I’m old enough to remember the times before any Internet (yeah, that old) with what would be now considered scant information about any new and exciting band. If you grab a copy of some respectable music magazine, fine, if not, you would have to rely on a good word from friends, acquaintances, anybody. But the most exciting part was to just simply risk your hard earned handfuls of cash and get an album (strictly vinyl) just because the title sounded good or the cover seemed great and be really pleasantly surprised.
These days, with all the information available, by the time you get to get a first listen to some piece of music, you might as well know almost everything about it, what it sounds like, and you were probably able to peek at the pictures of the band members while they were in junior high school. Which is all not only useful (not sure about the pictures), but great. Only, the surprise element is more or less gone. Well, it seems not always. Because Fox Academy’s new album “Saint Molly” came as a great surprise to me. A surprise how good it is.
And here’s where another problem with today’s information glut - with all the overabundance of stuff and information that is bound to come your way, you miss something that you shouldn't have. For me, the fact that this is actually Fox Academy’s eighth album. Now I have no idea whether the previous seven were as good as this one, but I’m certainly going to try and find out. And I’ll find the time.
But what is it we get with this set from Michael Todd Berland and Christian Novelli, two guys from Portland, Oregon, who recorded these songs during last two years along with their friends (and maybe family)? We get an eclectic collection of melodious indie pop songs, that are a few steps ahead of your standard bedroom lo-fi pop. The songs are unpretentious, but fully formed and executed almost to perfection, something Fox Academy might have picked up from masters like XTC, without even thinking of being imitators. We get mostly gentle, almost perfect musical ditties that almost don’t reach the two-minute mark but with each musical detail thought out and placed exactly where it should be.
Want some music that is exciting, but very listenable at the same time. If so, you can’t go wrong with this one.
