I have to admit that “Hey Now Now,” my first encounter with Stray Owls (which, incidentally, my spellchecker insists on calling Straw Owls, so excuse me if they get renamed during the course of this review) put me on the back foot slightly. So, imagine how being faced with a whole album of their music would make me feel.
Excited! That’s how. Pretty damned excited. If one track can remind me that music is at its best, most interesting, and most important when looking for a new outlet or feels like the rallying cry for a new sonic scene, imagine what doors twelve such tracks might open, if only in my head. Hold my copy of Rolling Stone; I’m going in.
We are in the realms of rock here, but perhaps only loosely speaking, rock that has been stretched, prodded, moulded, broken open, and stuck back together. Sedimentary rock, if you like, which, in this case, is a conglomerate, that is, one with lots of other outside inclusions found in its makeup. (Sorry, I studied Geology in college, and I’ve been looking to use that line for decades.)
“Moonlight Shadows” is full of folk finesse and shimmering indie sounds draped in riffs that seem to echo medieval times. “Another Lost Mind” is a strange college rock groover that slowly turns psychedelic and heads off into space. “Scapegoats” is a strange, hallucinogenic indie experience.
“Larry David Lynch” is a mercurial piece of ambient-jazz soundtracking that makes me wonder if they first came up with the titular wordplay and then used that to inspire the music. I wonder what they would do with “Terence Trent D’Arby Water Authority”—actually, this is harder than it looks (and that joke might be funnier to UK readers.)
Anyway, When the Going Gets Weird is everything I thought it would be. I’m still not sure what it is, but it has somehow sated my musical hunger for something new and weird, and not playing by the rules. What more can you ask of an album or band than that?
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