Returning with their first record since their 2015 album, Diamonds, Dayton, Ohio’s Cricketbows have released an EP inspired equally by classic 60s and 70s bands like The Beatles, The Byrds, Little Feat, The Allman Brothers, Fleetwood Mac and The Grateful Dead and the wave of 80s and 90s indie stalwarts like R.E.M., The Replacements, X and Uncle Tupelo. The Communion EP features six new songs that, while still having a rich Psychedelic texture, sees the Cricketbows slowly evolving into a more refined “rural” Alt Rock band pulling together their numerous influences into something much greater than the sum of it’s parts.
Mixing short sharp bluesy tunes with more expansive Psych tinged songs, Cricketbows have crafted a set of songs with one foot in the hazy lazy late 60s/early 70s and the other in the current US Indie scene. The standout tunes have to be the squalling ‘Jupiter’ which shows that Cricketbows can rock like a beast but still cram it all into a sub 3 minute tune and ‘End Of The Night’, a song about the devastation the heroin and opiate epidemic has had on rural America. However the real gems are ‘Summer Festival Sky’ and ‘Sea Green’……………with it’s ringing Byrdsian riff and an unhurried early 70s groove ‘Summer Festival Sky’ comes on like a holy entwining of Jefferson Airplane and Heart while ‘Sea Green’ is a beautiful tune that starts with a gentle acoustic opening slowly building in intensity as it unfolds over six glorious minutes. The Communion EP is where “then” meets “now” somewhere out “there” and is well worth your time if you dig either the classic bands that have inspired this record or the newer bands tipping their hat to the past.
The Communion EP is out NOW on CD and as a digital download via Mosquito Hawk Records and you can check it out/stream it/buy it from the Cricketbows Bandcamp site here……….
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