While ignorant of it prior to hearing this disc, I was in fact waiting for the band that could combine Television's guitar interplay with the long lost guitar album of the late 80's: The Cure's Disintegration. When Nico Jordan's vocals start flying around on the first track, you'll get the point. Up front and, to use an overused term in total earnest and awe, soaring - they are another instrument altogether.
The great guitar moments of the past, the ones that didn't have to blurt out there presence, are echoed in the refreshingly understated but unavoidable (and unavoidably catchy) language used among these musicians. Like the last year of the Smiths existence, when they brought on a second guitarist to accent Johnny Marr. Or the great four piece line-up of The Wedding Present. The keyboard swells of guitarist Aaron Rude (the other being Jordan), the air-tight rhythm section of bassist Brad Stanfill and drummer Daniel Farris, are not just accents, but full on great ingredients next to all of that guitar shit I keep harping on about.
The Color Cast are sprung from a loose collective of Memphis TN musicians that refreshingly don't peddle in the genres associated with the region: No Mallternative Country, no flogging of the Garage Rock carcass, and no Bluzak. The Color Cast are poised to put Memphis back on the map in more of a Big Star fashion, as opposed to, say, a slumming eating-with-your-hands-roots-music-that-no-one-really-understands fashion. Is that really a fashion? You know what I mean.
- Andrew Earles
(Pitchfork, Spin Magazine, Author of Husker Du biography)
Serious Devo vibes with some creeping synths from this Oakland-based project featuring members of Mall Walk and Religious Girls. Bandcamp New & Notable Aug 25, 2017