These guys draw from the same influences as the Elephant Six bands, especially The Beach Boys, as well as from the collective itself. They play sunny, mildly psychedelic pop steeped in harmonies and kitchen sink instrumentation. Apparently they split up as a band when some members moved from their Memphis home base. In a neat twist they agreed to share the Snowglobe moniker and record albums “directed” by individual members with some amount of long distance collaboration. This is the first effort of that name sharing experiment and was spearheaded by Brad Postlethwaite.
Oxytocin has some catchy material but can come across as stiff and a bit too studied. It’s meticulously crafted and occasionally stifling as a result. You really get this sense with the vocals that are often fussily decked out with harmonies and/or multi-tracking. The rare time that there’s a pure vocal is like a breath of fresh air. I’m a sucker for Beach Boys-esque harmonies but it can be cloying if not metered out judiciously. “Rainbow” is a good example of a song that stumbles in its Pet Sounds pop masterpiece aspirations.
Sometimes they get it just right as on the bouncy orchestral pop gem, “Dry.” And the best song, “Happy,” stands out not only for its quality but also because it’s atypical of anything else on the album. Irony abounds as the approaching mid-life crisis sober self-assessment lyrics are set to a boppy beat with cheesy 80’s-sounding horns and a ridiculously catchy sing-along melody. These two tracks are easily the highlights of a generally agreeable album.
Mixtape tracks- “Happy” and “Dry”
Freebies- No mp3’s but you can stream “Happy” at the Snowglobe MySpace page.
There’s a really interesting feature at Pop Matters called
Elf Power’s eighth album finds the band veering off in a far more folky direction than on past efforts. Back to the Web is especially striking in contrast to its predecessor, 2004’s guitar-centered rocker, Walking With the Beggar Boys. About the only song that matches that album’s vibe is the glam styled “All the World is Waiting.” The change in sound isn’t exactly jarring though. As soon as Andrew Rieger starts to sing there’s no mistaking these songs for anything but Elf Power. Rather than the fuzzed out psych rock of their previous work, this is more of a jangly folk-psych rock. Electric guitars are subdued bordering on absent for most of the tracks. Instead songs are acoustic based, with prominent strings and clarinet weaving together with drones to produce exotic and often dark sounding textures. New drummer Josh Lott, an excellent addition, inventively drives the songs forward and anchors them firmly in rock territory.