Tidy Street - Back Home

BY CASEY LEWIS
TUESDAY, 22ND OCTOBER 2013

I imagine Back Home playing out on a crisp road dotted with picket-fenced houses, where mothers stay home to feather-dust and fathers call at dinner time only to say they will miss it. The children play outside to avoid their parents, learn instruments to ignore them, and transform their sound into the beginnings of an indie fairy tale…

“Change” is a song of love, confusion and adaptation. The narrator has experienced a significant change in his life (hence the title!) and is figuring out the best way to adapt while trying to keep a distant romance alive. The lyrics are perfectly crafted with images and melodies that take delight in a feeling of sympathetic understanding. Churchill creates a vibrant instrumental arrangement in which all voices are in and of each other while maintaining distinguished personalities. Some highlights: the rhythmic dance-ability is sneaky and infectious, and Georgie Dale’s violin contributes a nice earworm that is pleasant to have stuck in one’s head.

Whether or not it’s true, I typically assume that any song using “Mary Jane” to name its main female character is a song about weed. However, this version of “Mary Jane” is convincingly, and simply, a love song. The instrumentation here is much more modest and elegant than the former piece, presumably to shift the focus to Churchill and Georgie Dale’s vocal harmonies which are absolutely magnetic, and dripping in sweetness. Their timbres flow together like a stream, smooth and consuming. Dale’s vocals themselves are so haunting and hopeful they give one the urge to reach out a hand and touch her.

‘Green Eyes’ tells the story of a pair of lovers who desire true love but have no clue how to recognize it, let alone find it. In the meantime, they settle for staying together. They are lost, stuck in limbo with another half, but a temporary, false half at that. Musically the verses are simple, comprised of lighthearted melodies on acoustic guitar with strings of electricity woven about, while skipping rhythms maintain the song’s contentedness. Churchill’s whistling and Dale’s “do-do-do’s” add to the song’s familiarity. Unlike the first two pieces (in which Churchill was favored), in this finale both lead vocals are equally featured and equally endearing.

This official introduction to Tidy Street is charming and beautifully relatable. The band proves it can create three very different songs while sustaining a unique, intricate sound throughout. The EP as an entity is produced and arranged with impressive attention to detail and innovation, and gives me great hope for Tidy Street’s future.

By Casey Lewis

Download the EP Here