Premiere: Oceanography – Marcellus
I’m someone raised on hearing early punk rock music and on demoing my own punk rock groups and pretending to be incredibly satisfied with the sound of those recordings. Well, frankly, I and everybody who ever heard those tracks, knew that the sound hissed and whizzed like the blizzard on Christmas Day.
Marcellus by Oceanography is the exact opposite of that. While the budget spent on recording and producing the tune is not disclosed in the liner notes that I’ve studied, the end result certainly makes it seem expensive.
The song itself is a strange, pretty mixture of road music and earnest-90s alt-rock. Once, America had decided to anoint Adam Duritz as their heir to Dylan. They voted against it a while later, and I’ve been questioning their decision ever since. Marcellus sounds like the Counting Crows making a record specifically designed to be played in your car. It’s melancholic, fully-fleshed out, and should be playing on college radio.
Lesser Animals – Cannot Hang
I’m not one to help out the competition, but if the NME is still in the business of reviewing music, they’ll fall over themselves hearing Lesser Animals. Cannot Hang is the artsy missing link between the British press’ love for the indie-disco bands that can’t write and artsy post-punk bands that can’t swing.
Lesser Animals can do both on this single and the man behind the inventive moniker isn’t even British at all. In the great tradition of writing the most cheerful tune about an awful subject matter, Cannot Hang ties cabaret-style guitar chords, tense choruses, and big riffs, to lyrics concerning the very serious topic of anxiety that is only, naturally, exacerbated by the lack of human-interaction during lockdown season.
