Wednesday, August 27, 2014

CASSETTE REVIEW: Ron Shalom "Two Songs"


            Though Bandcamp does not state it in the artist or title, the cassette itself does note that this is “with Austin Vaughn”, which I feel needs to be reiterated to open this review.   This is a cassingle at its finest, one song per side and hence the title of “Two Songs”.   The music itself is very much guitar driven and it is in that way that I do enjoy it.

            The first song is of the bedroom pop variety and comes off somewhere between The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel, as well as all of my other normal references at this point.  It is a fine song and if you think of this as a cassingle and this being the lead off song, hence the single, then it does also serve well as being that one song perhaps that you only know Ron Shalom by.

            On the flip side we have more of a Buddy Holly/dreamy type of number, which does bring out something between The Get Up Kids and Rocket Summer as well.    One of the first cassingles that came to my mind for some reason when I heard this was Weezer’s “Undone (The Sweater Song)”, which is paired with “Holiday” on the B Side, so when you have something like the blue album by Weezer that is just so well rounded it’s hard to have a bad song and I feel the same way about this.

            I actually think this would be a great precursor to a full length by Ron Shalom, though I would prefer the full length to also be on cassette as it just seems to work so well here.  I could very easily see this as being released by either Rok Lok Records or Juniper Tree Songs, both of which labels would be lucky to put out a full length by Ron Shalom.  








No comments:

Post a Comment