Folkmote

They Say...

Review by Ned Raggett, All Music Guide

Saying that the debut album by this group knows its audience as well as its preferred sounds is a bit like saying that a company like Apple has a slightly shrewd guess as to its general clientele. Screaming (politely) its love for not merely a musical style but an aesthetic, Donny Hue and the Colors adore post-psychedelic epic storytelling of the sort that prompted any number of acts in the '90s who have now become venerated forebears themselves. (That Elf Power have gone from their own worship of the past to becoming members of that past in the eyes of younger bands says it all, for instance.) And so Hue and company deliver Folkmote, with its winsome singing, simple but sweet piano melodies, rumbling and collapsing guitar sprawl (the appropriately titled "Piano Dreams" has feedback that couldn't be invoking the spirit of Isn't Anything My Bloody Valentine any harder if it tried), and more -- all packaged in the kind of cutout, die-stamped, and faux-naif artwork with lost children beneath monstrous butterflies that finds the spot where twee and nightmares intersect. It's all very nice, to be sure, but this is a debut record in the classic sense, beholden to its ancestors to an extreme degree, part of the crowd rather than standing out from it, and -- at least in this point of musical history -- hard to separate from any number of other bands out there working in the same general vein. That these guys will probably be opening for the Arcade Fire somewhere is a given (if they haven't already), but that they're not primed for anything more at the present time is something they'll have to grapple with on their own.