A Welcoming New Album from THE FAMILY GRAVE

A fresh album release from The Family Grave just dropped, and this record delves into a slew of folk and classic rock influences, along with surprising turns here and there that keep the album fresh and keep the listener on their toes.

Right from the start, you can tell that this album has a lot of personality embedded in its veins.

Songs can feel warm and welcoming and tell great stories even while rocking out.

The album opens up with the track called "Sweet Charity", which gives you some of the record's staples right from the get-go, as you have some crisp guitars, warm-toned organs that sort of fill the space and create depth, and addictive vocals along with live percussion.

Now, this, to me, is an excellent introduction to the record, not just because it gives you some of the staples that you're going to hear, but it sort of invites you into the aesthetic of the album itself.

Again, between the guitar tones, vocal approach, and organs, this is definitely very classic rock-influenced, and growing up listening to that stuff, this really hit the nail on the head and felt nostalgic for me.

"AC DC"  is the following track and this one rocks a little harder with distorted guitars, but still that classic and almost vintage feeling guitar tone, which you can tell was honed in purposely.

This is a major attribute of the album itself. There's a lot of attention paid to the tones of their instruments, and that is a huge reason why the record feels the way that it does.

This was aimed at people who grew up listening to classic rock or folk songs that tell great stories and have a strangely welcoming sense to them.

Then we have songs like "Valentine's Day", which is much more vast, cinematic, has a little bit of a dark edge, and makes me think of bands like Nick Cave in the Bad Seeds, for example.

Sounds like this gives off that heavily theatrical backbone, and I love that because it pulls you in in a different way.

As I mentioned before, this is a record that keeps you on your toes; however, one of the brightest and most vivacious tracks on the record is certainly the kind of song that surprises you even on an album like this.

This track is called "Daylight", and it features more of a Samba-style rhythm at times, jazz-influenced, loaded with horn sections, and still has an amazing warmth to it like the rest of the songs do, just in a different sense and tone.

This track provides such a new set of textures that it really kind of blew me away, and it's the third track in.

So, by the time you get past that third track, you start to expect the unexpected.

You get funk, rock, folk, alt, and plenty more rolled into one record with loads of surprises around the corners and plenty to offer in the way of dance ability, and vintage tonality that again, can give you bouts of nostalgia.

Sometimes the guitar tones are so perfect that the song actually sounds like it was recorded in the '70s or early '80s. "Big Man" is a track that serves as a perfect example of exactly that.

It's like it was influenced by bands like the Rolling Stones.

Now, the name of the album is called Old Songs For Kids, and one of the reasons for that is that the band began recording the songs on this record before the previous one was even released. It almost feels like a compilation release.

It is the third part of a three-album release called Happy Old Love Songs Trilogy, and it's only available in full on Bandcamp.

You can hear a few of the singles on Spotify, but if you want to hear the full album, you'll have to jump over to Bandcamp to do it.

I can assure you it's well worth it as once again, this is a record that has a lot to offer, loads of those surprises, lush and surprisingly energetic songwriting, along with those classic and nostalgic, vintage approaches and tones right down to the way it was recorded.

They really nailed the aesthetic that they were going for here and it was a record that I would suggest listening to all the way through from beginning to end.

Listening to a few tracks might give you an idea or a gist of what you might expect but will not give you the full spectrum of what the whole album has to offer.

This is a journey worth taking, and if you listen to the full record, it's quite a fun experience, and again, this is what it was made for.

This is an album meant to be heard as an album.

So, take a deep dive into this one and I'm sure you will not regret it, especially if you're a fan of any kind of classic rock.

Remember where you heard this first.

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