The very first thing I thought when playing the title track of this EP was that I was going to get a boring country tinged piece of American bore. Not that country music is bad in any way, but any country music that isn’t excellent is awful. There seems to be no in-between. Anyway, I’ve digressed. So, when the lo-fi harmonious female vocals popped in for a tea party, flitting between the childish and playful, I was honestly surprised by what I was hearing. It’s certainly not country.
The second thing I thought was that this song was released about four years too late to be included on the Juno film soundtrack. If you’ve heard that record, and you hear this, you’ll see what I mean.
So, what do we have here, a sixties-infused piece of jolly pomp. It’s utterly lovely and sounds really old. Like it’s been recorded in a garage somewhere and put straight onto CD with no mixing or production. There’s even a horrendous discord less than a minute in which, if intended, is genius, or if not, is a horrible oversight. There’s no fluff on this song, as its low on production, low on budget, and high on getting your songs out there to be heard just for the sake of sharing what you’re good at. It’s a good message really, even if the song doesn’t quite put it across perfectly. In fact, the other three tracks on this EP are all equally low-rent, but it is refreshing to hear a band who aren’t about the production and are all about the music. Shame it’s not all as good as this, but I’ll get to that later on.
So the story on the title track is pretty much that lots of girls want to speak to one guy forever on the telephone. That’s about it. That’s as far as this two and a half minutes of lolly-rock gets us. It’s certainly not complex, but it’s fun and could only make the most black-hearted not feel warmed just a little bit by its youthful exuberance.
Following on from this, the three that follow could be more different from the opener. There’s still plenty of “la la laas” smattered across them, but 'Your Saddest Song' chooses to slow things right down. And it’s utterly excellent. Gone is the youthful, playful nature of 'The Mountain Dogs', and in comes something more fragile and grown up. It sweeps from lyric to lyric, changing tack between dynamics frequently, making the whole thing unpredictable, but not messy. It’s sublime and certainly the highlight of this EP.
If you ever wanted to know what sleeping sounds like, listen to 'Noahs Days'. It’s, and I have to be honest here, boring. While 'Your Saddest Song' managed to be thoughtful and atmospheric, 'Noahs Days' just gets lazy, until the last forty five seconds when it suddenly wakes up and gets weird. Timing and melody go out the window and the whole thing sounds clumsy and clunky. Maybe that was the point, but it didn't work.
Then we finish with 'Pass through You' which is the sound of Stealing Sheep losing interest. The guitar’s off on its own merry little tangent, the drums are just, well, there, and the whole thing just seems like something they tacked on the end to turn an excellent two-track single into an average four-track EP. Stealing Sheep? Counting sheep more like.
It’s a shame, really, because it had so much promise during the first half, but the second half just seemed to lose interest, which is the biggest crime in music because this could have been utterly brilliant. The potential is there, it just didn't quite have the payoff.
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The second thing I thought was that this song was released about four years too late to be included on the Juno film soundtrack. If you’ve heard that record, and you hear this, you’ll see what I mean.
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