Echolyn
...and Every Blossom

 Are you ready to fall in love once again? To rediscover that silly feeling of lightness that makes you walk a meter above the ground? If so, this EP by Echolyn is just for you, because it is magical: four acoustic songs of crystalline beauty introduced by the voice of little Sarah Jane, the age of innocence like the drawing on the cover.  Just four tracks that unfold irresistibly like flower buds in spring, indifferent to the whims of the weather and needing no additions or chemical additives.

 The five Echolyn members hit the skins, strum the guitars, play the saxophones and flutes, bow the violins, draw chords from the grand piano, sometimes sing a cappella... In short, they have no need for electricity and, given the price of oil, they could be the band of the approaching medieval future that awaits us.

 It must have been tough for the five guys from Philadelphia, juggling part-time jobs as mailmen, carpenters, accountants, to pour their hearts out with instruments in a genre not much loved in the United States. Their first two exceptional self-produced albums from 1991-1992 sparked comparisons to Gentle Giant and Genesis, but this little fifteen-minute gem returns them to their natural dimension: an unattainable and uncompromising acoustic perfection.

"...This is a happy song," says Sarah Jane's little voice, yet with "Bright sides" we are catapulted into the melancholic world of Echolyn, a ballad led by piano and violin as if Gabriel & Co. of the golden era had been unplugged. This begins the game of memory, they seem like... they remind me... but nothing could be more wrong, because you can remember someone and yet you're not them. Memory is one thing while a real experience is another.

 Echolyn deploys the light cavalry that tenses the strings in "Ballet for a Marsh" without any anachronistic attempt to revive the golden age of 1970s progressive. In fact, with "Lunch in the sun" they engage in a nighttime song that travels the city streets during the explosion of summer heat, crossed by the sudden thrill of a crystalline trumpet solo. The conclusion of "Blue and Sand" entrusted to piano, guitars, percussion, whispers, and shouts is a duel with the swaggering metal-studded giants prowling around them menacingly.

 Every now and then, unplug and listen to Echolyn.