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Driving Is A Full Time Job Download
Cardinal Download

Photograph by Carlos Lima

You wouldn’t know it, but Ross Brown began his musical career with Ska. Brown aspired to become a master of the genre, one of those legends that comes to mind whenever we think of those three letters. But things rarely turn out the way anyone intends, and Brown’s latest album, The Human Condition, places the ska sound pretty far from your mind. Instead, the entire experience is reminiscent of a drive across the highways and freeways of mid and south-western America. This doesn’t come as a total surprise, considering Brown’s hometown of Olathe, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City.

While this may make sense from this music, Brown’s stylistic evolution doesn’t merely jump from Ska straight to Americana folk-rock. With the help of the ubiquitous Ableton Live, he has compiled two complete albums of electronic music. These pieces, each available for download on Brown’s website, prove Brown’s ability to create lush and complex pieces single-handedly. The Human Condition utilizes these practices while still taking a pronounced detour from the electronic world. Instead of working through solely digital means, Brown begins with a guitar track and builds from there. “Typical instrumentation is guitar, bass guitar, drums, tambourine. Sometimes I’ll play horns or mandolin or some sort of keys. I usually play it all myself because I don’t know what I want to do until I’m actually recording it,” says Brown.

Ross Brown’s The Human Condition is available to order from his website, along with two other albums that are free to download. This recording-on-the-fly attitude may seem somewhat alarming, but it all plays into Brown’s philosophy concerning musicians. “I really just admire people that seem legitimate about what they do. It’s something that you can sense almost immediately about them, through their music and how they present themselves.” What better way to represent legitimacy than recording something so natural and organic?

Strawberries Download

“We kind of hope that our music will somehow save the world.” Verbatim, this is the answer that Lee Pender of the New York based band Boy Crisis offered when asked why the band creates the music that they do. So what is our savior’s style? From what I can tell, it’s a charismatic mix of dance-inducing beats and flippantly sexual lyrics that doesn’t take itself too seriously. When Tal Rozen quips “you can do me up like Woodrow Wilson/ carry my children,” and “I wanna be your South Beach diet,” it’s evident that Boy Crisis is aiming to bring their listeners along for the ride.

BC’s quest to fill the world with love, sex, and dancing began in 2005 when Rozen, Alex Kestner, and Victor Vazquez began creating music together at Wesleyan University. A year later, the band was on the brink of breaking up due to their inability to play their creations live, when Pender joined as, “a Christmahanakwanza present to the world.” Since Pender’s arrival, Boy Crisis has been able to bring their sound to clubs across New York City, the ideal environment for their individual brand of dance rock.

BC draws on influences you might suspect, like Justin Timberlake and Michael Jackson, to bands a bit harder to hear in their sound, like Battles, Animal Collective, and Kylie Minogue. While these artists have impacted their lives from a distance, the boys of BC recognize the changes they’ve made on each other. “I think we influence each other musically and personally,” says Pender. With Kestner handling the production, Vazquez and Rozen writing lyrics, and Pender on “wiitar,” the band often finds themselves sitting around a computer throwing ideas back and forth until something good comes out of it. Pender added that, “the best stuff strikes us … but you notice you get struck less often when you don’t ever sit down with the intention to get struck.”

In any case, sex sells and BC sells sex in a wonderfully intoxicating way. It’s hard to do it justice on a recording, so if you’re in the Big Apple, get your butt to a show.