Elstow – Just Alive
Meeting interesting people who possess great insights about the way that the world might work is a wonderful thing. It’s also an exhausting process. There’s only so much that a regular human being can handle of these kinds of talks.
People watch documentaries about dictators, or glance at them through their television screens at 7 o’clock news. And while they’re fascinated and develop all sorts of theories, they’d rather not have the dictators over for Sunday lunch if they can help it.
But the opposite is usually true for music. We’ve been spoiled by great artists. And we’ve been trained to await lyrical concepts that have some weight to them. Some things about fishing, or buying muscle cars are fine, but most listeners would agree, aren’t stimulating enough.
Elstow makes, first of all, compelling, beautiful psychedelic-rock music. Should you understand none of the lyrics, the majesty of the music will be enough to keep you delighted. But the questions asked in “Just Alive” are fascinating and should give you enough reasons to want to take them and apply your own answers. And, if, indeed, we’re just alive for the moment with no possibility of anything better, will it feel as breezy and refreshing as Elstow’s music makes you feel for the time being?
Trip Sitter – I Love You All
The easiest way to make money is to take ownership away from everyone else and then give back whatever it is that you took through some cleverly-worded rental deal. It’s not just real estate where this strategy is effective, but entertainment as well.
If this was the 1970s or the 1990s, at the first hint of a band being successful, you’d see record execs jumping out of their limos and throwing bricks of bills at every single band who remotely resembled the one who made it big.
But what a silly thing it is to assume that you can own a music genre and every band in it? What a stupid notion it is to assume that these groups can’t walk and create their own scenes, and their own fans to go along with those.
Trip Sitter has taken everything it needed from the psychedelic musical movements of old and has reassembled them in a way that is wholly their own for “I Love You All.” Hippie-inclined in both concept and sound, Trip Sitter is the kind of band that is so good about reinterpreting the past, that it can’t help but spark a modern scene around it. But just owns it all? Whoever is willing to put enough imagination and love behind this all.
