Lowertown – Friends (2019)

Lowertown – Friends (2019)

An Atlanta-based band/duo comprising Olivia O. and Avsha the Awesome (the brilliant, the incredible).

I’d been dreaming of an album like this. One called Friends, where every track title was a first name! And here it is!

I’m sure it must exist somewhere, but I’d also love to find an album where the first track was called ‘One’, the second ‘Two’, and so on. Or perhaps each track could be either a colour or an object. I reckon there are loads of albums out there where every track title is a single word. The Cure, to take one example, must have done that.

Another funny thing about Lowertown is that the album is indeed called Friends, but they’ve also released a single called Worst Friend. This duo certainly isn’t short on humour, that’s for sure! And certainly not on creativity either.

There are loads of short albums that I love. This one, in fact, lasts less than half an hour…

…but despite all the enthusiasm I seem to be showing, I can’t give this record a very high rating. I really do love Lowertown; I think they’re brilliant. But I don’t think I’d have loved them if I’d started with this album. I’d have thought it was nice, but I’d have put it to one side and forgotten about it. I wouldn’t have bothered to follow the rest of their work; I wouldn’t have followed them in any way, on any social media platform.

Actually, it’s all rather uneven. The first track, ‘George’, is so brilliant that I expected the rest to be on the same level. I could listen to ‘George’ on repeat, which I couldn’t do with most of the others. I’ll only listen to them once in a while, or just skim through them. Still, to write this review, I had to listen to them several times, after all! 😉

Well, I love ‘Gerald’ too, which starts with Olivia Osby’s soft vocals and is joined by Avsha Weinberg’s wilder, more aggressive voice. And the blend is exquisite.

Track number 7 is called ‘Outro’, even though there’s no ‘Intro’ at the start. Why not? Especially as this ‘Outro’ is one of my favourites. It’s an extraordinary, rather wild piano moment.

The very last track is a recording – a first take of the second track, entitled ‘Charlie’. Nice… but nothing more! In fact, what spoils the enjoyment is the sound. It’s very raw, not well mixed. It’s like a poor-quality demo. It really deserves to be remastered without us having to wait for it to turn twenty!

They’ve been compared to Phil Elverum and Alex G, both American musicians renowned for their songwriting talent.

Songwriting is the art of writing songs. That much is certain! But according to the French-language website HAT Music, defining it in this way would be like saying that cooking is ‘putting things in a saucepan’. The reality is that songwriting is one of the most complex, fascinating and stimulating forms of creative expression in existence – and one of the oldest, given that humanity has been singing and composing songs for millennia.

Songwriting is the creative process that leads to the composition of a song. It generally involves: writing the lyrics, developing the main melody, choosing the chords and harmonic progression, and defining the song’s structure. And it’s considered a musical genre in its own right, rarely understood by the general public, rarely understood by those who aren’t passionate about music or who are stuck on just one genre. That’s it, in a nutshell.

The band members accompanying the duo on tour are: Joseph Clementi on drums, and Immanuel Pennington also on drums. On bass, it’s either Sean Henry or Eva Smittle.

I’m looking forward to listening to their latest album, Ugly Ducking Union, soon. And I’ll also be checking out their second album, I Love to Lie. It goes without saying that I’ll be listening to their live recording on Audiotree too, as it’s always worth checking out the bands who play there.

For those who may not yet be familiar with it, Audiotree is an American music label based in Chicago, founded in 2011. The company records and releases live music sessions. It also promotes artists and organises concerts, inviting artists from all over the world to come to a professional studio to record, perform and release a live EP free of charge.

Fans of indie rock, experimental pop and folk, this is the place to be! A band to watch…