“Lo-fi without the laziness!” What a great phrase, and an apt one too for this latest EP from Ryan O’Connell, The Weather’s Been Fine. Why so apt? Because it gets to the heart of a musical issue we experience all too often. Too many artists think that terms like lo-fi, D.I.Y., or bedroom pop are excuses not to put the effort in, that it is a license to offer up something half-baked rather than a sonic choice or deliberate musical attitude or approach.
The Weather’s Been Fine is an excellent example of how you can embrace the aesthetics of the unpolished, produce work that feels unproduced, and still deliver a great set of songs, ones that walk a fine line between the spontaneous and the intentional.
“Cannonball Man” kicks things off perfectly, a squalling, scorching indie groover, proving that a song being ragged is not the same as being messy; looseness is an art, an attitude, not at all the same as not being musically together. Brilliant.
For me, “Mirror Coat” is as good as it gets here, a Cure-seque guitar riff being slowly buried under ever more intense sonics, and the title track, which plays us out, is a wonderfully nostalgia-soaked piece of acoustica, again slowly gathering around it blistering guitar lines—a short but impressive final blast.
It’s a sound driven by its surroundings: a humid Atlanta kitchen and only the most necessary equipment. This stripped-back approach and deliberate underproduction have allowed other elements to be captured in the recordings, such as the fragile state of the artist, the claustrophobia of the surroundings, and “a house and a mind having a nervous breakdown.”
That’s what happens when you leave space for the real world to soak into your music. Honesty!
