Julia Brown is not a person, but a band. A band that makes lo-fi indie-pop tunes. A band who just put out their debut release, an eight track cassette called to be close to you. And Julia Brown make aboslutly WONDERFUL music. It fills me with the same immense amount of joy and happiness that I got when I discovered the R.L. Kelly tape a little while. It has a surface level of pure sweetness and simplicity that are more than enough to make me listen to it over and over again. However, those repeated listens are what help reveal the potency this little release contains inside.
The chorus of boy/girl vocals that trade off as much as they intertwine. The arrangements that sound scrappy on the surface, but manage to pack so much more of a punch to them, swelling and swirling in their lo-fi warmth. The heavenly viola that helps to flesh out the arrangements so much. Then there is melancholy and mixed emotions that hangs around the entire cassette that makes everything feel ever so more powerful, like the quiet sadness that decorates "i was my own favorite tv show the summer my tv broke", or the teenage confusion of lust and drugs in "how i spent my summer". Even the upbeat tracks like the pure indie bliss that is "library" have deeper, sadder emotions running through them that show themselves after repeated listening. All this is made all the more impressive due to the bands tendency to use the fewest lyrics possible, and of those choice selections, envelop them in purposefully vague contexts. All this makes to be close to you a little treasure, the type of tape that you spend hours pouring over long forgotten internet forums and backrooms of old record stores to find. Julia Brown make the type of unselfconscious indie-pop that would have/should have been on K Records circa 1987, but instead get to grace our ears now.
Links:
Julia Brown's Facebook
Buy to be close to you here, from Birdtapes
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