UKNW SOUNDS : THE HEAD AND THE HEART (USA)
A contemplative folk pop, a joyful melancholy, the soundtrack of rustic ballads, sounds that could make your life better. It is with hand on heart and a head full of good intentions that The Head and The Heart search to gently push us into the shackles of a sweet summer joy. This Seattle grunge group draws harmonies that are among those of Fleet Foxes and Mumford and Sons to encourage the audience to march with a trumpet in hand.
The orchestration is eclectic, frenetic, and the instruments unleash new snippets of folk in their debut album ‘The Head and the Heart.’ This folk album is classic, but we do not get bored for a second, especially when six stay at homers come alive passionately on their instruments. Their short introduction ‘Cats and Dogs’ is a lively concentration of their musical footprint: guitars and lightly rhythmical percussion under the gentle vocals of Josiah Johnson, Jonathan Rusell and Charity Rose Thielen lead to the invigorating “Coeur D’Alene”. In Oklahoma, we are on a whisky river where we meet Faulkner characters in ‘Down in the Valley’ and ‘Lost in my Mind’. Sublime tracks which reject all sadness in the group.
Like their name, the tracks in The Head and the Heart tend to underline the emotion and the intellect. But trying too hard to mix the two, some tracks fall flat and go nowhere in the reflection. Rusell sings “I wish I was a slave to some age-old trade, like riding ’round on railcars and working long days” in’ Down in the Valley ‘. A good start, but quickly runs out of steam in the valleys of California and Oklahoma, which remain two quite distant states.
All good music lovers judge their music as fresh and playful. A 37 minute gold rush fills the head and heart of travelling promises (kept or not). A word to the wise!
Julien Catala