I've previously expressed interest here in The Sands, the new band featuring music critics Sasha Frere-Jones and Chris Lee, who used to write for Spin, mainly because of the 3 excellent and slept on solo albums Lee has released in the past few years on Misra and Smell Like Records. And now SFJ has put the band's entire 9-song demo up on his site for free. For a demo that they want to re-record for a proper album, it's impressively mid-fi, but I'm still working out what I think of the songs. The first song that was leaked a few months ago, "The Hostage Song," might be my least favorite (tied with "Early," which sounds like Sonic Youth's "100%"). And unsurprisingly, the one I like most, "House of Golden Proportions," is the one that most sounds like Lee's solo albums and best utilizes his Buckley-by-way-of-Steve-Perry soulful pipes. Overall, it's promising, though. I think part of the reason I'm curious to see how this band progresses is because I'm interested in seeing how people primarily identified as critics are received with their own musical projects (SFJ already had some success with Ui but he's much more well known as a critic than he was then). I'm always paranoid that writing about records will someday paint me into some kind of corner that will make it harder for me to release records of my own without any people having preconceived notions about what I can or should do. If it ever turns out to be a conflict of interest I'll quit writing in a second.

Labels: Chris Lee

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 29, 2005 at 11:48 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.