Aireline - Ocean Songs From The Year Of The Horse

For a lot of people it's hard to imagine a band hailing from Nashville, TN that has the musical sensibilities of Coldplay and the guitar work of earlier Radiohead. Fortunately, Aireline dispells the doubt that this could ever happen. Ocean Songs From The Year Of The Horse certainly has its own sound and explores plenty of its own space outside of anything resembling Coldplay, Radiohead, or any Brit-rock band but the connotation of excellent musicianship, solid songwriting, and a willingness to create music for the sake of creating music, not popularity or profit, is definitely prevelant. Ocean Songs accomplishes the semi-rare task of having every musical part interesting on its own, but cohesing into a smooth unit when combined. Bass lines that add flavor to the mix instead of just keeping the rhythmn, drums that explode into a controlled frenzy or quietly keep things moving, soaring guitar solo's, haunting piano, and vocals with harmonies in all the right places make up just a few of the elements that gel the album together so well. The album presents itself strongly throughout its 42 minutes of playing time. Strangely enough, the majority of songs have a very dark tone to them, even though they are catchy and certainly worthy of a good head-bobbing. The especially poignant album opener "Legionnaire", the spooky to groove laden "Rest Your Bones", the breezy to forceful "People Like These", and the frantic "Traveling Through Dangerous Scenery" are all great examples of this. So if you want to believe that people in Tennessee still use outhouses, haven't heard of some crazy city-folk invention called "shoes", or that they sleep with their cousins without batting an eye; that's fine. But never let it be said that intricate, catchy, well produced, superbly written and performed rock can't come from here. [www.aireline.net]