eagleowl …. Into The Fold

Eat Hats mp3 eagleowl Into The Fold …. buy it!

crickets… this one starts with crickets and you can’t imagine anything more perfect than that. What eagleowl does best is bring your musical ear down to the ground like it used to be when you were a kid and lay in the grass and listened to the grass grow. They play these emotive, desperately sad songs achingly slowly. The double bass dominates the opening track, ”Into the Fold,” offset by violin and harmonium and guitar. I want to sit in a room and listen to this live so much but alas they are in Edinburgh, as is so much good music these days! There, those are my first thoughts about this delicious EP.

Vocally, this thing gives a similar feel to For The Thoughts You Never Had, (which I’ve played incessantly) in that Bart and Clarissa show both the long, slow, wailing and the peppy side of folk music equally well. “Morpheus” is downright cheery for this band; I might have been fooled if I didn’t know Bart’s voice so well. And it is a rich, chocolatey voice that mixes with those lower tones of the instruments in that way that people describe chocolate as having a “mouth feel.” Do you foodies out there hear that too? Call me crazy, but hearing and taste are sometimes so nearly the same thing for me. So yes, if I had to characterize eagleowl, as a band, I’d definitely color them chocolate, no doubt.

“Eat Hats” is a good instrumental piece, solid and folksy and determined. Again, the opening notes, plucked so deliberately make you pay attention, make your ears tune IN, before taking you down that delicate, stream of a melody, (with it’s fireflies, and ripples, and occasional splashes, as your oars hit the water.) But this last track, “No Conjunction,” … well it’s pushing on ten minutes long for a reason, darlings. It just builds and builds and builds. It’s atmospheric and brooding and heavily delicate.  Into the Fold is only four tracks, and like everything that eaglowl does, you feel ripped off at the end, no matter how gently they try to let you down. They’re kind folk, I’m quite sure of it. But stingy, nonetheless. We really must compel them to do more, record more, produce more, by buying up all the copies of this damn EP and convincing them that they’re awfully good. I don’t think you need to be persuaded to do that, it’s quite obvious to me how beautiful this all is. Aren’t you quite sure as well? xoxo