Back to vinyl, back to analog seems to be all the rage these days. Most of it is some sort of retro posturing, and as far as the music itself is concerned it usually ends up in either pure copycat stuff or just a lot of musical cotton candy - when you bite into it, there’s just a tiny bit of caramelized sugar.
LA duo Midnight Sister and their debut album Saturn Over Sunset can definitely fit into the analog category, but…
No fluff here. By all the musical references Juliana Giraffe and Ari Balouzian present here, they are obvious Sixties and Seventies music fans. To that effect, Giraffe, who wrote all the lyrics even references T.Rex (“Blue Cigars”). They also utilize analog studio techniques, steering away though, from what is considered lo-fi these days (for some reason, analog is too).
But what is clear from the music is that the duo has been able to bridge the gap between then and now - the music sounds like it can be freely called a modern timepiece.
Maybe a lot of it has to do with the fact that neither Giraffe or Balouzian had any real experience with pop music before. Giraffe is/was a filmmaker, and Balouzian is a classically trained musician that dealt mostly with orchestrations.
And boy, can you feel his good touch at orchestrations here! The orchestrations color practically every track, as do the influences the duo incorporate into their music. From the ‘Strawberry Field’s” like mellotrons of “Canary” and White Album-like “So Young” to Left Banks style orchestrations (all over), Kimono My House era Sparks (“Blue Cigar”) to the exquisite Laura Nyro (“Showgirl”). You name it, Midnight Star got it.
Still, the duo is able to give all of it a modern connection, either through Giraffe’s lyrics - “the sound is now”, as she says in “Shimmy”, or through a clear sense that they’re assessing their musical inspirations from a time distance.
And it all works, almost perfectly. Can’t wait to hear what they come up with next.
