review of local
releases. If you're an OC musician or band with something new to
offer–vinyl
single, full length album, CD, cassette–we want to hear from you!
Send
copies, along with any photos and PR material, to Beat Blvd., c/o OC
Weekly,
2975 Red Hill Ave., Suite 150, Costa Mesa, CA 92626.
Roman
Candles
Books/Make Art
(a cassette!)
Yorba Linda's Roman Candles have been plugging away for a
couple of
years now, with three self-released cassettes to their name (including one drawn from a
variety of scattered sessions). Read Books/Make Art,
recorded and released last year, is the kind of happily self-conscious
indie-pop rock that could have just as easily been recorded at home in
1985 as
it is now, an underground continuum of pop culture references, random
winsomeness and a surface nerdishness that disguises a sometimes sadder,
more
reflective core.
]
So there's a song called “Walkin' Outside” that's a
sweet
little ramble with harmonica and what sounds like mandolin. There's the
distended
guitar and echoed vocals on “The Ballad of Ghost” makes for an
unsettled,
roughly beautiful ballad of a lost soul. On the flipside, how one reacts
to
“Fuck Yeah Fest!” (about a visit to said event) might depend one's
tolerance
for the local in-jokes, though the quick blast and ramble of “Punk
Belongs to
Me” makes up for it. Then there's “Tom Bombadil,” about entertaining a
dream of
living off the land and wanting to be a stowaway.
That's a bit of a theme for
the
band, given that the next song is simply called “The Stowaways” that
looks at
the same dream from a slightly older, wiser perspective. All of which is
a good
thing, because if “Tom Bombadil” had in fact been about the one character
from
The Lord of the Rings, the only fate for them would be busking at
Comic-Con this
weekend with the other filksong types.
