There are infinite songs about relationships, and certainly music can take love to a new, magical level when presented with the right song and the right people. But rarely do we come across an interplay of music and love as symbiotic–as desperately codependent–as it does in the work of debut indie outfit The Echo-Friendly. The band, half of which resides in Memphis and half in NYC, debuted their first single, "Same Mistakes" last June on Cantora Records. They're back with a charming new single, titled "Boats".
Jake and Shannon, who comprise the lead vocal duet of The Echo-Friendly, also make up the long time off and on couple whose trials bleed profusely, and unabashedly, into the band’s music. Penned by Jake and refined by Shannon, every lyric can be considered a literal account of real-life events in the relationship, including actual conversations and conflicts, without metaphor or regard for the musicians’ privacy. The result is a textured narrative of the labors, travails and psychoses of a messy relationship, all delivered in a refreshingly digestible indie-pop package. In an age where our lives are more public than ever, The Echo-Friendly renders us all voyeurs to both the beauties and imperfections of entangled love.
The single “Same Mistakes” is a palatable introduction to the band’s love journal. In it, we find the highly relatable frustrations of repeating mistakes, breaking promises to yourself, and realizing in many ways you’re still the immature teenager you were 10, 15 years ago. It’s an anthem of angst for first-world young people faced with the melodramas of growing old without growing up, and the burdens they place on their lovers as a consequence. “Same Mistakes” gives a voice (two of them, actually) to these unspoken universalities, with complements from a steady guitar pulse and growing harmony that aches with distortion at the song’s instrumental break. The E-F’s Cantora debut is a deliberately compassionate confession to falling short of the adult we’re all supposed to be.
Frontman Jake Rabinbach has spent the past two years touring as part of Cantora artist Francis and the Lights’s band, and has released and performed music under his band Jump Back Jake in addition to releasing the November ‘10 online EP “Still Not Sorry” by Jump Back Jake and The Echo-Friendly. While the lead singers, Jake and Shannon Esper, hail from and live in New York, the band records at High/Low Studio in Memphis, where bandmates Jake Vest and Greg Faison take up residence. The foursome is well into completing its first EP, expected to come out later this fall.
