It can be an odd experience listening to new record releases in 2021. You hear albums that are made by very young musicians that quite deliberately choose a quite specific point of time in Rock and Roll history as the base for everything they wish to express musically and emotionally. This can lead to a quite disconcerting journey for the listener, who is not really sure whether they should be in 2021, 1981, 1971, or wherever.
This kind of Stars in Their Eyes time travel approach was probably kicked off by The Strokes 2001 debut Is This It more than any other record. Hey, it was a new century? But why bother to address the new when we had so much glorious past to reve in? Hey I'm not complaining. I'm as nostalgic as the next guy and I'm certainly deeply interested in memory. Check out the byline at the top of the page. But it does make me sometimes wonder where exactly we are heading, given that we seem to spend so much of our time looking back over our shouder. Rememeber what happened to Lot's wife.
The latest guest to join this feast on all our yesterda's are California duo Winds. Tonight for your delight and delectation on their debut album Look at the Sky they will attempt to recreate the moment that 1967 became 1968 on that very West Coast. Far out man! Very far out!
Winds, like all proper musical trainspotters do not go for the usual suspects. They will not remind you remotely of main stage headliners The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds of Buffalo Springfield. Instead they take their lead from the more obscure delights of these times. Spirit, Tim Buckley, It's a Beautiful Day, and The Youngbloods. But they keep moving around from track to track and this makes the records by turn frustrating and rather intriguing at one and the same time.
Each of the eleven tracks on here sounds fine on its own merits. It all has an Age of Aquarian joy of flight, that isn't something you come across too often nowadays. The songs are lean and not inclined to indulge in Haight Ashbury jam. The longest thing on here checks in just short of three and a half minutes.
There is a tendency to mix and match from sounds and sensibilities of the Summer of Love and The Summer of Hate which followed though which means the album as a whole is somewhat incoherent. For example towards the end of the record when they rope in guess vocalist Nina Antonucci and go for the full on Serge / Brigitte effect, just because they can, you do wonder if a firmer hand at the wheel might have resulted in an album that expressed a stronger overall statement rather than sounding like a counterculture late Sixties mixtape.
Still, I like the record. It does something rather unusual and several of the songs are highly impressive in their own right. It's certainly a very, very listenable albumWinds certainly have the winds in the sails. Should be interesting to see where they're blown next...
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