Cassette Review: Fir Cone Children "The Age Of Blastbeatles" (Blackjack Illuminist Records)

[€5 // Edition of 16 // https://blackjackilluministrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-age-of-blastbeatles] 

Last July I was first exposed to Fir Cone Children and really Blackjack Illuminist Records on the whole.  It was a strange time for me because I still thought back then that everything being released on cassette was "noise" or "ambient" or just some kind of "experimental" genre.    So it caught me off guard- to say the least- when I was comparing the previous Fir Cone Children cassette with bands you might hear or have heard on the radio.

"The Age Of Blastbeatles" is not that far of a departure from "Everything Is Easy" but it definitely feels like it has some growth to it.    Most of what I can take from these songs reminds me of the fuzzy, melodic harmonies of a band such as Weezer (but more like if you complied the various soundtrack songs and such from Weezer than any single album of theirs) and if there are other bands in this dreamy mix I can't really hear them as much because I just consider this to be Fir Cone Children now as the songs have really come into their own.

The funny thing I suppose is that if I hadn't heard Fir Cone Children before and was receiving this cassette as my first exposure to the music I'd think it was going to sound like The Beatles based upon the artwork (slightly) and the fact that, um, "beatles" is in the name.  I'd probably wax poetic about how the title "The Age Of Blastbeatles" has something to do with Fir Cone Children creating this new version of The Beatles as the songs could have that pop-rock appeal of The Beatles but combine something else, something modern which would be the "blast" part of it.   ("Blastbeatles" would be to The Beatles perhaps the way "post-punk" or "post-rock" is to their predecessors, if you will)

But I'm not new to this dance.   I'm not going to compare this with The Beatles simply because it is a different time and quite frankly this music sounds like it's from 2016 but if I was going to trace it back in time I wouldn't go any farther back than 1996 (maybe 1995 if I was feeling generous) and as such it just simply doesn't go back far enough to be in that same time.   That isn't to say that if The Beatles were all still alive today and creating music together this couldn't be the end result, but I just want to think about this one as being more about Fir Cone Children and less about that other band.