Written by If you follow music blogs, this band is, by now, old news. If you don’t, you can thank me later. The band I speak of is The Morning Benders, a little group from California. A fact that is easily understood once you dig into their wave-washed new album, Big Echo.
Big Echo is The Morning Benders’ second studio album, following Talking Through Tin Cans and is aptly named as the whole thing just kind of reverberates. To me, there are a few standout tracks, but the album as a whole is outstanding. The quickest little pop glory nugget is “Cold War (Nice Clean Fight)”, it clocks in at a whopping 1:44, but based on the amount of times you will listen to it over and over, it might as well be about 10:00 long. Lead singer Chris Chu only needed about only needed about 20 seconds to work in one of my favorite lyrics of 2010 so far, “If you catch my drift, hold it close to your heart..” he sings as he works through a breakup scenario. He begs his opponent to keep the war cold even at the very end and the serious tone of the lyrics is belied by the upbeat hand-clapped rhythm.
On “Promises”, Chu and his mates start out cool and calculated and build toward the chorus from the verse. The organic growth of oral percussion, drums, and guitar strums is what really gets me on this track. It rises and crests just like a wave until it crashes down and the fuzzy guitars mount on top of each other again and reunite with the drums to form a pulse almost only to scatter again.
And on the track which will stay with me, with you, forever, “Excuses” they really do something special. “Excuses” is just like, remember the scene in Walk Hard when Dewey Cox has like 1000 people in the studio of all different shapes and sizes. Well this is the song that came out of it. It’s just like everything piled on top of each other, but in the way that cheese fries do it (awesome), not in the way that dumps do it (gross). Layering strings, percussion, vocals, guitar over and over to create this force of sound is just really impressive. You can see how something like this comes together, which makes it all the cooler (Thanks to Adam G. for this link):
Yours Truly Presents: The Morning Benders “Excuses” from Yours Truly on Vimeo.
So that’s awesome. I just love what he says about the song. It makes me hopeful in that way that very few tunes ever do. Very cool. And that’s only three tracks. I’m not going to spoil the rest for you, just listen to it. It’s going to be a great one to fill your lazy summer days and your bocce games at your cookouts, I promise.
The OTHER album you should be listening to in preparation for the summer is Free Energy’s Stuck On Nothing. It is the party anthem album of the year. Free Energy likes to pull on the tunes from bygone eras and it chooses the most bombastic and guitar duelingest ones with excellent results. In fact, sometimes you might feel like the record you’re hearing is from the 70′s.
Free Energy have been compared to several bands of the 70′s especially Thin Lizzy of “The Boys are Back” fame and that’s a good thing in this blogger’s estimation. There is something familiar and fun about almost every one of their tunes but something expansive about them too. This is a band I just have a super good feeling about whenever I listen to them. Ok, my 3 songs for them: “Free Energy”, “Bang Pop”, and “Dream City”.
I’ll start with “Dream City” which has perhaps one of the best ripped-off openings and backbeats ever. Listening once, you’ll be able to pick up the “Rock N Roll Pt. 2″ vibe rather quickly, but the song takes a couple different steps than that stadium anthem winding up and winding down in parts. It’s a cool song and it ends with a saxophone? Yes it does.
“Bang Pop” is the kind of song you immediately hang on to and shout along with. It sounds like a Weezer track if Weezer had decided to throw in a bunch of guitar soloing and a pulsing rhythm. It’s also a pretty sexy tune and one that keeps you slapping your knee and clapping your hands or vice-versa.
But for me the best is the opening track, “Free Energy” which has a little AC/DC meedley-meedley action, some fantastic solo action, and a super-positive vibe. I love listening to this song when I walk around the city, it kinda gives life to everything. It might help that they are now based in Philadelphia, but I like to think they might be singing about the street I’m walking on. Also, do you have a fever? This track has the requisite prescription to cure it.
I’m going to find that street, looks like they’re in my old basement, except a lot less creepy. Anyways, that tune gives you a good idea of what I mean. This album will be in heavy rotation all summer because the tunes are just really positive, semi-nostalgic, and certifiably power-classic-rock-pop jams.
Start listening now, so you can sing along when you come over for a PR cookout. Otherwise, you will be super left out when we do karaoke.
added to the wedding playlist-keep summertime tunes headed my way brother. it’s almost jon daly season