The New Year

Performer: The New Year
Distributor: Alternative Dis. Alliance

Notes: Brothers Matt and Bubba Kadane never promised a huge departure when they transitioned from Bedhead to the New Year in 1999. As NEWNESS ENDS picked up where the former band's TRANSACTION DE NOVO left off, so this record subtly expounds upon 2004's THE END IS NEAR's musical advances. That previous sweet Bedhead bleak streak is still in evidence on "My Neighborhood," but other songs like "The Company I Can Get" and "X Off Days" are slicker, brighter affairs. That half the songs were written on piano might help account for some of the changes in tone, which is most noticeable on the straight-up piano ballads, "MMV" and "Body & Soul." Lyrically, the New Year remain glum, but their willingness to widen their sound evokes the opposite, which is hope.

Magnet (p.116) - "[W]alkabout pacesetters 'X Off Days' and 'The Door Opens' feel more like a mad dash. The unrushed songs are equally appealing, gussied up with elegant guitar and piano accents and spiked with disarming lines."

Throughout the `90s, brothers Matt and Bubba Kadane put out records under the Bedhead moniker, helping to pioneer the "slowcore" subgenre, which tuned down and minimalized the broader guitar strokes of indie rock. But in 1998, they put Bedhead to rest, and three years later, emerged with new bandmates as The New Year. On the new band's debut, NEWNESS ENDS, their aesthetic has remained as starkly straightforward as it did during the Bedhead days, but the sound has grown into something a bit meatier and more dynamic. The brothers and their cohorts continued to record and tour, having released the acclaimed THE END IS NEAR in 2004 and a self-titled full-length on the storied Touch & Go label in 2008.

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