I’m a sucker for new genre tags. Yes, I know that they are only of interest to lazy journalists and overly impressionable music fans, a sort of shorthand that cuts to the sonic chase or a quick way of piquing audience interest, but being that I am both of those things when I saw the term “Mediterranean Americana,” I was hooked.
And it is a great term, more accurate than most generic tags doing the rounds; listen to the titular opening track. On the one hand, you have sweet, bluesy country guitar lines; on the other, folk accordion and, over the top, a set of lyrics that are both wonderfully poetic and brilliantly off-kilter, and I mean that in the best of ways.
But even with those two words suggesting a specific blend of genre and geography, things aren’t quite as simple as I have made out. Take a song like “Pop Came to Our Street” – funky bass grooves and strident beats drive the music, and over-the-top scuzzy, alt-rock guitars, pop vocal harmonies, and a wandering trumpet all take turns in making the song their own. Sort of like an Eastern European folk ska outfit! Damn, they’ve got me making genres up now…but I guess if you need to do that, it speaks volumes for the originality of the songs found here.
“Whos-a-ridin’” is soulful and succulent, “Zinedine Cezanne” is a cool folk-pop piece that makes punning fun out of mixing famous footballers with fabulous painters, and “Lovers Par Excellence” wanders into a sort of ambient cosmic country territory that the likes of Bon Iver would find familiar.
At times, New Gondoliers remind me of Lusitanian Ghosts a band who similarly mix modern pop with more traditional sounds, but most of the time, they sound unfathomably unique. And I say unfathomably because the sonic strands they wield are all fairly familiar when taken as individuals, yet somehow, they find new ways of weaving them together into something totally original. And that, I guess, is the art of making something fresh out of familiar sounds, an art that these crafty and creative Croatians have proven to be masters of.
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