Marvelle Oaks – Oh My Days
Force a few strangers into a room, and they don’t develop plans for a future egalitarian society, they don’t start writing amazing prose together, and they don’t motivate each other to do meditation. Put a few strangers together long enough, and they start resenting each other, holding grudges and, eventually, throwing punches around.
Now, if you stick a few musicians in a room for a very long time, what you get, most of the time… is the same thing, only with songs detailing the bustups. But not always. The ones who manage to brave it through, musicians like those who’ve worked on the songs by Marvelle Oaks, eventually reach a kind of higher truth and a connection that can’t be otherwise planned or programmed.
“Oh My Days,” by Marvelle Oaks, has a small, lively, exciting sound to it. This feels like something recorded by someone who just happened to drop into the same garage rehearsal space as the musicians working on the track. And it sounds like they caught the group as it was rehearsing for the nth time this particular piece of music. It’s quite a wonder what people can do on the rare occasions that they work together rather than against one another. Marvelle Oaks is a nice reminder of that.
Mondoshewan – Dead Eyes
Never underestimate an overstimulated, under-appreciated young artist willing to spend countless hours chipping away at art that, initially, only makes sense to them. They’re the people that the corporations, which are so smart about selling other people’s works, would rather forget. They’re the ones who make any planning made by these big companies, virtually, make no sense.
It’s not like the kids writing the songs, penning stories, or drawing cartoons even know what they’re doing. It’s not like they know anyone in the industry, have a marketing plan, or even smell good enough that they could join business meetings. But artists like the ones that make up the indie-rock trio Mondoshewan have a much greater chance of changing the world than their counterparts who tick all the right boxes.
Why? There’s something that happens when you push someone long enough. They either give up or they get mean. Listen to the lo-fi, clunky in places, but wonderfully delivered “Dead Eyes” and see for yourself to which category Mondoshewan belong. It sounds like the music of people who make it to the rehearsal space religiously, although there’s no way to justify it to whoever would ask why they’d waste so much time. There’s something fantastic taking shape there, and “Dead Eyes” may just be an early snippet of it.
