Labels: Emergency Umbrella Records
Review by: Nadia Almashoor
This ep features four beautiful original tracks and a Pixies cover that intersperse between spacy-dreamy shoegaze and delicious indie rock. The opening track “fallout stations’ is a splendid atmospheric introduction and the vocals are wondrously blended in over simple acoustics. A highly soothing presentation that literally catches you off guard with a very catchy “buy/sell/trade’ which is reminiscent of granduncles of lo-fi : Guided By Voices without sounding anything like them but everything like them. The pace is then dropped to a simple yet haunting melody which Death Cab For Cutie wished they had written before appearing on the OC. As a big Pixies fan, I am highly critical of any covers but these four Missouri kids do it so well, there is hardly any room for judgement. With “caribou’, you get a feeling that the FFR can be loud if they want to. This tendency to explode is again eminent in their closing track “transistor kids’. Like Pavement, like The Flaming Lips, like Three Mile Pilot and like so many other gems of this calibre, one doesn’t have to subscribe to a particular straightfoward straightlaced sound. The FFR are indeed remarkable in displaying their talent and are definitely not afraid to combine their influences and moulding them into an adorable creation.
A winner for my cold drizzly moods and rainy weather.