Pleasing and agreeable in nature.
Pleasing and agreeable in nature.
Nice is a difficult word. It means, according to the dictionary I have gathering dust on a shelf somewhere, lots of things. Pleasing and agreeable in nature, having a pleasant or attractive appearance, exhibiting courtesy and politeness or even, if referring to a person, someone of good character and reputation. However, if you say that a record is ‘nice’ then people usually translate that as, "Well it’s not great, is it?" And therein lies my problem. I want to describe Goldrush’s Ozona album as nice, but I don’t want to sound like I’m doing it a disservice. But it is just that, nice. A good nice. A very enjoyable nice. It’s not particularly loud or exciting but it is most definitely pleasing and agreeable in nature. The front cover is shit though, I have to say.
Recorded all over the place, in part at Dave Fridmann’s legendary Tarbox Road studio in the woods of New York State, it’s an album of 10 nice and agreeable songs. It’ll be instantly familiar to a lot of you because Same Picture and Let You Down have been floating over the airwaves for quite some time. The original version of Same Picture was released way back in 2001 let us not forget. Thankfully they still sound like great little songs and the Fridmann enhanced version of Let You Down is superb. Elsewhere, everything’s very pleasant, without ever really being catchy or infectious.
The songs are all well played and although I’m sure it’d be reasonable to label them as a rock band, they’re a mellow bunch all in all. There’s a slight country twang to most of the guitars and every arrangement seems to be made up of light, floating pieces, save for There’s A World, which closes out the album with a marvellous wall of cymbal crashes and wailing guitars.
Parts of it are great and the rest is rather good. It’s hard to pick out something really memorable apart from the two singles you’ll probably be familiar with already, but that’s not to say that it’s not an enjoyable listen. I get the feeling it might grow on me a little. It’s the nicest album to be released this summer and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Stick it in the CD player and enjoy the weather while you can.
Words : Damian Leslie