The bright and summery sound of Little Suns seems tailor-made for open-air festivals but is too complex for cheery sing-alongs.
This quintet from Montreal, Quebec, are a fusion of many styles; a shuffle mix of classical, folk, baroque pop and world music.
The fact that band members John Cockburn and clarinettist Robin Meyer-MacLeod travelled through Romania and Hungary explains the album's strong Eastern European slant.
Their already rich sound is augmented by guest musicians who add string arrangements, trumpet, sax and uillean pipes.
This instrumental diversity is at odds with relatively conventional song writing. The characterless vocals and banal lyrics tend to distract rather than enhance the intricate arrangements.
The cheery 'let joy abound' subtext to the tunes often lends them a cheesy New Age aspect. The opening track, Sunboat has a big, theatrical Sufjan Stevens-esque production which takes a fairly lightweight song and remakes it into a mini-epic.
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The line "let normal be strange again" from Wake Up articulates a overriding desire to turn the humdrum into something magical. So we get an Arabesque flavour to Them Girls and bouncy Beirut style rhythms in Child Of The Night.
However, for all the divergently exotic musical elements, the songs are still firmly rooted in conventional structures of commercial pop. It would be better if they were more weird and less normal.
Little Suns' website
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