Echo Kid themselves describe the sound they make as “kaleidoscopic dance hall disco thunder” which seems as good a tag as any for an album unrestricted by generic lanes or traditional rules, and an album that seems happiest scouring the musical landscape past and present for any sonic shiny thing that catches its magpie-like eye. It doesn’t take many songs to realise this album deftly dances through classic rock and retro-power-pop, psychedelia, and bedroom indie experimentation; it is free-wheeling and genre-hopping…it is fantastic.
The title track kicks off with a late-Beatle-esque array of shimmering pop rock, a song that feels like it might have been left off Let It Be and is only now being reappraised—one hell of a way to start.
‘Tomorrow’s Just Begun’ ploughs a more off-kilter, folky path, groovey and great fun, while ‘Lemon Fire’ feels more Stone’s-like, Brian Jones exploring his world music and folky side and ‘Why All That Crying’ heads into more psychedelic soul-soaked territory.
And although I have been dropping some big names in an effort to find suitable reference points, ‘When Are You Coming Back’ truly stumps me; it is brilliant, odd and brilliantly odd, a beguiling folkscape that appears to be drifting in from some sort of otherwhere, out of time and unique, like something you might find accidently as you try to tune in a cosmic, trans-dimensional transistor radio that’s picking music from a place that may not even exist in the usual, tangible, physical sense.
‘Thank You For Today’ ends big, an anthemic and awesome summation of a lot of what has gone before, a celebratory sign-off if ever there was one.
Echo Kid don’t sound like any one band, but they do sound like many of the best bits of contemporary music all woven together, not in any plagiaristic or plundering of the past sort of way, but shot through with just enough familiarity to make their adventourousness contagious. But most of the time they sound like nothing other than Echo Kid.
Unique doesn’t begin to cover it.
