Otherworldly Things - Time Turns to Memories (Magic Door Records)

If the sound of Brit-pop resulted from indie bands taking an older, English, 60’s beat sound and reimagining it for an audience two and a half decades down the line, “Time Turns to Memories” sounds like the opposite process in action. Here, Otherworldly Things sound like the result of a 90s indie band stripping their sound back to its pop essence and re-connecting it with pastoral ’60s roots. And the result is a sound so reminiscent of bands such as The Kinks or The Small Faces that if you told me that this had been produced by a long-lost British Invasion band from back in the day, I wouldn’t have batted an eye-lid.

But, of course, there is one gaping hole in the scenario I have just laid out above. And that is that Otherworldy Things are neither a long lost 60’s beat combo nor a bunch of 90’s revivalists. And they are not even British. Otherworldly Things are, in fact, a contemporary and current concern from New York City itself.

And, that speaks volumes about the spread of music in the modern age. Genre, geography, and even era are no longer demarcations to creativity. So finding the sound of Swinging Sixties London, complete with the requisite delicacy and deftness, style and sonic sophistication, waxing lyrical in the heart of a modern-day American metropolis is something to be applauded rather than astonished by. Then again, New York City always felt like it was its own separate entity, somehow disconnected from the rest of America, the rest of the world even, so I’m just surprised it didn’t happen sooner.

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