I have a slight soft spot for Arizona bands, for perfectly shallow and pointless reasons I assure you. My reason is that quite possibly my all time band, Jimmy Eat World are residents of Arizona, I’ve never been there and I’m undoubtedly overlooking a lot more bands from Arizona, some I’ve heard of and some I haven’t. However, that’s not the point. Alive in Wild Paint’s origins seems purely coincidental, but they do offer many of the same qualities as the ever glorious Jimmy Eat World.
Reading through the info on this band it’s almost impossible to find any justification for why a debut album should sound this good. In my head I’m thinking “who are these guys? How are they so damn good?” Their sense of melody feels as though it’s derived from ten years worth of material and a knack for honing their craft to its utmost perfection. Can that word be used? Perfection? Is this debut album that good that I use the word perfection? At this point I would ideally ask that everybody who’s reading listen to the album and come back afterwards to enjoy my synopsis. It’s difficult to find enough adjectives to fully do credit to this music, I feel as though all that needs saying is listen and believe it for yourself.
However, that wouldn’t make this a very good review. Alive in Wild Paint mix a delightful blend of the slower, acoustic and piano driven songs which make you feel as though you’re drifting in and out of consciousness. It ebbs and flows in a most glorious manner, almost driving you to sing along with the words that you don’t quite know yet, the melodies are infectious and addictive. The greatest thing Alive in Wild Paint achieve is that you feel the overwhelming sense that you’re listening to something great within thirty seconds of the first track, how many bands can boast to being that accessible?
For all it’s gloriousness, ‘Ceilings’ never quite takes off like you half expect it to. But this isn’t to any of its fault, it’s beautifully understated in that it provokes a response where you feel like there could be so much more. So many bands would extract every possible melodic high, but Alive in Wild Paint, to their eternal credit never quite go there, and in doing so they leave you begging for more and you know you’re going to lose the next 49 minutes of your life and then lose it all over again. Of the twelve tracks you’ll be subjected to it’s impossible to pick out a stand out, ‘Forecasting’ probably comes closest to standing out, but it’s only very subtle.
Finally, the icing on the cake, creeping up quietly and unassumingly on you is the vocal delivery of front man Travis Bryant. The only way I can describe it is that he was tucked into a nice big cosy double bed with thick blankets when he recorded the vocals. The tone is beautiful and everything just slowly creeps out of his mouth and into your ears, a perfect compliment to the glorious tunes with which the vocals interlace. The dynamic they first establish and then sustain is the absolute crowning achievement of Alive in Wild Paint. It’s hard to know what else to say, you have to listen to this album. It is about the closest thing to musical perfection I’ve heard in a long time, this album is an instant classic.
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Alive in Wild Paint - Ceilings
