'About 20 Years' by Otto And The Dark

Good news. The Otto And The Dark  album "About 20 Years" is now available for your enjoyment.

It's taken them a while to get it ready for release and if you a long term fan who  has been following them since their days as  Jaster Mereel then not only have you probably been anticipating this for a while, but you probably know them very well. Personally I first encountered them at CovTember last year but even so I've been waiting for this.

As James Meadows of the band tells me, this represents a chance to share a collection of core material which is important to the band before they move onto releasing new songs in smaller groupings for maximum impact.

The tracks in question are:

"About 20 Years", "Star Spider", "Red Dress Shrink", "Aviation", "Robotic Concentration", "Complex Schematics", "Daytime", "Over" and "Decode to Recode"

Even from those prompts you do get a picture of a literate bunch (with a definite technological slant) and they combine a thoughtful and melodic approach to music with equally intelligent song themes. You can tell early on listening to the album why they feel it represents both a solid foundation of an original repertoire to build upon as well as being a powerful & articulate calling card for what it is that they create.

This is definitely music for a discerning audience (fine by me of course) where inherent catchiness never spills over into dumbed down anthemic repetition & where each element of melodicism gets twisted into something too angular to permit of cosiness.

"Quirky" bands are by no means rare but too many appear to inject a bit of that quality in order to rescue mundanity. That comes across as calculating & irritating. Others are just unusual from the start. Otto And The Dark give the impression on some of these songs of starting off relatively conventionally then one of them shoots off in a weird direction, the others like it & the consequent strange trajectory remains in the composition. Certainly unusual bits abound but there is no sense that they are there for effect.

From what I'm told, there is no intention of moving on from these songs: merely augmenting them in the set. Which is desirable because quite apart from the mission statement aspect, they are too strong to drop precipitously.

What I'm not sure of is whether the band intend to focus down on one or two as singles in the meantime before putting out intended new recordings? A whole album is of itself a harder swallow for new audiences coming fresh to a band, however good each song might be. "Star Spider" or "Aviation" for example? Or both?  ("Decode To Recode" is probably too long & I'd not wish them to butcher it for a single edit).

At any rate, we already know that there is more to come & that's something to look forwards to.