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Artist
Friends In America
12+ albums
UK
about
Friends In America - What It Is To Be Release Date: June 26, 2013 Record Label: Self-Released The greatest thing about the new record from Glasgow-based indie rock act, Friends in America, is that it immediately sounds familiar. Some listeners consistently look for music that reinvents the wheel; I look for music with heart, passion, and ties to the bands and records that I already love, and the debut album from Friends in America—it’s called What It Is To Be, in case you want to go pick it up on the band’s Bandcamp page—does all of those things in seemingly effortless fashion. In reality, I don’t think it was effortless—the band assembled this record over the course of two painstakingly stressful years in the lead guitarist’s bedroom—but the perfectionism paid off. These songs sound remarkably lush, more fully fleshed out than many efforts from major label bands with infinitely more resources under their belts, and if time is what it took for What It Is To Be to come to fruition, then I’m glad the band stuck it out and made a record the way they really wanted it to sound. Over the course of seven songs and 27 minutes (is it an EP or an LP?), Friends in America flit back and forth between emo-charged dream pop (album highlight “Gaffe,” whose bursting harmonies recall moments of “Goodbye Sky Harbor” from Jimmy Eat World’s seminal 1999 LP, Clarity), sobering and simple indie pop (the gorgeous and heart-rending penultimate track, “I’m No Captain”), and rousing arena rock (the
