Free Release Friday
Adam & Alma: Back to the Sea
2010, 23 Seconds Netlabel
Download Here
Rating: 7.8
Adam & Alma are a deceptive electronic duo. They are equal parts American indie rock, European trip-hop, and 80s electronic pop nostalgia. The group sounds like a thesis statement of all that is good about electronic music over the last 10 years. The only problem is that they don’t sell themselves, literally and musically.
The duo begins their debut EP with the hushed track, “Things,” a environmentally-immersive track of melon collie indie rock. With small guitars framing the hushed vocals of Ellen Arkbro, the track swells into a thick, Portishead-like environment of deep-swelling bass and glistening bell-sounding harmonic fringe. The band bookends the EP in the same way, with the lush ambient arrangements on “Bon.”
The inherent problem with Adam & Alma is this lush understatement. The EP delightfully saunters onto your playlist, hardly making any waves in your sea of singles and album tracks and then, just as you notice Ellen Arkbro’s and Johan Graden’s presence, the EP is finished. Adam & Alma won’t make a case in their five tracks like Coldplay would. No, this is an album that reveals its charm inside, a sweet center covered in neutral outsides.
Tracks like “Smile For Me, Sun” approach 80s pop with the same knowledge that Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello had on their Postal Service project. Fun synth hooks and harmonies clamour for the listener’s attention and hold it–prolonging the listening experience and taking the listener on an adventure. The stuff of fascinating listening is all here: texture, melody, hooks, environment, all of the high points of the genres the group references and done in such a way that recalls the artistic movements of the last 10 years yet never feeling contextualized within them.
Make no mistake, Adam & Alma are everything that is good and familiar, but performed in such a way that brings fresh rewards. This is an EP that makes me eager to see the band’s full length and even more eager to see them make a true single. Despite such knowledge and deft handling of the devices that the group employs throughout the album’s six tracks, it is nuanced to its fault. There is no single track that would provoke the causal listener to shell out $.99 on ITunes, yet the album has six tracks that would send a music geek to his eBay account anxiously trying to find a first edition vinyl of this EP.
Mp3s & Cover Art via 23 Seconds Netlabel
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Louis Korom IV is a writer and designer living in Denton, Texas.
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