I have always maintained that music is a time machine. Even in the newest sounds, you often hear echoes of your own past, sounds and words allowing you to reexperience feelings and emotions that take you back to a time and a place. As “Seymour Stein (for Earle Holmes)” kicks off The King Canutes masterful debut, my mind floods with memories of late eighties gigs, of watching bands such as Aztec Camera, The Lilac Time, and The Go-Betweens. The times were good, because the music was good!
And if this Brooklyn-London duo readily conjure up such heady memories, it is less because they are deliberately channelling the past and more that they have created a classic sound that echoes that golden age of indie-pop, and classics never go out of fashion.
So it makes perfect sense that, three tracks in, the dulcet and delicious tones of Prefab Sprout’s “Cars and Girls” are ushered in, a deft, delicate take on a great song.
The two songs that give the album its title follow. “Perfect Summer” is a brilliantly nostalgic piece, a haze of hazy summers, that starts in gentle reflection and powers out in jaunty pop-rock glory, and “Eastern Seaboard” slowburns its way from folk finesse to exquisite indie.
By the time we get to the album closer, “Come Undone,” an understated and chiming sonic breath of beauty, we have travelled some of the most gorgeous, intelligent, original yet oddly familiar paths in the music landscape today.
Keir Woods and Richard Alwyn Fisher have produced a fantastic collection of songs and to bring them to fruition so brilliantly, they gathered around them the great and good of the NYC indie scene – Mac Gollehon, Kevin March, Dave Derby, Kendall Jane Meade, Mike Dillon, Jessie Kilguss, David Nagler, John Leon, Doug McEachern, Renée LoBue and Verena Wiesendanger, to name a few. And it probably comes as no surprise to find Ray Ketchem at the Magic Door Record Label behind the boards.
A fantastic album that both captures something of the classic sound of indie-pop songs from better times and, in doing so, sets the highest of benchmarks for that genre in the future.
Eastern Seaboard, Perfect Summer album
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The Mixture as Before
