Maybe it’s because the island’s surface area is so small – making a high population density and so very easy to hear and be influenced by the same things – or maybe it’s because any given band’s music has to travel such a great distance to reach foreign ears and so similarly bent groups tend to run together in waves, but it often seems like the UK exports a tremendous number of sound-alike bands. Think about it; a decent cross section of the British bands making waves on this side of the pond (including The Arctic Monkeys, The Fratellis, The Kooks and Babyshambles) are pretty interchangeable as far as their styles and overall sounds are concerned. 6 Day Riot, however, are blessedly different and so derails the above theory completely. The group recently played North By Northeast music conference in Toronto and, in anticipation of their showcase (and presumably in an attempt to diffuse the cost of the journey) the band has written and released an EP of songs about Canada.
The material might be about Canada and the band might be from the UK but, as soon as Bring On The Waves begins, 6 Day Riot sets itself so far apart from the pack that they might as well be from another planet. From the gentle ukulele coupled with singer Tamara Schlesinger’s wistful voice that opens “Go Canada!,” listeners know they’re in for something different. The overwhelming vision that the EP invokes is one of a little girl playing happily in a large, sun drenched room and caught in a daydream – oblivious to the fact that anyone’s listening. It’s an incredibly romantic moment that’s had not to fall in love with. As she sighs along, she makes up her own rules as she goes that hook listeners because they are just so immodest; mixing sticky sweet melodies with a delivery that could just as easily be used for nursery rhymes.
The band, for their part, cultivates a potent mixture of music that’s part folk and part Celtic traditional with hints of gypsy flavor and intimate sweetness that compliments rather than challenges Schlesinger and is, at once, very old sounding but very new because it has been re-envisioned here with archly pop-minded intentions. The instrumentation and song writing of “Sky Father” and “The Last Stand” instantly recalls the craft and (to a limited degree) approach of Two Minute Miracles, The Burning Hell, Red House Painters and Geoff Berner but made all the more salubrious because of the band’s sweet and (this is not a slight) oblivious delivery; nothing about Bring On The Waves feels contrived, calculated or willfully different for the sake of difference and that’s becoming an increasingly rare commodity.
If this band has the stamina to make a full-length album as endearing and engaging as the four songs on Bring On The Waves, what we may be looking at here is the next important band from Britain. It would be a nice change because 6 Day Riot may single-handedly make it okay to play music that wears its heart on its sleeve again.
Artist:
www.6dayriot.co.uk
www.myspace.com/6dayriot
