My daughter has been loving the award-winning animated short film Peter And The Wolf for the last few days, as have I. We got it from iTunes since Hailey’s favorite thing is watching movies on my iPhone. The stop-motion animation is wonderfully charming and with no words and only the score accompanying the visuals, it is a nice break from Dora The Explorer or Blue’s Clues. I only mention this because the first track, “Poor Old Ra,” from the Pica Beats’ album Beating Back The Claws Of The Cold prominently features an oboe melody that instantly made me think of the wolf-eaten duck from Peter And The Wolf. The album then incorporates a little sitar to compliment the somewhat plaintive and lyrically overreaching indie pop. This is definitely an album that one could easily call eclectic. There are times the music borders on crazy psych rambling and other times fairly straightforward chamber pop. There are so many different things going on that the album is a bit confounding. The Pica Beats would have been much better served by not incorporating seemingly every interesting sound and idea they’d ever heard into the songs Beating Back The Claws Of The Cold. It pieces this is a good album, even though not totally my thing. It was released last year by Hardly Art.
MP3 | The Pica Beats – Poor Old Ra Beating Back The Claws Of The Cold
MP3 | The Pica Beats – Shrinking Violets Beating Back The Claws Of The Cold
Poor old ra, shrieking violets
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While I totally agree with you that this album has its flaws, I liked it a lot because it is a little “off” and because its influences and direction seem different from most new bands.
Speaking of which, I read your post about not being able to keep up with new bands, and like you, I also feel overwhelmed and don’t find there is much to get excited about. So many sound just like some older band that did it better. The Pica Beats stand out a little from the mundane crowd, which made them appealing to me.
PB/Ryan Barrett’s music does stand out, bc this is one artist who is following his heart and writing and producing the music his way, w/o compromise to what’s commercially profitable and LOTs of people of all ages are LOVING it – including me, his mother. Interesting (and I love it) that you were attracted to it bc of music your daughter likes….someday she’ll be a PBs fan…