Often when i am researching a band for a review i will come across bands with similar names spread across the globe. This is not uncommon at all.
There are two bands named Sob Story and they are geographically separated by a mere 45 minute drive. There is this Sob Story, the one i am reviewing, based in Ann Arbor. They are an ambient electro group. Also, up the road in Detroit, there is the other Sob Story, who are a kind of indie pop act.
This seems like a really weird coincidence. Why would two artists so close to each other use the same name? Is there something going on in Michigan that i don't know about?
This Sob Story have released a virtual 7" in Everything Is Chemical's excellent series. This is the 106th release, which is quite a string of free music that this label has given away.
There are four songs on this virtual 7", totaling about fifteen minutes worth of music. It's fifteen minutes worth of odd, spacey music.
The first track features a clapped beat that is echoed from here to next week. The song is called Miss Fuyutsuki and combines that echoed clap with a faint little drone wandering around under a heavily echoed voice. The sounds here are so echoed and stretched that they form a miasma, a dense drone to lose yourself in.
Continuing with the Japanese naming scheme we have Hikikomori. This is a slowly pulsing ambient tune that is barely there, consisting largely of a sound like a horn played in a distant room in a big building.
The music is a little denser and more concrete on Aspartame. The voice is still so echoed that it sounds like it is stuttering, but the beat is much stronger, like a floor tom hit once and echoed and looped.
Sob Story get even more solid with their music on Fan Mail, in which there are strange echoed vocals floating far in the background, incongruously hard drumming, and layers of random drone. This tune kind of reminds of Amp, the old ambient trip-hop project from the late 1990s.
Overall, this is not bad. It's a free release, so it is certainly worth the listen.
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