The name of the band is The Silent Years, the album is The Globe, and the songs are going to change your life, at least for the next month or so. Not to be all Portman and The Shins on this, but I’ve had a hard time turning these tracks off long enough to write about them.
Ever since Radiohead, we’ve all loved a good falsetto, and singer Josh Epstein provides, wandering up and down the scale with ridiculous ease. It’s a beautiful voice, too: smooth enough to soothe the ear but rough enough to thrill. You want to spread it on your toast like marmalade or ride around in it like a zeppelin. The band suits the voice, with a collection of instrumental proficiency that doesn’t quite dazzle – which suggests a false note – but does gently insinuate the songs into your brain before you’re quite aware of them.
Those songs are well-constructed, and cover more than the standard love-loss-lowered-expectations subjects you might expect from your average indie album. “Don’t you think that it’s yours because maybe it belongs to everyone,” sings Epstein on “Pay It Back” in a nicely ambiguous lyric that could refer to anything from the planet to digital rights management
Do yourself a favor: buy this album and listen to it incessantly. And do it quick, before they start getting played every hour on the radio and you have to pretend to be sick of them along with all the other cool kids.
Favorite Track: “On Our Way Home”
