The Earlies

I embrace the conflict of interest in writing about the Earlies. Singer and guitarist Brandon Carr and samples-and-keys whiz John Mark Lapham are friends of mine from college who have always made sweet music together, and now they’re getting their due — earning it, that is — which includes frothingly positive reviews in the big Brit mags: Mojo, Uncut, Q, NME. How Carr and Lapham met up with some brilliant, time-biding Manchester, England, musicians, got semi-famous there, then landed a deal with Indiana’s Secretly Canadian is a story full of cross-Atlantic voyages and Internet-swapped music files, the latter of which constituted the band’s early work and much of the music on this debut album.

The Earlies built a fanbase in the UK with a crashing, buoyant Mercury Rev-meets-Spiritualized sound bolstered by horns, strings, woodwinds, massive drumming and crafty electronic melodies, countermelodies and the sparkles between. Teetering between noise epics and Beatles-for-breakfast reveries, the record is ultimately childlike. The lyrics are often nonsensical (I read the newspaper today/It said one of us is dead, Carr sings over a mellotron and a Casio beat), and your guess is as good as mine when it comes to the Mother Mary and the Morning Wonder leitmotiv. But like the group’s heroes, the Flaming Lips, the music hits like a bomb made of begonias, lemon drops and broken crystal ashtrays. Even the heaviest song, “The Devil’s Country,” with its foreboding choral march of brass power chords, feels like the soundtrack to a 10-year-old’s fantasy that he’s the emperor of the galaxy. It’s music for grown-ups, too, aimed at opening all the jaded, closed-off parts of the adult imagination, tearing down the cobwebs and letting sunshine into the attic.