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Album Details

• Artist: Marlon Rando
• EP:
Marlon Rando
• Label: indie
• Year of Release: 2011
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: mark_morton on 2011-07-07

Marlon Rando is the kind of band I could hear discussed as I cringingly traipse into Other Music in NYC (not that I'm trying to give the "store" a cheap plug). The clerks, either draped over the counter engrossed in the latest issue of Paste or sluggishly trying to hold up the walls would either laud the band for its ardent anti-establishmentism or they would mock it for daring to resurrect the blasé rockabilly genre, which they most likely deem has no business crawling its way into the 21st century.

Truth be told, Marlon Rando is the perfect study in musical irony. On the one hand, the band is so left-of-center that it will surely never be played on pop radio. Not only does the recording quality set at an awkward equalization (thus screaming for a vinyl pressing), but there is so much reverence for classic rockabilly that only the most indie of indie fans would lend a ravenous ear sight unseen. However, Marlon Rando also rides a twisted tangent between Shoegaze and surf/hot rod street rock that the band would neither be out of place rocking a smoke-filled nightclub in Greenwich Village nor kicking up sand on a SoCal beach.

The music is not "oh, woe is me," and it is not happy, jolly "life is perfect" neo-Beach Boys saccharine-laced sentimentality. Marlon Rando also employs a bit of science fiction romanticism, in a similar vein to what Man Or Astro-Man? conjured regularly. In a nutshell, each song on the EP is laced with hopeful melancholy - saying that while things are bad now, they will eventually get better because I said it will! What I find most impressive about Marlon Rando is that it is everything and nothing simultaneously - spacey and psychedelic, dreamy and kaleidoscopic, crusty and backwashed with a wall of reverb, and begging for a nic-fit! The band truly is musical creativity at its quirkiest.

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