Thursday, June 5, 2008

This week’s band-crush.


The Republic Tigers believe that music is the career they were destined for (I’m actually laughing at how cliché this first sentence is, but I’m going to leave it here for my own amusement). In their late twenties and early thirties, these guys are hardly starry-eyed youngsters with rock-star dreams; they’ve had the time to think about it, experience crummy jobs and other failed musical efforts to finally make a well-planned out decision to ‘go for it’. And they’re still cute, despite the old age...

Aww, I kid.

Seriously though – their bassist left (read: got fired from) his job at RadioShack to devote himself to the band. So you know they’re serious about making music.

The band has just released their first LP, Keep Color (Chop Shop Records) and appeared on Letterman last week in their very first televised performance. Things are looking promising, I must say! I stumbled upon their album and have been obsessed with its opening track Buildings and Mountains ever since. And when I took it off ‘Repeat’ and gave the rest of the album a chance, I was very pleased.

Keep Color is happy and smooth, with an exaggerated amount of layers that just so happen to fit together seamlessly and give the whole album a cinematic sound. There’s a little bit of rock, a lot of synth and a crazy pile of vocals. In my opinion, if The Republic Tigers was a food product, they would be Orbitz: fizzy, sometimes heavy, and constantly shifting with an excess of strange bubbliness, but so pleasant and gratifying that you don’t ask questions. Was that analogy just an excuse for me to include yet another ‘90s throwback into my post? Perhaps.

Hopefully, The Republic Tigers will have a longer shelf life than this now-defunct soft drink. Keep Color seems to convince me that this could in fact be the case. Some of my favourite songs: Fight Song, which is pleasingly upbeat with an impressive variety of percussion and a funk influence, and Air Guitar, which is not as solid musically, but is good in that its lyrics paint a hilarious portrait of the sport that is, well... air guitar: ‘I don’t care if you are tall, black or white or very small, grab your axe and play guitar’. Written as a joke and combined with an overdramatic melody, this piece is smack in the middle of the album and quite enjoyably breaks up the album with humour.

Here are some tracks for your listening pleasure! Also – if you are interested, I found a petition to bring back Orbitz, just because.

xo

The Republic Tigers - Buildings and Mountains

The Republic Tigers - Fight Song

2 comments:

girl 2 said...

thought one:

"why would she hyperlink air guitar...?"

(click)

thought two:

"bahahahahahahahah"

Anonymous said...

i saw a street vendor selling orbitz to wash down his hotdogs.

i wonder which was older?