Labels: Count Your Lucky Stars
Review by: MH
This band features folk from Joie de Vivre and Dowsing and others and is of that autumnal emo sound with a poppy slant. Despite the fact that it’s about 40 degrees in Brisbane everyday at the moment and there are no leaves falling on the ground, I’ve had this on everyday lately and I’m pretty smitten by it to say the least. This record has turned up a couple of years after their debut EP (the one with all the arrows on the front cover) and you can still hear the influence of Rainer Maria – particularly in Kate Grube’s vocals. Her keyboard gives this a different slant to some of their peers though and a couple of the early tracks like “Sunny Day Renter’s Insurance” remind me a little of Slingshot Dakota. You could start to draw some comparisons to Dowsing as early as the first track which is a mid-paced instrumental and leads in to “The Petravicz Estate”. The guitar sound throughout is twinkly and rather lovely, and specifically on the stunning “Hans Christian Andersen” it is very reminiscent of Joie De Vivre – cracking song by the way. I’ve kind of gone through a range of favourite songs on here over the last few weeks. For a while, the standout tracks for me were “Jude II” and “Zodiac” which are both naturally melancholy and downbeat as is the whole LP really. That was on the first few listens and then the rest of the album caught up and grew on me even more. I probably can’t decide which songs I like the most on here now – it’s totally without filler. Lyrically, things are all downbeat and contemplative and each track hits home. I could get pretty overexcited by this one. It’s somewhere towards the upper echelons of my favourite records so far this year.