What is it about the sound quality of NZ-made recordings? Back in the ’70s and ’80s, we were decidedly inferior in recording, production, engineering. Suddenly, however, every other local album – even comparatively unheralded, comparatively low-budget ones like this Calico Brothers debut – sound gorgeous.
Perhaps it’s a wave brought about by a decade or more of institutionalised learning of the recording crafts, or perhaps it’s just that we’re not COMPRESSING he hell out of recordings over here like they do for commercial rock albums in the States and England.
Whatever the reason, it’s great, and for me, it makes listening to an album like this (one that doesn’t fit stylistically into my preferred musical orbit) a pleasure.
Calico Brothers come from the Waitakeres, but their folksy, slightly country-ish sound sounds more remote than that. If you crossed one of the less favoured Flying Nun bands (Sneaky Feelings, for instance) with a Beatles influence via Crowded House, and added a touch of comfy country/folk, you could arrive at this very nice but thoroughly conservative music. (Conservative not in the political sense, you understand, but in the sense that there’s not exactly a lot of risk taking or boundary-breaking going on here.)
The lineup is old-fashioned and rootsy (and includes banjo, mandolin, Hammond Organ and Wurlitzer) and the excellent production/engineering makes every instrument resonate.
Not an album I’d rush out and buy myself, perhaps, but there’s quality in the songwriting, the arrangements, the recording. That’s a recommendation.
http://www.tone.co.nz/Members/stereonerd/my-blogs/music-platters/calico-brothers-tell-it-to-the-sun-ode-rhythmethod