Hotel – “Near The Desert, Near The City”
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Hotels – “Hydra”
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I can’t give Hotels much credit for originality. Both their music and their band name are rather derivative (and confusing… “Motels”???) but the music is still good stuff and worth a few spins. The track “Near The Desert, Near The City” is very familiar sounding and sounds like something you could’ve heard at a friend’s house years ago, back in the 80′s during college.
‘Where Hearts Go Broke’, released as a digital download on Valentine’s Day, February 14.
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“From the opening salvo of single ‘Hydra’ to glorious finale ‘Flight Of The Navigator’, Where Hearts Go Broke takes the listener on a thrilling musical journey through airports, streets, bars and, yes, hotels, populated with people falling in and out of love, lost in the gutter but always looking to the stars. This is the most relentlessly paced, hauntingly melodic, damn catchy pop music you’ve never heard, each song an end credit for the weary traveller or the romantic dancer; a tune you should listen to just before you die.
Throughout this addictive album, crisp, propulsive drumming and beautifully melodic bass are buoyed up by sizzling synths and chiming guitars, with Blake Madden intoning urgent, compelling vocal lines. It’s all here: the swooning nu-gaze surge of ‘Near The Desert, Near The City’; the edgy guitar clang of ‘Port Of Saints’; the gorgeous Bond-esque epic ‘The Heart The Hears Like A Bat’, with its tremolo guitar and vibraphone rippling out into the night; and the impossibly sublime ‘Café Martinique’, where the tumbling majesty of Joy Division meets fast-paced chamber pop, with one of the most blissed-out finales you’re likely to hear.”