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Nicking the melody from Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” for lead-off track “Weather Report” is a sure way to grab a listener’s attention. What follows is mellow, 3 o’clock-in-the-morning music, spiked with a shotful of trance. The Golden Band moves at a devil-may-care snail’s pace through a collection of tunes that are best enjoyed with the lights off and eyes closed. The style shifts are subtle, moving from pop to jazz, with a greater diversity of instrumentation than they’ve ever shown before and ambitious four-part piece “New Drifters” to boot. However, one senses the band fighting against their patented formula. It’s a pleasant listen, but methinks one of Austin’s finest is capable of even better.

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Sarah Zupko is a former Executive Producer at Tribune Media Services, the media syndication arm of the Tribune Company, and a 10-year veteran of Tribune Company. Aside from writing novels and plays, she devotes most of her time and energy to running PopMatters.com and formerly PopCultures.com, as well as research in the fields of Slavic and German history, and general European cultural and intellectual history. Zupko studied musicology, film, and drama at the University of Chicago and media theory at the University of Texas, where she received her M.A. in 1995.


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One of the quietest bands in the world (sporting a drummer) prove that you can record some excellent songs without a Marshall stack (most of the time).
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