Review Bagheera – Hollow Home – EP
Bagheera is a trio consisting of Tom Cowcher, Sam Twidale and Jacob Silkin and are a product of the always active Liverpool music scene. This is a young, as yet unsigned, band with only the self-produced Hollow Home EP under their belts but they have been getting a fair amount of positive attention from fellow bloggers and the BBC Radio 6’s Tom Robinson. They haven’t been courting labels as of yet, hoping to build their repertoire before approaching them. Smart thing to do since they are all still students at the University of Liverpool.
The first thing you will note about the four song Hollow Home EP is the Beach Boy-like harmonies (all the guys sing) on the first song. This is coupled with a Grizzly Bear-like sensibility that takes these songs into the realm of soaring melodies that are layered with multiple loops and samples and are accompanied by richly textured vocals. These guys sound like they have a lot more experience than they do. The sound is complex without being crowded, and is both fresh and classic at the same time. I loved the aggressive drumming on the first song, Horizons Lined With Scars, however the vocals left me a bit confused and underwhelmed. The intro has a gorgeous guitar line that loses it’s impact when the undynamic vocals take over. I wish this was an instrumental. And that is the problem I have with these songs, the vocals let the music down. I couldn’t decide if it was because, to me, they sounded slightly flat.
Circadian Clock has a similar Beach Boy harmony and another gorgeous (this time acoustic) guitar line, very reminiscent of a flamenco style. The choral-like harmonies are the best thing in this song, they really are wonderful but again there is something slightly off, whether it’s the recording itself or the way it was mixed I’m not sure. I again felt underwhelmed, like this song wanted to be so much more but was stifled before it reached its full potential. In fact, you could say that about this whole EP. You can’t fault the musicianship, they are a talented trio, the guitar is bright with nice tone and attack, the drums sometimes fail the song such as in Skeleton Leaf where at times they are almost non-existent but on Horizons Line With Scars they make the song, and the vocal harmonies are really well executed. Still, I just couldn’t get into this group of songs. The last song Old Machine is another complex arrangement of loops and overdubs. And that could be the problem for me, I just can’t imagine sitting and listening to eight songs of harmonies and atmospheric overdubs. Just not my kind of music, I guess.
The guys from Bagheera are still in school but are working on perfecting a live show and recording new material for a second EP. Once they graduate they will be concentrating on the band full time and perfecting their repertoire. This band has a lot of promise, to be sure, and hopefully with a lot more experience under their belts the songs will be much more fully realized, right now they just fall short of being truly great tunes. By the way, don’t let the label “folk” music scare you, these aren’t really folk tunes, at least not in the strictest sense, but as with all genre’s of music folk has fallen into a kind of miscellaneous category where things get grouped that don’t quite fall into the other genre’s. If it has an acoustic guitar then it must be folk. Uh uh. If I were forced to group this into one category I would put it into atmospheric alternative. Which is another miscellaneous category all of it’s own. Let’s just say that this EP defies categorization and leave it at that, ok?
You can listen to these songs on the bands MySpace page and if you contact them they will send you a free copy of this EP. You can also find Bagheera on Facebook.
Bagheera – Horizons Lined With Scars
Bagheera – Skeleton Leaf
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