By Jeff Copperthite:

And now, to bring New Bands 2.0 to a close, I bring you…what else?  Another new band!  I hope you have enjoyed us exploring some more musical libraries and contributing them to the sessions.  We’re always thankful for more to cover as well, allowing us to approach our 366 day goal (leap year naturally – nice going Chris) more readily.

With that said, I can guarantee you’ll hear another song by this band before the year is out.

When I was a young student at the University of Connecticut, we were fortunate to have a really awesome, but somewhat unknown band perform named “Guster”.  My roommate Andy insisted they were really good and we were going to enjoy them a lot more than…who else played that night?  (I honestly don’t remember!).

I remember seeing two young guys with guitars, and a…percussion player.  Yes that’s right – he’s not a drummer, he plays various percussion entirely with his hands.  And they had a rocking sound that caused my wife to buy the album that today’s session comes off of called “Lost and Gone Forever”.

The song you’re about to hear was, unknown to me, their first single from the aforementioned album.  It is titled “Fa Fa”, and the title sounds like a song that belongs in the “They Might Be Giants” library.  However, it is a Guster song, and a great one at that.

During this session, I tried to keep a “rhythmic acoustic” strumming going, but missed a couple of chords and a bit of some lyrics due to my trying to keep that strum going.  Doesn’t change the fact that i’m quite proud of this session given the amount of times I had to practice it.

And today closes out “New Bands Week 2.0″.  I hope you enjoy it, and if you are new you stay a fan.  Come back every day for a new session from us!

Tomorrow Jim will bring us a Super Sunday edition.  Will it be a new band?  Tune in to find out…

Related posts:

1. “The Freshmen” (Verve Pipe Acoustic Cover) – The Laptop Sessions

Easy Wonderful (Guster, 2010)

(October 5, 2010)

Review:

The Easy Wonderful CD design is telling: the disc is a vibrant, organic hand-drawn color wheel (see the cover) with a massive “FBI Anti-Piracy Warning” stamped over it; this design — whether the band approved the warning or not — finds Guster, as always, an engaging band with a knack for beautiful songwriting but with too much feeling forced or underwhelming this time around to truly impress alongside their back catalog (i.e. Keep It Together, anyone?).

Top Two Tracks:

“Jesus & Mary” & “Architects & Engineers”

Related posts:

1. Jukebox the Ghost’s “Everything Under the Sun” (2010) – YES, NO, MAYBE SO?
2. Interpol’s “Interpol” (2010) – YES, NO, MAYBE SO?
3. House of Heroes’ “Suburba” (2010) – YES, NO, MAYBE SO?