RADAR: Eight and a Half
Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 5:44PM
Broken Social Scene drummer Justin Peroff joins forces with Dave Hamelin and Liam O'Neil of The Stills for Eight and a Half, an intriguing new Canadian art-pop trio that fuses layers of eerie, beat-driven synths, washes of chiming guitar chords, looped drums and Hamelin's atmospheric tenor vocal croon. In unexpected ways, each member stretched and pushed himself out of his prior comfort zone and into wonderfully strange new directions. What was old was simply old -- and this was something fresh and different. Self-titled debut album, due April 10, is filled with dense, dreamy alt-pop, cacophonous blips and bleeps joining in a musical conversation that manages to be both droningly ambient -- a positive, actually -- and slyly melodic. Drifting in and out like an enveloping morning fog, songs like the hypnotic plugged-in anthem "Scissors" admittedly to a bit to sink in but when the hooks got hold it was all over. Surrender may not have been swift but it was complete. Watch the EPK and "Scissors" video below...
Eight and a Half - "Scissors" (from the album Eight and a Half)
Eight and a Half - "Go Ego" (from the album Eight and a Half)