The Altered Hours – Lay There With You
There’s an appropriate song for every occasion, the right choice of song that describes any kind of character, the correct tune to soundtrack any event, no matter how historically significant or not.
Find the right combination and you’ll be rewarded. The music business may not be dealing with the same kinds of profits as it once did. Still, writing the perfect words and music, as deemed so by audiences of millions, may still be enough to help you land a house in the same neighbourhood as the great athletes and rock stars. Irish band The Altered Hours is tuning into those frequencies.
And that might be all that there’s to it. Tuning into the right frequency may be the only way to receive those special broadcasts. We must remember, after all, that the very first great pop songwriters were shocked to learn that they could copyright their work. Songs, to them, just floated through the ether.
That’s a long way of saying that the retro-obsessed The Altered Hours have enough discipline to work with these esoteric methods that they find just the ideal sounds for the complicated love affair described on “Lay There With You.” The song doesn’t rely on overused formats or strategies. Instead, The Altered Hours just find what’s missing for creating a story that’s missing nothing else whatsoever.
Maudlin Strangers – Say What You Wanted
Nothing out of the ordinary ever seems to happen to most musicians nowadays. If their songs are their diaries, well, very few of their stories are unusual or, to be frank, worth taking the time to scribble down.
But how can this be? Like Jake Hays of Maudlin Strangers, most of these musicians are forced by their profession to live in some of the strangest places in the world. They live in giant cities filled with large houses and apartment blocks behind which strange characters are plotting their way to happiness.
You should be able to easily locate cult members, stars who’ve turned into drunks, and would-be dictators on nearly every street corner. Why, if you live in such a city, you ought to be able to find some bizarre stories at any time of the day.
Maudlin Strangers make the best of their time in the proximity of odd events and hard-to-explain phenomena involving outrageous characters. “Say What You Wanted” is the kind of indie-rock sound meant to accompany some sort of make-shift ceremony, or to soundtrack an unholy act. The music’s greatest strength lies in the way that it blends familiar pop lines with a just-out-of-reach otherworldliness. Jake Hays knows how to use the Los Angeles weirdness to his advantage.
