Not fade away seems like a band that has been around music for a while, though is just being made known to me. Now I could simply look at their Band Camp page for prior releases and see whether or not that is true because this could perhaps be their debut album for all I know, but it doesn’t matter because it’s not about the facts and statistics—it’s about how it sounds. And Nfa sounds like a band that has been around forever and many people know about them and like them, but I’m just finding about them now, being the usual late-to-the-party music fan that I tend to be.
Our first two songs on “Dead Souls” are rather drone and ambient. In the second song, I really began to hear pieces of the song “Somebody I Used to Know”. It’s weird, yes, but it still reminds me of it somehow. The static in the background of this all reminds me as well that this would just sound amazing on cassette. (Someone do it and send me a copy please)
Now, some reviewers who like to write albums off after the first song (I admit, I might sometimes, especially when I don’t like it, but I try my hardest not to) will simply pass this off as being instrumental drone. That might be true for the first two songs, but by song number three we have vocals. This is why you need to stick these things out, people, and why I do because from here “Dead Souls” only gets better.
The vocals offer a more trippy, indie rock, shoegaze type of sound with a guitar loop and almost spoken word vocals on the third song. It has that Velvet Underground feel to it, but isn’t ripping them off. When we reach the song “Letter to Patrice” we get some lasers (Which live should come with an incredible light show) that I hear as a slow motion battle scene from Star Wars.
“Love is a cancer” (Which is a point I can somewhat agree with, except for, you know, the whole part about big pharmaceutical companies not wanting to cure love so as to make more money. Though I guess if loveless people found love, dating sites and books and all that would suffer, right?) has some somber and sad strings, which definitely makes this album go very quickly from being written off as one long drone sound to quite a bit of variety.
Regardless of where Not fade away is at in their musical journey, I am just glad to have listened to them now and look forward to more music by them as well as listening to these songs repeatedly.
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