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Sir Splendid - Lords and Peacocks

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By: Alibastard | in: Music |

Sir Splendid is happily misleading. Take their song, “My Friend”, featuring a guitar opener that seems a refugee from somewhere in 90s radio grunge. A just slightly over-dynamic drum fill leads in and then acquiesces to a somewhat standard beat – again I conjure all that music deemed “Alternative” before “Indie” became popularized as the blanket descriptor for intelligent rock. At 25 seconds nothing sounds exceptionally different. But then everything stops to make way for a kind of stuttering beat, the vocals admitting the focal point with dynamic intonation - “She’s wasted again – my friend.” The entire song has transformed from flat and doleful to catchy, sporadic, daydreaming, just a little bit glam and very cool.

Sir Splendid

The entire album has a kind of mid-nineties nostalgia to it, seeming to borrow sound textures from Soul Asylum, Live, Civ, Pearl Jam and early Flaming Lips. But each time you feel like you’ve heard this before, you become instantly sucked into some new direction that the band entertains, some intuitive next level that overrides your hasty categorization. Flange muttering guitars break into reflective, fuzz-colored choruses (about the 1700s no less), seemingly innocuous acoustic strumming melts into near David Bowie dramatics during “Sweet Sixteen”, goes through a slacker rock out, back into a kind of T- Rex “do-do-do” chorus and then meanders around in musical no-where land, refusing to end.

Sir Splendid

There’s Southern rock sewn in, dooming serial killer anthems and choruses that croon like Damon Albarn in a Blur that might have shared a San Fransisco stage with Janis Joplin, a Ween that believed a little more in the lyrics they were speaking. Together the guitar + drum duo of Marcus Barron and Paul Chandegra make for promising beginnings towards jittery rock that seeks freedom from itself.
In “Lords and Peacocks” raw, chunky textures punctuate each track, unadorned with excessive vocal overdubs. And what could be a slightly more emotive, somewhat more dreamy Black Keys-style collaboration veers from more minimal classic rock categorization to become something still warm, something still in the works, and every bit as interesting as you’d want a freshman release to be.
Word is they have a new release in the works.

Sir Splendid - Mr. Sickameantwister

Sir Splendid – My Friend

[Buy Lords and Peacocks]
Sir Splendid Official Site
Be their friend


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Posted on May 6, 2007

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