If you’ve ever read any of my reviews, you know that I have a special place in my heart for albums that are real. I like albums that are more human and less computer. I like real drums, as opposed to drum machines. When my editor-in-chief sent me a track off of This Distance, the new EP from Oax, it hit me right in that “this is real” heart place.
I would even venture as far as to call this EP raw, and I would mean it in the most positive way possible. The guitars feedback. The cymbal hits aren’t uniform. You can hear that someone is playing the music you are listening to, and that someone is Angelini Giorgio. Aside from the closer on the EP, ‘Sutures’, everything on the album was written and played by Giorgio.
On my first listen through, this album made me want to drive. I wanted to feel wind, and watch mountains and hills pass by. I wanted to cruise down Highway 1 and listen to this and remember good times and bad times. Then I read the story behind the album and understood why.
Angelini had been on a hiatus from music, after leaving The Rosebuds and going back to school. Then he went through a hard breakup. Then he sat down and wrote music, by himself. This EP is the result of an emotional dam breaking. I listened to the album a second time and I could feel the lyrics. I empathized with the man singing about the sins he had committed, and the sins committed against him, and the culmination of all these sins and how they make up the lives that we lead.
What I’m trying to tell you is that this music is good. It is really good.
