Unwed Sailor – Blitz
The recent great novelists are kids brought up on comic books, bad television, and Chuck Palahniuk. The last great batch of the 80s and 90s bands were a bunch of kids brought up on comics books, bad television, 60s pop music, and warm melodies. Guess what the future great songwriters are going to sound like?
Unwed Sailor will certainly declare their love for the more experimental music artists to have surfaced of late. However, Blitz reveals the vision of a songwriter that has likely spent a long time in a room strumming along to old Phil Spector records and to the Smiths.
Blitz is simply a very good, classic-sounding guitar record. There’s no Eddie van Halen pyrotechnics going off. No, it sounds like the work of a man that’s been getting familiar with Johnny Marr’s record collection. Warm, moody, yet welcoming, Blitz is classic guitar-pop. Sorry, I didn’t mean to bust your weird cred.
Riley Pearce – Golden Retriever
I’d like to think that Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday on a piece of paper used to wrap his sandwiches while taking a break in between sets at the Cavern Club. He didn’t present the song to Lennon and the others out of fear of being laughed out of the room, or worse. Nearing the bottom of their catalog, they started asking George and Ringo to knock a few tracks, and they, eventually, got down to recording Yesterday.
Frankly, a lot of modern rock’s most memorable songs have been created with little thought put into the craft. Whether by accident or because of the effortless nature of the writing that comes across in the performance, some of these are among the most memorable in modern music.
Golden Retriever by Riley Pearce is that kind of beautiful, naive love song. It’s the sort of tune someone writes as a gift on the eve of their significant other’s anniversary as an excuse not to buy them jewelry. But, just as overpriced ear and finger ornaments, these kinds of songs also last forever.
