In Life is a collaboration between Oakland musicians Omar Martin and Nick Noro. The band recently released a six-song self-titled EP In Life.
The first song is entitled “Strawberry Blonde” and revolves around lots of reverb, guitar, drums and synths. It starts with an almost old time classic rock vibe. The lyrics are catchy and the guitar progression is a classic, timeless one that has been used in rock since the early days. “Hole in the Ground” reminded me of MGMT at least in terms of the production they were trying to accomplish. There are some well placed synths as the song progressed and some of the vocals had a David Bowie type of quality to them. The chorus is catchy and psychedelic. “Christ 1” is more like progressive, psychedelic rock with a Tame Impala type of vibe. They get really electronic on “Intake” which ends up sounding like a shoegaze inspired song. “Still Care” is a high energy song that had its moments. The closer was “Pandemick” and it also was the highlight in the batch. It was a hard song to pinpoint and I enjoyed the off kilter vocal approach. My main critique was just that this release was very lo-fi. As an engineer myself I would say this is the area they should focus on moving forward. I think working with an engineer who has some technical knowledge would help immensely with the mixing in particular and how to create separation between the instruments. Musically, I thought there were a lot of interesting ideas. Their songs have a lot of different influences from rock, to electronic, to hip-hop and more. It reminded me of old school Beck in a way where he combines all these different styles into his sound. I thought this was a solid release and hopefully just the beginning for the duo.
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