Rock that is equally classic and forward looking.

8 MP3 Songs in this album (25:17) !
Related styles: ROCK: Space Rock, ROCK: Garage Rock

People who are interested in Love and Rockets Swervedriver Failure should consider this download.


Details:
Technical difficulties conspired to keep Ottawa rock quintet The City Above from achieving all it had planned for 2008. Still, in lieu of releasing a planned follow up to their acclaimed 2006 debut, Mongrel Comets, this very prolific band still released 24 new, non-album singles online and continued to hone their stagecraft with a steady stream of shows as both headliners and support to internationally known acts such as Handsome Furs and Irelandâs Fred.
The bandâs sophomore record, Year of the Spider, was completed early last year but nearly lost when singer/guitarist/in-house engineer Ross Henwoodâs PC crashed. Those tracks have since been successfully recovered and are currently being mixed. In the meantime, the band have gone back into their deep archive of songs and put together an interim release, entitled Low Soul.
Its eight tracks (a âmini-albumâ by the bandâs standards) are drawn from the furious period of writing and recording for Year of the Spider and beyond. And, even with those two dozen singles, a second album and now Low Soul, the band still have a huge and growing archive of songs.
âWe had broken the 100-song mark when the computer crashed last year,â explains guitarist Steve Fouchard, âand then continued recording on our digital 8-track. Those sessions resulted in another 100-plus songs so weâve got a large body of work to draw on for the next several years and weâre still going. Ross and I get together to write and record at least once a week. Itâs just something we do for fun.â
One critic called The City Aboveâs sound âhard to pin down,â and Low Soul is no exception. While Mongrel Comets was the tentative sound of two formerly estranged best friends getting to know each other again, Low Soul is a snapshot of a songwriting team in full bloom, with no barriers.
âRoss coined the term âheavy mellowâ as a catch-all description,â says Fouchard. âI responded to that immediately. Weâre students of all sorts of quality music, regardless of genre. The only rule is donât be homogenous. We write instinctively and have never rejected a song for being too much or too little of anything. As listeners we crave peaks and valleys, ebbs and flows, so thatâs what we tend to deliver as musicians. To us, Deep Purple is as artistically valid as Sonic Youth. And we always like to have a ballad or two up our sleeves.â