I remember being impressed with the uncategorizability (that’s a word, right?) of La Need Machine when listening to their previous single, “ I Wish I Could Fly.” Well, the same generic cross-pollination is definitely at work in their new one, “These Old Jeans.” Whereas, often, when music is described in such terms, it implies that the band may lack focus, perhaps not yet finding their signature sound or musical raison d’etre; here, nothing could be further from the truth.
What La Need Machine does on this new single, what the band does throughout their music, is find the natural points where the divides between the various genres are thinnest and merely build bridges and doorways between them.
This is why when you listen to a song like “These Old Jeans”, you realise that there are sonic sweet spots in the musical landscape where gentle folk meets lilting country meets effervescent pop meets understated indie meets emotive Americana…and so on. It is in such places that you find this band hard at work, ploughing musical furrows and mining sonic seams.
At the risk of repeating the point I made when I last had the band’s music under my pen, Seattle is a city associated with a very particular sound, and also coffee, tall, pointy buildings and tech companies, but, in the case of its defining musical association, it is a sound that hit its golden age more than a generation ago now. It may be time for a new scene and a new sound. Maybe La Need Machine could be the first to storm the barricades of tradition on its behalf. Wouldn’t that be something to see?
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