
Your Westies – Cherries
We all wait anxiously for the “New Sound,” that thing that will make us music listeners and record collectors find something wholly novel and exciting to ping our collective hopes on. But although new sounds and techniques do spring up all the time, few of them are as revolutionary or, let’s be honest, satisfying as we’d like.
For the most part, the bands and music artists deemed by the press to be revolutionary were rehashing the favourite sounds of their record collection. Whether it was Nirvana trying to sound like Pixies, or The Last Shadow Puppets taking inspiration from old Scott Walker records, there’s nothing new under the sun. Or, at least, there’s nothing new worth getting really excited about.
This is why Your Westies look as backwards as the internet will allow them to. On “Cherries” the band go out looking for the music that’s made Alex Turner tick. They wind up with a sound that mostly resembles 50s pop-rock ballads, the kind that would be sung by a teenage idol meant to make young girls swoon. However, the style and arrangement work well when the indie rock treatment is provided. Your Westies move forward by looking back.
Folklore Society – The Fall
There was a brief moment in the mid-1980s when it looked like the only people who were ever going to continue making music out of songwriting were the progressive rock musicians. Or, at least, that’s what people used to call them. Now, they were different. They’d hired personal stylists and an army of lawyers, and they were writing pop tunes.
Everyone was in the act. Genesis, Yes, Pink Floyd, Rainbow all did it. They were really good at it, too. It wasn’t just the fact that their audiences had grown up with them and were sick of 10-minute songs about kings, queens, and green ogres. The prog-rock people knew how to fashion a pop hit that television and radio could comfortably play and that audiences would ask to hear again.
Listen to Folklore Society’s “The Fall” not because they represent a new or old way of making music or because some critic tells you that they’re cool looking. Listen to Folklore Society because they have that prog-rock touch over a pop song. Bringing in elements of folk and the complexity of prog, “The Fall” is a song that calls to mind the great campfire classics. Add to this a singer’s voice that sounds like that of Scorpions’ Klaus Meine, and, in any era, you should be on to a winner.