The Mango Furs – Shoes Untied
Underneath the mysterious presentation of this Nashville quartet, there beats a heart that’s in tune with the 1960s sweetest psych-rock tunes. The Mango Furs might as well be studio hermits for all I can tell. Their song Shoes Untied songs like the kind of single that A&R people, back in the not too distant past, would have spent millions of dollars to get the record-labels’ bands to write.
It’s certainly pretty, but not in an obvious way. Yes, it reminds me of Cage the Elephant’s earlier singles. That’s neither something shameful, nor will it hurt the song’s commercial potential.
There are many interesting elements here that don’t just provide a diversion but add to the song overall. There’s a memorable surf-rock guitar riff snuck in. There’s even a trace of retro-psychedelia courtesy of the sound effects and church organ sounds. And, there’s more than a hint of slacker-rock in the vocal delivery. Here’s a radio single done right.
The Yardarm – The Fact of the Matter
New bands, typically, spend the most amount of time of their first months together discussing what the group’s name is going to be and what kind of genre they are going to cover. If they’re really ambitious, they sketch out a logo design. Fortunately for indie-rock bands, they face little worries in regards to the sounds that they will be covering. Here’s a style that offers artists a free pass on taking musical elements from any of the genres that the band members fancy.
Talent borrows. Genius steals, of course. Winning or losing the songwriting battle is then merely a case of knowing where to take from and how to reinterpret the results.
The Yardarm comes armed with a great amount of confidence and stonerish, comfortable vocals. They also have a song, Fact of the matter, that sounds like someone learning to play Mick Ronson riffs, and adding to them melodies that got MGMT a hit a while back.
It’s a very nice sound that reveals the Yardarm to be collectors of records, not just of good times.
