An absolutely gorgeous new album from Badinage has a wonderful way of delivering lush and beautiful soundscapes uniform of string sections, live drums and bass, and unbelievable guitar work.
The Once Upon a Time album is purely instrumental but manages to deliver stories with each individual song as progressions are vast, and catchy, and everything has this wonderfully cinematic backbone that it leans on.
This record features amazing strings and still comes through with this sort of classic rock influence to it a lot of the time where the songs end up feeling warm and welcoming in a lot of different ways.
The feel and sound of the strings with the guitars really let the record layer textures and build these atmospheres that you fall right into.
There are loads of melodies, and hooks that stick in your head and bounce around in there for hours or even days after the songs have ended and the only way to satiate that is to listen to them again.
I absolutely adore hearing the different influences that come through when you listen to the album, and this is one of those records where you should really be listening to the whole thing.
Listening to only one or two tracks will not give you anywhere near the full spectrum of what the album actually has to offer.
The release is bountiful with amazing arrangements and compositions that are led by this guitar work and in a way, it almost feels like the songs interconnect with each other sort of like a concept album would.
I adore this aspect as well simply because I love full albums.
This is more of an experience than an album and it serves as an amazing escape for your mind because when you listen to it you end up getting pulled away from your surroundings and put it to all these different places.
The full album has elements of classic rock, jazz, blues, and more all riddled with character and strings that are coded in a certain pop color.
Most of all, everything feels sort of alive and breathing in its own way.
There are beautiful swells and sways throughout the record that give it life in a unique way.
The Melbourne-based trio certainly brings a lot to the table and throughout this record, every element seems to complement each other.
The energy is unique as well. It's almost as if some of these songs were recorded live on the floor to an extent so that the players involved off of each other almost like a live jazz trio would.
This was wondrous, charming, expansive, vast, and it's so much fun to just get lost in this record.
Listening to this album is like reading a good book or watching a good film where, when it ends, you have to reacclimate yourself back to reality again.
This is because the record takes you all these different places as I mentioned earlier.
The whole thing has an almost perfect dynamic and sound balance to it so that each instrument has an equal level of impact throughout every song.
I feel like there was a lot of attention to detail during the creation of this record but, I also feel like there was a certain level of improvisation at times.
Either way, you can tell these guys are having an absolute blast doing their thing and they're just in their zone. They're in their own world making music with fewer boundaries than the norm.
It's a beautiful thing really.
Take a listen to this record and you'll see how the music has a way of swimming through the air that surrounds you
Again, I urge you to do the full album and not just the track or two.
I also suggest you listen to this with headphones on so you can soak in all the different elements, melodies, and lush textures that come through.
Dive into this one and see how it affects you.
Comments