Let's face it folks, the Beach Boys are never coming back, but at least we have the Explorers Club!Last week I interviewed one of my musical heroes, Jason Brewer, from the band The Explorers Club. If you like The Beach Boys, The Beatles or America you need to go to amazon.com right now and download three brand new songs by The Explorers Club! The best part? They're all free.
This is the link:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005U9Z0PG/ref=tsm_1_fb_lk
These three songs are being presented as a suite of music called "The Californian Suite". The three songs on the disc are "Walk On By" (a Burt Bacharach and Hal David standard covered by Dionne Warwick, Isaac Hayes, The Beach Boys and many other greats), Weight Of The World (a brand new original song) and Summer Days and Summer Nights (an original song that references the Beach Boys album of the same name).
This suite of music is fantastic, both as a marketing tool and as a release. All 3 songs are better than anything The Explorers Club have done before. These 3 songs represent a band more unified, educated, confident and artistic than ever before. Their version of Walk On By is different than any you may have ever heard before. The vocals are sung in a powerful and agonizing way that stands out in my mind much more than Dionne Warwick's version and their version also doesn't have the same backing vocals that the Beach Boys version had, so it is impossible to declare them "copycats", considering this version is completely unique. It even has a nasty organ solo at the end!
When I first heard the Beach Boys cover of Walk On By, I ADORED it. I must have listened to their version 20,000 times. I've learned the song and even thought about recording a cover myself. I am kind of glad I didn't get around to recording my version, because it would never have been as good as the Explorers Club version.
The 2 original songs on the suite, Weight of the World and Summer Days and Summer Nights are sort of spiritual sisters. They belong together. Weight of the World has this great flamenco guitar riff in it and amazing Spanish castanets acting as the rhythm. The song also has a great horn riff in the middle of it that makes the song sound like a Bacharach standard (Raindrops anyone?). This song is beautifully crafted and is so gorgeous that I'm afraid some people won't give it a chance, just for being so gorgeous.
Summer Days and Summer Nights is slightly slower than Weight of the World, but probably will have a greater appeal to the general public because it doesn't feature any castanets or flamenco guitar playing, but instead focuses on singing and vocal harmonies. The vocal track on this song is really gorgeous and so are the vocal harmonies dispersed throughout the entire song. Another awesome thing about this song is the ending, which picks up in speed and has a nice keyboard solo with some excellent acoustic guitar riffs and flute lines as well. It's really groovy and reminds me of The Free Design and Harpers Bizarre.
I really love this 3 song EP and I can't encourage you enough to download it immediately from amazon for FREE here -
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