An Overnight Low – Paracetamol Philistines
The original punks were merely folks who found the shortest route to their goal. It was a method to escape having to dress in fancy clothing, meet well-known managers before striking a deal with a record label, or spending countless hours hunched over your instrument.
What the punks saw was that trends always shift, and no music industry deity can decide what the public, especially a minority of it, will choose to listen to somewhere in the future.
In many ways, bands like XTC and Elvis Costello, with their smart, snarky power-pop did the same thing for audiences just as angry as the ones that the punks were serving, but with less panache and fewer opinions on fashion.
An Overnight Low is a band that shares that intention. They sound like math teachers who’ve started a band and went about discussing the chord changes for the first few months of their group’s existence. What they lack in eye-grabbing attire, they certainly make up in grandpop orchestration and pretty melodies.
Ethan Gold – Alexandria & Me
The 80s indie rock groups of any worth were certainly not doing it for the money. However, I doubt that there was anyone in the American scene who did not look upon the early 90s grunge bands with a touch of jealousy, like an honest man looking at a million that’s had to lie and cheat in order to earn his millions.
The sound they created, free and broad, usually punctuated by great, expressive guitar lines, lives on. It’s found adherents. Some of them simply chop away at copy those old stylings. The more talented ones work at reinventing them.
Ethan Gold is among the more talented ones. Alexandria & Me is a love song that could have easily been adapted to suit the pop requirements of the age. Ethan, however, stretches and distorts the imagery presented in the tune in a way not unlike the best indie-rock groups of the 1980s.
