I was contacted a couple of days ago by a group called Hello, Broken Arrow.  I almost titled this post Hello, Hello, Broken Arrow, but the explanation would have stripped away whatever thin humour was there to begi… never mind.

The songs are lovely, but their MySpace page is so sparse that I could have done little more than re-post the music here and say ‘here ya go’, which somewhat defeats the purpose of mp3 blogging if you ask me.

So, a little more detail: they are a group of Seattle musicians who started getting together once a week to try writing songs with different people.  Initially, the idea was simply to generate a kind of creative freshness which would improve their own individual projects, but it turned into something with a life in and of itself.  The participants come from bands like Huma and Shenandoah Davis (who introduced herself to me only recently), and they haven’t quite got as far as finding labels to release anything yet, but they’re thinking about it.  They’re also applying to play Pickathon this year, which would be brilliant, but it’s still clearly very early days indeed.

I love the sound of this.  It’s West Coast alt-folk, in the broadest sense, and does sound to have obvious kinship with so many other bands from the Pacific Northwest: sparse, and slightly otherworldly, but with a good rhythm to keep things moving along.  You can’t be too definite about anything with only two demos around, but I’d say this sounds really promising.  More please!

Hello, Broken Arrow – Mine is a Light (Demo)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Hello, Broken Arrow – Golden Fools (Demo)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.