The Beverly Crushers – Holographic Fantasy
You just need to listen to enough bands, flip enough records on and off the turn table, and unpack too many cassettes for there to be little importance of who it actually is making the sounds. That is the perfect moment to really fall in love with a song or with a band’s music. That ideal moment is when it no longer matters what the musicians look like, in which bands they might’ve played before, or any other details like this.
Still, that doesn’t mean the musicians are sparred from any of the heavy lifting. On the contrary! Ideally, they want to become vessels for sounds that take the listener to a dream world. To be able to properly do that, it is expected that they’ll need to sacrifice just a bit of their ego. They’ll need to focus on creating a perfect sound, all while worrying very little about their clothes, hairstyles, or what their friends are going to think when they hear the music.
Reminiscent of the original progressive rock bands, in both sophistication and song length, The Beverly Crushers’ “Holographic Fantasy” is a musical fairytale worth hearing from start to end. This may be a hard ask, so the band does its best to warm you up about getting into the passenger’s chair.
Gently coalescing lead guitar lines, bass grooves, open hi-hats, and sweet keyboard sounds create the magic of the intro. The same elements move more and more into focus as the song progresses toward a crescendo where shards of guitar solos end up flying at dangerous speeds through the air. The band assures us that these daydreams are “better than reality,” and I can’t help but agree.
S. LaBate – New Year’s Dissolution
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, don’t you know. And, if you’re like most people the kind who has been dealing with personal issues and conflicts with your loved ones for the past twelve months, it’s the most terrible time of the year as well. There aren’t many times, except for election season or the start of wars, when people are simultaneously as close and as distrustful of one another.
But we got the Ramones, don’t w,e and all of the great Christmas songs that have been made and talk about these clashes. And, if you’re enough of a romantic or simply can’t get off the couch when a Christmas movie is playing, you’re bound to feel that there’s something with a bit of magic to it happening around these winter days.
S. LaBate’s “New Year’s Dissolution” excellently takes the love of The Ramones and of pop-rock Christmas carrolls and mixes them with the songwriter’s own hopes and mistrust. But that ain’t all. This is an excellent sounding record, take the kind that Johnny Ramone thought he might’ve been getting when he was foolish enough to fire Phil Spector. It’s guitar-driven, has a real warmth to it, and I predict that other artists will be covering it in the future. Just you wait and see!
