Late Night Groove
We were listening to KEXP’s Wo’Pop show tonight, and heard a track from a new CD by Zero 7 called When It Falls. I popped onto iTunes and downloaded the album (and did the little dance where you have to burn a CD, then rip it back to mp3 in order to get it onto my Archos mp3 player because of iTunes’ proprietary file format). Normally, I’d want to hear some more of an album, but I bought this one on impulse, based on how much we liked Simple Things, and the live show we saw at the Showbox last spring.
Zero 7 is one of the “downbeat”, or “chill”, groups that have arisen the last few years. Others in the same vein include Thievery Corporation, Supreme Beings of Leisure and Massive Attack.
I enjoyed the first run through the album. It’s a bit slicker than Simple Things, which I’ll have to decide later whether I prefer. The featured single so far, Home, has a new vocalist, Tina Dico, and for some reason this cut reminds me a bit of a something from Joni Mitchell’s Hejira album - just a melodic whiff, though, as Joni’s poetic storytelling is definitely absent. I prefer, I think, the numbers by Sia Furler, the vocalist on Destiny from the Simple Things album. There is a lot more bluesy keyboard in this album and less sampling.
