This New Jersey act are new to me, and I only came across them because I was asked by someone at work what I thought of them. Being unable to answer I took the only course of action possible, and immediately tried to find out more about them. ‘The Perils of Time Travel’ was their debut release, a thirty-minute-long EP that they released in 2011. Even before the music starts one realizes that here is a band that are somewhat out of left field. While a septet isn’t really that unusual in music, the instrumentation being portrayed by some of the line-up certainly is. Sal Marrano (vocals), Tom Monda (fretted and fretless guitar), Greg Colacino (acoustic and electric bass) and Odin Alvarez (drums) can be said in some way to be the “normal” side of the band. They are joined by Russ Lynch (violin and viola), Ellis Jasenovic (tenor and soprano sax) and Andrew Digrius (trumpet, flugelhorn, and synth). Even discounting that the much-maligned flugelhorn hasn’t seen many rock outings outside of Jethro Tull or Gryphon, it is certainly unusual to find any band combining strings with brass, and little in the way of keyboards.
What is even more interesting is just how commercial they sound, certainly not what one would expect from a line-up like this. They mix Coheed and Cambria with a gentler version of Protest The Hero and manage to make djent, jazz, pop and prog sound as if they were destined to be together. Yes, they can go off into tangents when they wish to, and Tom is an amazing guitarist, but it is the sheer joy from the music that makes one keep going back for more. Somehow it manages to be inventive, fresh and new, yet managing to stay accessible and soon the listener wonders how they managed to live their musical lives without ever coming across these guys before. Some of these songs could even make it onto rock radio, what on earth is going on?
It is rare to discover a band truly formed and with strong direction on their very first release. What on earth could an album be like?
