Mutual Benefit
Mutual Benefit are a band who popped into my inbox for the first time a few weeks ago, and I have been listening to their stuff an awful lot since. Their releases are available from their BandCamp page, and include their two latest EPs, Spider Heaven and Drifting, which come on the A- and B-sides of a tape with artwork made by the band and individual to every purchase (digital downloads available immediately upon purchase).
Musically, they seem to drift from Sufjan Stevens (alright, only barely) to the prettier experimentalism of Sin Fang Bous, and off into lovely dream pop territory, before losing focus and stumbling into a scatter of glitches and digressions again. There are times when it is a little too soft and lovely and poppy for me, but it is never that way for long, and just as the niceness becomes a little grating you can pretty much bet that something strange is about to happen.
As these releases are coincident I find it interesting that the band have opted to define them as two EPs rather than a single album, which they do have enough material for here. Bands tend to love albums. As a record label I love albums, because they are infinitely easier to publicise. But as a writer and a music fan I have a real devotion to the more concise and often more unified EP format, but here lies the problem with digital music, because whilst in tape form (which I confess I haven’t purchased) you would hear this as two very distinct entities, on a playlist they follow one after the other and lose that sense of individuality. I have tried to keep them separate, but realistically that is quite a tricky thing to achieve.
Music this meandering can drift a little at times, and there are occasions where it feels like the band have let slip their focus just a little. That’s a slightly questionable accusation to level at this kind of music though, because that lack of focus is so inherent in the way it is all put together that it is at the heart of both its best bits and its worst moments. So whilst there are occasions when I am a little less than fully engaged, they are few and far between, and when Mutual Benefit nail it, they really do have some gorgeous songs – such as in the video at the bottom of the page.
It was a funny one, this. I heard there stuff and was immediately intrigued, but I wasn’t immediately grabbed once I had the whole piece of work to listen to. So whilst the fascination was pretty much immediate, a fuller relationship with the music took a little more time to achieve. It’s good that way though, and now that this has been on constant rotation for the last three weeks or so I can finally say that I am really enjoying both of these excellent EPs.
Mutual Benefit – Desert Island Feeling
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