Post War Years - All Eyes - Galapagos

Haters of Made In Chelsea look away now.

No, I'm kidding. Please don't!

I used to be a hater myself, but my housemates forced it upon me once and... well, you can probably guess the rest. However, I'm safe in the knowledge that I'm not obsessed with it, like so many are. I just find it fascinating to see how these people live. Craziness.

Anyway, MIC (as it's affectionately known)'s redeeming quality for myself and many others is the music, chosen by a lady called Andrea Madden. Nice work Andrea! In one of the episodes was a song called "Nova" by this band. Click here for the Spotify link. It's a great song, so I looked for them on Spotify, and found this song, "All Eyes".

Courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/emmaswann/2428027562/in/photostream/

I'll actually talk about the band now. They're from Leamington Spa in Warwickshire, which is coincidentally not far at all from where I live! The band is made up of Simon Critten, Henry Riggs, Tom O'Hare and Fred McLaren. According to MySpace and LastFM they describe themselves as being: "Latin/Hard House/Jazz but they have an Alternative/Indie edge about them too." I'd say they're not far off Alt-J, or London Grammar, of whom my last post was about. Read it here.

This song has a slightly oriental feel to the start; there's an instrument being used that gives it this effect. I'm not quite sure what it is. It could be a keyboard, but it sounds a bit like a string instrument, like a mandolin or something.The start is really minimalistic, just vocals and INSTRUMENT. It's pretty chilled out, but with a kind of driven feel, so you can tell it's going somewhere.

"Every hour you undress it

Every eye on the finish line

You do realise you're obsessive

Every eye, all the time"

There's then something else added into the background, sounds like synths:

"Roll eyes

Immature lies

All eyes

Innocent lies"

There's then this massive chorus type part, but with no singing. There's drums, this massively heavy bass soon and some kind of squeaky sound effect over the top.

This effect then goes away, but the rest stays on. There's some cracking harmonies in this part as well:

"And you're a cigarette burning

You're on the rush until the glow is out

And your clocks forever turning

The strong will jump before the time is out"

Critten's vocals sound very relaxed, which could cause him to become lazy and get things wrong, but actually everything is completely right on the note, sort of like Harrison Koisser of Peace.

It's a bit weird to say that a song has attitude, but this song definitely does! We're then back to the pre chorus bit:

"Roll eyes on

You miss your lights on

All eyes on

Innocent lies"

The song is then stripped down to just drums and a guitar:

"You have all the time in the world

Time in the world

Time in the world

Time in the world

Time in the world

Time you have on"

In this part, there's another melody in the background overlapping with what's going on here [this is called polyphony]. I really like this effect.

That instrument then comes in again, the one that could potentially be a mandolin or something but is probably a keyboard . It's being played so quickly at this point that it sounds like a harp!

Everything then comes back in again really forcefully with "All the time in the world" over the top.

What a goodun!

Youtube:

Spotify: