Great Northern - Trading Twilight For Daylight
Great Northern first start to hit their stride on “Home,” a sharply-written tune that uses the band’s boy-girl vocal dynamics and memorable melodies to its advantage. On the first two and a half minutes of “Low is a Height,” singer Rachel Stolte nearly channels Beth Gibbons over the beat of a slowly pulsing drum machine until the orchestra can’t restrain itself anymore and the song turns into some kind of eerie starlit waltz. But it’s on the album’s best track, “Into the Sun,” that Great Northern’s slick songwriting finally reaches its peak, unleashing a wily, Broken-Social-Scene-esque rock number whose drumbeat sounds almost unstoppable until it fades into a lilting New-Pornographers-esque acoustic outro.
Still, Trading Twilight For Daylight sometimes struggles to find just the right mix of style and substance, but Great Northern seem to balance both sides pretty well, though, and the results are always sincere rather than robotic or calculated. These are ten songs that are all listenable enough to bear repeating and catchy enough to get stuck in your head at some point. So is it a pop album for indie kids or an indie album for pop kids? Who cares.
