“I look at your picture in the dark / Make believe that you are still in my heart and taste / The regret on my lips” – No royal wedding, EP Island.

The multi-talented Laura Lee Schultz (interview) is back with one of her myriad of going projects, EP Island. This release, called Sweet’ish is made up three very rocking (and atmospheric tracks).

The concept of EP Island is that Laura Lee Schultz (guitars, synth, vocals) and Melanie Covey (percussions) add one extra musician for each installment (three so far) and write in one day, record the next one and finally mix on Sunday (no indication if it was after church or pancakes). This time they brought Sarah Jane Truman (The Doers, Secret Truman) and the results are a gloomy-rock EP of 3 solid tracks.

The atmosphere is basically rock, but of the spacey quality. There’s a lot of room to breathe during the songs (that don’t really have that many quiet moments, just a few ones building up towards a thundering crash) and they are no-nonsense corkers.

‘Engine cleaner’ is moody and gloomy, like those 80s songs that you would find in mixtapes, with the name of the artist escaping from your memory, but the music always engraving itself in it. It’s dark and the vocal delivery goes back and forth, giving it an interesting aural mix.

Rockier ‘No Royal Wedding’ (wait, I saw them on telly – they are hitched!) is more straight to the point, with an attitude-laden riff that is followed again by a gloomy, almost gothic fingerpicking lick. This is the rockier one of the three and possibly the one that will first catch your attention (hear 1:13 to 1:31).

Sarah Jane Truman‘s bass (and voice) gets the limelight for closing track ‘Teen age’, an angsty song that although catchy (and even poppy), it has some dark undercurrents of being the invisible one in a one way relationship.

In the end, the music that EP Island make sounds (and feels) like freedom. It’s the product of very talented musicians trying to expand their musical palette with music that hasn’t been planned and has been recorded in a blitzkrieg style. It boggles the mind that these three musicians hadn’t worked together before and synced up so well, taking their inspiration from visual stimulus from slide projectors and viewmasters (mine broke…). Wonderful EP from three very talented women. Check their other projects too!

Words: Sam.

Links

EP Island Bandcamp. Website. Myspace. Last.fm. Facebook. Twitter.