Great Northern

Trading Twilight for Daylight

(Eenie Meenie)

Record Review by Sarah Jane

It’s easy to imagine Great Northern’s lifelong (for L.A.) friends Rachel Stolte and Solon Bixler working Parker and Benchley-style, facing each other seated at their respective keyboard and guitar tinkering away - she focusing on the words, he on the music - on their awesome full-length debut Trading Twilight For Daylight. The His & Hers vox are best used in “The Middle” – their synthtastic “Hello, Goodbye” give-and-take is akin to an Aimee Mann and Michael Penn-style un-Acoustic Vaudeville. And stirs memories of the Almost Famous scene when Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs tells young Cameron Crowe of his unpopularity with the kids at school “You'll meet them all again on their long journey to the middle.”

Overall there’s an Earlimart daydream believer fuzz reverberating through Trading Twilight For Daylight. “Into The Sun” is a Jan & Dean-style clap along and Nada Surf city’s kaleidoscope of beeps and boops, “A Sun A Sound” gets miserable right (“Everything you’ve ever seen is gone.”) As does the Pixiesish “Telling Lies,” while the underwater “City Of Sleep” sees Great Northern Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. Bixler is a former Earlimart guitarist. The Ship founder and Earlimart frontman Aaron Espinoza is Silverlake’s recognized Patron St. of Effects Pedals, canonized for his maritime visions (The Ship – Great Northern and Silversun Pickups are members) and miracles (Treble & Tremble).

An ephemeral No Place Like “Home” theme runs through Trading Twilight For Daylight - prominent in the somniloquy of the phantasmagoric six-part narcoleptic music box symphony “Just A Dream, the mercurial power pop of “Telling Lies,” and 103.1 friendly “Home.” “lOw IS a hEIghT” floats on sound waves of convolution reverb, and like Earlimart’s “Tell The Truth Pt.1, Tell The Truth Pt. 2”  lyrically alludes to Echo Park’s “Watching The Detectives.” Similar to a dreamy and melodic Sonic Youth (“Superstar,” “Do You Believe In Rapture?”) Great Northern’s songs aren’t tethered to classic pop song form: Bixler’s Pink Floydian orchestral score, “Our Bleeding Hearts” is a hallucinatory slow dance song of disjointed, echoing 1986 synth and baby Xylophone.  Moreover, “Babies” would fare well on RichDork’s ‘Radiohead Is Close To Godliness’ rating scale.