A lot of this stuff sounds to me like “Talk Talk covers the Dances With Wolves soundtrack,” at best when people actually believed rock & roll was something spiritual and not just a backdoor to preteen booty — but to be fair I’ve never heard a note of Fleetwood Mac or Pink Floyd or Peter Frampton so maybe this London soft-rock act sounds like them too. All the songs on EP1 are really schmaltzy, really serious, even their cover of Ginny’s “Can’t Be Serious” has patient piano and guitar motifs run through who knows how much reverb, and falsetto-heavy vocal melodies just sorta floating atop. Maybe this “rock music for a hot summer night” / Buddha Bar shit is your idea of a good time?

“Can’t Be Serious,” which welded guitar-soloing beardo to nervous arpeggiated midtempo synth-pop, seems to have been the band’s jumpoff for the recent EP2: “Your Love Over Gold,” “People Without Love,” and “Arc of Abraham” use more confident variations of treated synths, balearic guitar, and heavily FX’d lead guitar. Even if you don’t dig them, you can’t deny their conviction, especially on “Your Love Over Gold.” They probably don’t even know they just wrote a shitty “Come Undone,” g’bless’em.

AMO / 001 / 002
[Listen]
[Listen]
[Nick Sylvester]