Wide Orbit – Full of Feathers
You’ll see in before and after pictures. The effects of being President of the U.S.A. for 4 to 8 years are similar to nursing a drug addiction for a similar period of time. People in this position tend to age badly.
But few want to admit that this is what happens to musicians who hang around for too long as well. Wide Orbit is a new band. The musicians are in love with the world and enamored with hearing each other play. It’s this innocence you hope that they keep, even though you know chances are slim.
It happens to the best. Even the hippies of the 1960s had to be pushed by some corpulent manager on stage a few years into their career and made to sing anthems of love and peace. All that work in the music business makes most people forget about those well-intentioned messages.
Let that not happen to Wide Orbit. “Full of Feathers” makes the band sound as if they’ve discovered their parents’ old record collection and the school library’s love poetry anthology at the same time. The blend, together with the unique influence of their collective charisma, created a warm, indie-psych sound that makes you yearn for long Summer nights. It’s hard to keep this pace for long, although I desperately hope that they do.
Wayside – Beyond the Pale
There are musicians, I am convinced, who, when they sleep, have a variety of one single dream rolling through the theatre of their minds. In that dream, they feel pressured to find a desert. They then get into a large automobile, put it into top gear and go out slaloming through that desert. The night follows the day, and their car keeps rolling along rhythmically, like a drummer who won’t stop, not even once, in the shows ever.
Do they ever reach their destination? Is there even a place that they need to reach? Although that might seem highly relevant, it’s not a question worth asking, not in these kinds of dreams. That’s because any good interpreter will tell you that the point of it all is the search. Getting lost is half the attraction. The rest of it is the groove of the tyres and what might be found out there.
Wayside is a band desperately passionate about getting lost in a land of mystery and the unknown. The band is also deeply in love with the sound of dark psychedelic-rock bands that have undertaken similar journeys. “Beyond the Pale” is music best served with black sunglasses while wearing biker boots. It’s designed to be impossibly cool and like that desert journey to create giant expectations.
