Seventeen Evergreen: Music Is The Wine
After a broad-based critical approval for both their debut album, ‘Life Embarrasses Me On Planet Earth’ (Aug’07) and debut UK live and radio session dates (Jun’07) Lucky Number’s super San Franciscans, Seventeen Evergreen, release the much anticipated lead single, ‘Music Is The Wine.’
Seventeen Evergreen’s chief-protagonists Caleb Pate and Nephi Evans, are both singers, multi-instrumentalists, & most importantly, storytellers of imagination and hyper-reality. “Music is the wine, to fill my cup of sadness, helping to forget a love electrocuted”, is the simple eloquent message offered here, emphasizing the emotionally-healing quality that music holds for so many of us. “The songs of love that live, beyond the instruments, behind your eyes and growing, gradually pull…[you]…in”, to a stronger place, of course! It’s a sexy place too, adopting ‘Moon Safari’s sultriness as if played by an acutely amorous band of space-funkers. This is true to The Independent’s reading of Seventeen Evergreen’s album, its’ “…other-worldliness recalls Midlake only with the time-machine set for the future rather than the past.”
Further fortifying the aphrodisiac funk is the most chic of Parisians, Joakim. His remix comes on like the super-slinky ‘Space-Disco’ sister to Taana Gardner’s classic Heartbeat’, a groove of dancefloor lust you can imagine both Grandmaster Flash & Larry Levan championing as their own. It’s a minimal but bumpin’ breakbeat that feels like it’s on the cusp of a new dance genre, cutting a fresh soulful edge to the track alongside the reverberations of a startling sonic mix of rasping keyboard trills & effects that Joakim rocks so well!
In addition we hear surely a new expression of ‘dubstep’ with Bi-Polar Men’s mix of album track ‘Ensoniq’, providing an irresistible urgency to the deep bass tones we’re used to from the genre. Leading scenester Skream has already made this mix a stalwart of his international dj sets and featured it on his recent Radio 1 ‘Essential Mix’.
Seventeen Evergreen’s vision goes way beyond the sonic of course. Following their association with supreme video-groundbreakers Encyclopedia Pictura the band are now currently in LA directing their own storyboard. As lead singer Caleb puts it he expects them to be “waylaid by the bling-fest, but reminded that life is magic.” The result will surely extend the picture book beauty of their previous promo activity, including gravity-defying romps in Marin County, & somersaults in space whilst performing!
So once more Seventeen Evergreen are continuing to glide eyes wide-open along life’s many paths, savouring the manna of every one of their visionary details.
