Review: Owls And Other Animals

    I'm kinda a sucker for lo-fi singer songwriter stuff. But I can't stand Dylan. And I'm not even normally a fan of acoustic guitar. (The dude who brings an unrequested acoustic guitar to a party is only marginally less a pile of scum than the dude who brings an harmonica. And at least that fits in your pocket, so you can pretend that you just happened to have it with you. The jerk with the guitar clearly has plans...) I do, however, find that I am drawn to music that is unusual, fragile, broken, noisy, and.... honest. In my book, basement tapes of a kid strumming his cheap hand-me-down while his voice cracks will always kick Eric Clapton off his lame-ass stool. Folk duos can be particularly treacherous, often little more than pretentious sleepy jammers feeding each other's most boring inclinations. But Owls And Other Animals are unique in that they seem to recognize the aural charms of budget recording, but have strong writing and performing chops, plus they seem to share the same mental orbit as one another. They seem to reside on the same page of "The Moody Arts". (I just made up a book.) OAOA provide a shaky cool brand of authenticity to the audience. Owls And Other Animals, while achingly simple, are many things. They can be your atmosphere, they can be your poetry, but they can also hold their own with the Trash Cats. They understand pop and they understand beauty. They strip it down. They can croon unironically. They are masters of minimalism. Check 'em out and keep listening cuz I bet we're gonna hear a whole lot more. -Harmless

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