Little May: For The Company

There’s an old joke, well known among music fans, about what happens when you play a country song backwards. There are a few variations, but generally, you get your wife back, your dog back, and you quit drinking. Less well known is the joke about what you get when you play a New Age song backwards: New Age music. I am reminded of this second joke by Little May’s debut album, For The Company.

This is not a criticism of Little May so much as it is of what passes for contemporary folk and indie rock and, by extension, what gets played on the radio – particularly our national youth broadcaster, which has served up truckloads of this goop in the past decade, from Mumford and Sons to Angus and Julia Stone. If loud-quiet-loud was the white rock sound of the early 1990s, this is the era of next to no dynamic range at all.

Little May fit in perfectly. The young Sydney trio (Liz Drummond, Hannah Field, Annie Hamilton) make acoustic-based music with minor flourishes – strings that swoop and soar as required, tinkling piano, electronic touches to keep things vaguely edgy – and their self-titled debut EP was a runaway success, at least if these things can be measured by the number of times they are streamed.… Read more..

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