The Essex Green - This Isn't Farmlife
The Essex Green - Cardinal Points

Prior to actually sitting down to pound out a blog from this worn keyboard, I generally obsess mentally over what I'm going to say, how I'm going to approach a piece of music or a band. Rarely I discover that I really needed to write about something else entirely. Sometimes the finished piece is better than what I imagined. Often over the course of research I find that some of my points are completely unoriginal.

I was going to talk all about how Essex Green manages to walk that fine line between nostaglia and admiration, how they manage to exist in timeless space—creating songs as indebted to the pop of the past as entrenched in contemporary mires, and how Brooklyn hipsters and scuzzy garage-rockers could both find common ground on the Essex Green, but the Merge Records blurb sums it all up much more efficiently: "timeless pop that is classic without being retro."

Another interesting point is that Cannibal Sea, The Essex Green's latest album was actually recorded in both Brooklyn and Ohio. So maybe there is something to my somewhat pejorative reduction of geographies and genres. Moving beyond bi-coastal, Essex Green manages to be both Red and Blue, and neither.

In full disclosure, Cannibal Sea is the first Essex Green record I ever bought. But that infernal Radio Io Edge... Everytime "This Isn't Farmlife" came on I thought to myself, what a great song, stopped working, and clicked on iTunes to see who it was. And "Cardinal Points" seemed to capture a lot of what I love about Caribou and my Nuggets box set. And hopefully someone is burning me some of their earlier stuff too... So there may be more Essex Green in Cacophony's future.

The Essex Green is making their way out to LA on Sunday, May 7 at Spaceland. And have about 10 shows after that as they make there way back to New York on May 18.

(Buy Cannibal Sea from Merge.)