We’re in the no-mans-land time period of the music industry, in between the last week of CMJ charting this year and the first of next, and there’s almost no new music coming into the radio station now. Fortunately, this indie-pop duo waited until now to send us their EP, because this one’s jumping out at me while I’m scrambling to catch up on all the music I missed this year in order to find music for my Best of 2014 shows. This male/female duo hails from Florida and initial press I can find about them seems to emphasize how minimal they are (just guitar, drum machine and vocals), and while their songs are short and compact, they’re catchy and leave enough of an impression that they don’t feel underdone or demo-ish. “Vow” in particular has the type of swoon-worthy chorus melody that causes me to play it several times in a row, and the doe-eyed naive voice of the singer certainly helps. Even though they’re American, these songs wouldn’t sound out of place in a set with any number of sweet-sounding Scandinavian indie-pop groups, although the more uptempo “Chinese New Year” sounds a little closer to a stripped-down Camera Obscura. Closing song “Toto”, the song’s most atmospheric and beat-driven track, appears in two versions: the two-minute original and a remix by xxyyxx, which slows things down and spaces it out to 3 minutes, but somehow it actually ends up feeling shorter and more sketchlike than the original. There may actually be more elements to the song, but they’re spaced out more, and the vocals are treated as samples rather than lyrics. The whole EP is an unexpected end-of-year treat.