Mazes | Mazes
By Mrs. Tansy Maude Peregrine • Mar 2nd, 2009 • Category: On the Record
Most Likely To: be one of the year’s best debut records.
Borrowing equally from chamber pop and alt-country, Mazes crawl right into the musical overlap between Belle and Sebastian and Fleetwood Mac. It sounds improbable, but it’s pretty damn good. The Chicago-based three piece includes Edward Anderson, Caroline Donovan, and Charles D’Autremont. Although Mazes just played their first live show in Urbana, IL, its members aren’t new to making music. Anderson and Donovan are also members of The 1900s,whose full-length debut Cold and Kind deserves a listen. As Mazes, the trio distills some of the 1900s’ hallmarks – wall of sound production, rich harmonies, and clever lyrics – until nothing but its sonic lifeblood remains.
As Mazes, Anderson, Donovan, and D’Autremont are stronger than a side project, but Mazes is still a sleeper. Even though there is nary a weak track in the bunch, it’s still unlikely to make its members wildly famous. But really, what would success be for a band like Mazes beyond doing what they love to do? Not every band dreams of ten seconds of glory on Grey’s Anatomy.
Mazes begins with solitary footsteps across a hard wood floor and then grows into something grand, yet still unassuming. The record leads with “Manual Systems,” the best campfire song never written, which sets vocal harmonies against simple piano chords, hand claps, and tambourine. On “Cat State Comity” Anderson sings, like a plaintive Neil Young, “Never found the life I was following / I couldn’t figure it out,” transporting the listener to a time when happiness sprang freely from an a.m. radio and an empty road.
“I Have Laid in the Darkness of Doubt” is simple, yet rich, weaving Lindsay Buckingham-style vocals into the sweetest mandolin and female harmony. Mazes musical breadth is impressive, for they include songs with a wide range of influences from Helio Sequence (“Things I Threw in the Well”), to the Decemberists and Pas/Cal (“Face Down on Forest Roads”), to Lou Barlow (“Heather on Heather”). It’s a pleasure to wander through Mazes’ musical labyrinths because, while they invent nothing new on their debut, they convolute the familiar until their songs are simultaneously recognizable and new.
Listen to “I Have Laid in the Darkness of Doubt” from Mazes:
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Mrs. Tansy Maude Peregrine is a former national collegiate croquet champion. She retired after a particularly sticky wicket left her with a glass eye and now prefers to lift a gimlet instead of a mallet.
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