This weeks iTunes selection comes from quirky group The History of Apple Pie. The London based quintet are female fronted and have a late 80s/early 90s brit pop/US angst girl band mixed with a little Bjork feel ala the 10 Things I Hate About You soundtrack. The band consist of Stephanie (lead vocals), Jerome and Aslam (both guitar), Thomas (drums) and Kelly (bass and backing vocals). They’ve been releasing stuff since 2011 and we’ve been oblivious to them the whole time, frankly it really should have stayed that way.
So the song is called ‘See You’ and comes from their first full album ‘Out Of View’ released by Marshall Teller Records. The band were featured as The Guardians New Band of the Day back in May 2011 with an average review and if the comments area nothing to go by I’m surprised they’ve gotten this far, as their sound certainly hasn’t changed in 2 years.
The entry to the track has some distorted guitar/ electro vibes which made me think ‘Great! Quirky start, could be an interesting song.’ I was horribly, horribly wrong. we then enter into lo-fi noise pop of a ‘We’re so cool’ scenester generation. There’s little musicality to the playing, the track generally sounds like chord bashing with an added ‘How much reverb and distortion can we put on the guitar?’ attitude.
As for the vocals, you can barely hear them. Whoever mixed this track hasn’t done a great job. The vocals should be higher in the mix and the guitar should be much lower as it over powers everything. When we do hear the vocals, they sound so nasally that I did wander if the lead had a cold. Alas that is the sound on every track, so sadly it’s not a one off. The light airy quality to her voice also becomes an annoyance rather than a deliberately made artistic choice and from the sounds of things this singer isn’t aware of proper breath control. A stint with a singing teacher would do wonders.
All in all I’m not going to go into depth on this track. I forced myself to listen to it numerous time and each listen was an uncomfortable ordeal that I do not wish to repeat again. Needless to say the verdict is DO NOT DOWNLOAD this track, I will be promptly deleting it from my iTunes library. If you must listen to it I advise streaming it from their SoundCloud.
Such a let down after last week, let’s hope next week is much better.
-TWSH
Download See You and Out of View
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