Maybeshewill - This Time Last Year, Last Time This Year/Condor And River EP Review

Review of the spilt EP from Maybeshewill and Her Name Is Calla titled This Time Last Year, Last Time This Year/Condor And River released through Field Records.

True originality in music is hard to find these days, so when it comes along it needs to be embraced almost immediately. As with the old adage about buses, you wait for something uniquely striking for months and then two come along at the same time.

Alright, so neither Maybeshewill or Her Name Is Calla can be described as new in the most pedantic sense of the word, but both deliver the goods in an astonishing fashion here that merely sets them apart from anyone else currently attempting to create something so musically adept without once resorting to plagiarism.

Indeed, it would be hard to compare either band's work here to pretty much anything else around. The two Maybeshewill tracks, 'This Time Last Year' and 'Last Time This Year' may have dabbled with 65daysofstatic's sample-heavy post-rock blueprint but both pieces of music elevate themselves in dramatic fashion above any of that genre's stale contenders, instead choosing the more extravagant route of an imaginary film score possibly involving elephants and geese. Weird but ultimately engaging.

Her Name Is Calla meanwhile offer a timely re-issue of the best single of 2007, 'Condor And River'. For anyone who hasn't heard this or seen the band play live, 'Condor And River' is without doubt the most ambitious piece - or should that be pieces? - of music these ears have been accustomed to in many a year. If 'Bohemian Rhapsody' had been set in the forests of Rutland and constructed in three separate parts while Stephen King directed it may have sounded like this.

Quite simply, this record demands to be heard by both punters fed up of the same old recycled hand-me-downs passed off as "new music" and aspiring musicians alike. There is hope after all.

9/10
Dom Gourlay