Z*L
NEW MUSIC
MUSIC AND TAKING CHANCES - It's taken me a long time to realize what I like best about music nostalgia; it's not the emotion of the music or the atmospherics - it's really just this: Great music is about sounding awesome - but music's even better when it takes chances.
Let me ask you this... If you are old enough, do you remember a day when a good record could be made without having it shoved down your throat through YouTube and Facebook advertising, through pseudo-independent corporate music blogs, or through product placement next to the cash register of coffee shops? Ugh. * (These may all be perfectly acceptable if not potentially requisite approaches to "making it" today. This does not change the fact it stink.) As a kid emerging in the world of music, I seem to remember being richly rewarded, time and time again, for doing simple research with a healthy music curiosity. The best new records are the ones you take a chance on and the best new records out there are the ones in which the artists do the same.
Let me ask you this... If you are old enough, do you remember a day when a good record could be made without having it shoved down your throat through YouTube and Facebook advertising, through pseudo-independent corporate music blogs, or through product placement next to the cash register of coffee shops? Ugh. * (These may all be perfectly acceptable if not potentially requisite approaches to "making it" today. This does not change the fact it stink.) As a kid emerging in the world of music, I seem to remember being richly rewarded, time and time again, for doing simple research with a healthy music curiosity. The best new records are the ones you take a chance on and the best new records out there are the ones in which the artists do the same.
AND HERE IT IS. And that brings us to Z*L, clearly descendant from the past, this is still something quite different. Isabel Reilly (vocals and bass) , Ian Adams (vocals and guitar) and Jack “Knife” Guilderson (drums) cut their teeth in such popular Boston bands as The Ghost Of Tony Gold, Rock City Crimewave, Vera-Go-Go, and Slim Jim And The Mad Cows but is something else altogether in this incarnation. So while you can see, hear and feel the undeniable influences of early influencers: the Jesus and Mary Chain, X, The Pixies and Mudhoney, for instance - the finished product on their eponymous debut is somehow far more than that.
I hear fuzzy psych rock, a country-steeped ballad, and throwdown rock 'n' roll interspersed through this one. It's impossible not to enjoy a band releasing an album's worth of great new music that somehow also manages to take chances. For that reason alone, Z*L is a project you should be listening to right now. Beyond that? They're wicked damn cool.
I hear fuzzy psych rock, a country-steeped ballad, and throwdown rock 'n' roll interspersed through this one. It's impossible not to enjoy a band releasing an album's worth of great new music that somehow also manages to take chances. For that reason alone, Z*L is a project you should be listening to right now. Beyond that? They're wicked damn cool.
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