Friday, December 10, 2010

Wonderful review of "It's My Story" In HI-Fi World magazine (U.K.)

There is a wonderful review of our "It's My Story" album in Hi-Fi World magazine (United Kingdom). It was one of their Audiophile Vinyl picks, along with an Elvis reissue vinyl album- so although we never shared a stage with Elvis, we can now say we shared a page with Elvis. Here is the review of our album:

THE TREE PEOPLE
It's My Story
Guerssen

   I have to hold my hands up and admit that I'd never heard of this outfit before who hail from Oregon, U.S.A. After some investigations I found that they released their first album (self-titled) in 1979 and then followed that up with another ("Human Voices") five years later. I knew that teachers had long holidays, but this is ridiculous because this album is the band's third release- was it worth the wait? The current incarnation consists of Stephen Cohen (acoustic guitar), Jeff Stier (flute) and Rich Hinrichsen (double bass) with the added occasional voices of Maeve Stier and Nicole Campbell. Their music is basically folk but it's not as simple as that. There's to many tweaks in their work for them to be labelled with such a simple word. Which is why you will see the words "freak folk", "psych folk", and "alt-folk" tagged rather uncertainly to them.  
    Whatever you call them, "It's My Story" is a wholly engaging album that, right from the start, pulls you into their head space. Beautifully melodic, the album is both busy and calming in its presentation. The title track, the first on Side One, grabs you immediately with a delicious selection of hooks while the next track on the side, "Sunday", takes you on an organic ambient journey of flute, double bass and acoustic guitar. And so it goes on, mixing instrumentals and vocal tracks throughout, in a wonderfully dreamy manner. For those wondering what the band was up to during its earlier days, you can get a flavour by checking out the track "Space Heater", which sits on Side Two and is a remake of the track which appeared on their debut release. A series of complicated ideas simply executed to form a magical album. 

Saturday, December 04, 2010

The Tree People's last United States performance, Spain in March up next, the music will live!