Now It's Overhead

Producers fronting bands is rather like TV stars embarking on pop careers: they shouldn’t really do it, but when they do results are pleasantly mixed. Take John Congleton, for example: his production skills were enjoyed with pleasing results by the excellent 90 Day Men, and his own band, The Paper Chase, are well worth their acclaim, too. Andy LeMaster’ s Now It’s Overhead are well informed by the bands that he produces – many Saddle Creek artists, Bright Eyes include, have benefited from his studio wizardry – but lack any real identity of their own. That’s not to say they’re bad, mind…

With a rotating line up, varying from tour to tour, establishing a distinct, standalone sound is always going to be tough, and the presence of Orenda Fink on bass can’t help but cast long, Azure Ray-shaped shadows across the more ethereal moments of tonight’s short set. Her backing vocals, too, have these ears drifting off to a place populated only by the most angelic. LeMaster himself is a confident front man – he overcomes early-set technical gremlins with the sort of calmness expected from current tour mates REM – but he never really asserts himself fully. Attempts at between-song banter fall upon mostly deaf ears. Then again, perhaps said ears are merely waiting for the next slice of sample-assisted indie-pop: ‘Wait In A Line’ and ‘Reverse’ both sound magnificent.

As magnificent as the set’s peaks are, though, the similarity between songs sometimes blurs the lines of individualism to the point where ‘magnificent’ troughs out to become ‘nice’, and nice becomes ‘inoffensive’, and ‘inoffensive’ becomes ‘I wonder if I need another drink’, etc. It’s an odd criticism for sure, to suggest that a band’s pluses are in a roundabout way also their minuses, but that aforementioned lack of identity ensures that, as nice as Now It’s Overhead are, they never once rise to a level where the listener cares for them enough to shut out everything else. They play wonderful music for the background to the bigger picture, and are just too pleasant for their own damn good.

But they are damn good. Damn…

Now It’s Overhead, then: a band of split personalities guaranteed to split opinion, even in the mind of the individual.