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Sam Grey Singing

Songs About Humans

Written by: PP on 12/07/2012 03:28:32

Sam Gray is a New Zealand based musician whose moniker Sam Grey Singing dabbles somewhere between the experimental realms of avant-garde noise and singer-songwriter. "Songs About Humans" is an album where he explores the possibilities in both styles, and where possible, merges them together into some rather quirky and intriguing melodies, although the whole ordeal has the stigma of being 'artsy fartsy' and super-hipster to it all-around.

The man is also a classically trained pianist and multi-instrumentalist; he plays guitar, violin, and numerous percussion instruments, which are all audible throughout the album in varying degrees. Especially the violin adds a nice classical music vibe to some of the songs, but it is usually quickly counteracted through heavy amounts of noise and distortion. It's clearly an attempt at being experimental, but the off-tune sounds honestly sound like a mess. Whoever thought lo-fi was a good idea in the first place was clearly wrong, or at least here Sam Grey and his assistant musicians are using it wrong to create noise instead of using it as a tool to create more quirky song structures such as Pavement for example.

That's why the overall impression about "Songs About Humans" is that you gotta be a fairly pretentious hipster type who'd be inclined to call this 'art rock' and other bullcrap before you can appreciate it. For the rest of us, the few decent vocal melody lines drown in the distorted ambiance and noisy lo-fi mess that this album is.

Download: Scratches
For the fans of: pretentious hipster music
Listen: Bandcamp

Release date 19.03.2012
Raw Onion Records