New Villager
New Villager
Release Date: Aug 16, 2011
Genre(s): Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Alternative Pop/Rock, Indie Electronic
Record label: Iamsound
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Album Review: New Villager by New Villager
Very Good, Based on 4 Critics
Based on rating 85%%
This New-York-meets-San-Francisco artistic duo is doing wonderfully creative things with its artistic performances. Is the album and musical composition merely an indie populist document to all these wonderful, abstract notions? In all honesty, it sounds like TV on the Radio doing lower-fi Death Cab, but slower…and sensually. There are crisp and slow electro beats, echo-drenched vocals and an absolute well of soul that touches immediately, deeply and profoundly.
Based on rating 8/10
New Villager's 2011 self-titled debut is a highly addictive, lightly experimental mix of blue-eyed soul and psych-inflected indie-electronic pop. Live, the trio of visual artists/musicians Ross Simonini, Ben Bromley, and Colin Palmer mix dance, visual art, film, writing, and any number of artistic mediums with their music. Its a multi-disciplinary approach that could lead to tepid, not-so-inspired music.
Based on rating 2.5/5
NewVillager talk a great deal about the “NewVillager mythology,” which, according to them, is “a vocabulary of ideas…a lens for looking at the world and art…a way to look at the world in a cohesive, consistent way. ” They say that the band’s music serves as a vehicle to make this mythology more graspable (read: less off-putting) and to capture what fascinates them, which, apparently, is the way things change from one state to another. For their recent “Temporary Culture” project at Los Angeles’s Human Resources Gallery, the band spent 10 days living and eating inside a mini-town of their own construction within the gallery made up of 10 rooms that represented each song off of their self-titled debut album, released on IAMSOUND, as well as the 10 stages of the NewVillager mythology.
Opinion: Excellent
When you attach the word “art” to the front of a band’s genre, that usually just means you’re at a loss to describe its sound. But if you listen to Brooklyn duo NewVillager’s self-titled debut and feel led to call it art-pop, don’t worry—it’s justified. The record is actually a 10-stage mythological story—five years in the making—whose cycle of birth, death and rebirth is supposed to be a metaphor for the artistic process (for example, “Cocoon House,” the first stage, describes an artistic idea’s inception).
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