Art Pedro &#8211; Epicedia

Art Pedro – Epicedia

artpedro I often struggle to write about Art Pedro, because I never quite know how to phrase exactly what it is I want to say. Basically, I almost always find myself thinking ‘okay, lots of good stuff going on, not quite sure I’d say it was entirely clicking for me, but I like a lot of the ideas happening here’.

When I interviewed Jamie from The Japanese War Effort for Fresh Air Radio the other week he talked about how much work he would produce early on – throwing around ideas, sketching out songs, and generally just working through exactly what it was he was trying to do. Art Pedro had a very prolific period a couple of years back which seemed to be to be a little similar: very prolific, but really quite patchy.

A year or so ago Pete Mason announced that he was retiring from music altogether, which he has a habit of doing from time to time, apparently, but you can’t keep a good mentalist down and he’s just recently come back to me with a whole album of new material.

Anyone with the foresight to invest in a cellist farm in the last few years would now be a very rich individual indeed because pretty much every damn band in the world seems to have one at the moment, and there’s one on this as well. It’s all added with a pretty subtle touch though, I have to say, so it’s hardly all that obvious most of the time, generally just bringing a comforting warmth to the songs in question.

Art Pedro’s songs tend to come across as the inner monologues which meander around inside your head late at night as you stare at something on your desk you’re supposed to be doing but can’t face starting.

The extra time spent over this album has been well worth it, though, I’d say. It has the right combination of a melancholic mood with little hooks and twists which spread themselves around enough to make this sound like a whole album, rather than a collection of ideas which just got trapped in the same place by accident.