Elephant Micah |
 |
Elephant Micah is a project by Joe O'Connell, a young musician from Indiana in the US. He writes songs about dreams, then records them onto good old fashioned 4-track with the help of his friends. Don’t let that fool you into thinking this is just another lo-fi recording for the sake of it though. The fact of the matter is this: when you’re recording an album full of acoustic guitars in a very low key manner, you don’t really need a full 64-track hard disk recording system.
Your Dreams Are Feeding Back kicks off in a beautiful manner. The combination of laid back acoustic guitars and the drum beeps of a Casio keyboard create an atmosphere which makes me imagine Lou Barlow singing with Grandaddy. It’s slow, gentle and just feels very natural: The kind of music that just relaxes you so much when you’re lying under the hot sun.
Those first few tracks are indeed wonderful and I thought I had been given something really special. There is a problem that slowly became unravelled though – the album gradually starts to lag.
With an overall length of 64 minutes it’s quite long and some songs just seem to drag on longer than necessary. It is not helped by the Grandaddy influence slowly fading away and being replaced by a style more reminiscent of Red House Painters. Not a complete disaster of course, but it just seems to lack the character and interest that was prominent in the beginning.
It’s a very pleasant album though, and I think it is a good alt-country record for the summer. Personally, I would have been satisfied with only 9 or 10 songs. Unfortunately, with 18 burned to disc it just seems to bog down the best bits more than I would like.
Steven McCarron
:: back to top ::