The Morning Benders – Sophomore Record Big Echo

The Morning Benders are young in both age and band-ed years.  Early twenty-somethings pushing their sophomore record Big Echo.  Their music expresses their age; personally, with words (lyrics) on individual relevance and emptiness entwined with supernatural joy and ambition over tune and tonnage that’s vintage sounding.  Think 60’s beach rock without most of the happiness of the beach (large swaths of the Gulf Coast excluded, of course).

It’s like finding some semi-worn but still wearable suit at the thrift store, right?

And that’s not to say that their music is on the emo-side, lyrically; or that it mainly wallows and wades in dark, corner hidden, wall flowered feelings, but some stuff here, lyrically, sounds a direct result of being young and feeling through growth, working through the thoughts that come uniquely from growing out of youth.  So it’s like you have these new, up-to-date musicians (age-wise) singing about nothing too ground breaking (though nothing too out dated or played out, either; timeless, I guess is the word) over music that sounds like it’s a throwback.  It’s like finding some semi-worn but still wearable suit at the thrift store, right?, and it fits and looks good and etc., so you buy it for a buck seventy five and this suit, while old, looks new on you and definitely takes on a different-y persona with you in it (assuming, of course, that suits, or any clothing really, can take on a persona).  So it’s a throwback dusted off and tried on by someone new giving it a fresh quality while still looking not all that new.  Different yet familiar.

The feel of the album, musically, is wall of sound-y with edges that have either been sanded too much or not enough.  Because the edges aren’t rough, ragged and jaunty, but nicely open and rounded in ways that kind of expand over like everything and let everything within float as they wish.  And it’s not like a booming, deafening sound(s) but more this pulsating, rhythmic, ever present hazy warmth.  I’m imagining staring at a sun [ed. note: not recommended] whose size takes up every square inch of your vision but not, oddly, overpowering but just there, making everything you see/hear be nothing but “It”, and only in turning your head will you hear/see anything outside this moderately bright and not too impeding star/sun.  And it’s like it’s almost like a big echo {DING!} Your can hear everything, but it’s nearly faint and distant, but still carries a largeness about it.  It seems like their singing and playing from the top of a canyon and we, the listener, are thousands of feet at the bottom, squinting up at the direction of the sound we’re hearing; the sound loud enough for us to know it’s not an apparition; indeed loud enough for us to pay close attention; yet just far enough away for us to be verging on second guessing what it is, really, up there; if it is up there. With open guitars and keys and lyrics that almost get lost in this giant space; slightly muddled by this vast space they’re in and you almost have to strain to here it all at all. And this thing sort of breathes, too; with large intakes of air then a flowing, steady release; then sometimes short, struggling for breath-type breathes, all while still and always having this cloaking and omnipresent quality about it.  Like a giant, echoing star that only by getting directly out of the canyon will you not hear and see it (you sold yet?)

This thing serves two purposes for me.  It can be nice playing while I’m beachside, hearing waves crash and listening to this thing that is similar to the sound of an open beach with active water.  And also, it’s nice to listen to in the comfort of the house; thinking about youth and its ups and downs and its general wide-open qualities.  If you’re in the mood for either, you won’t be disappointed.