Coming Soon - "Home from the Blues" (2008)

Coming Soon, one of France's most exciting indie folk/pop bands, hails from the culturally and geographically isolated town of Annecy. Imagine a great new band bursting out of Michigan's Upper Peninsula: you'd certainly expect, thanks to the interwebs, the band to be fully attuned to any number of current musical sub-genres; you might also predict a certain free-wheeling mixing and matching of influences and ideas that expose the remoteness of the musicians' origins—like a rare Galapagos finch developing more colorful tail feathers during the course of its evolution in an isolated environment.

The tail feathers of Coming Soon have got some serious color. Now based in Paris, the young band (whose members now range in age from a tender 17 to an able-to-drive-the-tour-bus 28) was inspired by the previous decade's American anti-folk scene and its stylistic antecedents. Originally a trio, the core members adopted vibrant nicknames (Leo Bear Creek, Ben Lupus, and Billy Jet Pilot) and began writing songs, recruiting friends into Coming Soon as the band developed. By the time their debut cd, “New Grids” was finished, the band had expanded to seven members, each with his or her own nickname and persona.

Like many debut albums recorded quickly (5 days!), “New Grids” is jam-packed with great ideas. Not all of them are fully realized, but the band's enthusiasm and joy in experimenting more than compensate. From the space-age 12-bar blues opener "Memento Mori" (in which the band members helpfully count down the bars during the chord changes) to the rousing, gather-your-friends album closer "What You've Left Behind," "New Grids" wears its twee/shambolic influences proudly. The album respectfully conjures Jonathan Richman, Calvin Johnson's Beat Happening, Half Japanese, Pavement (whose "Crooked Rain"-era fuzzy guitar tone is borrowed throughout), and the Shop Assistants with a smart mixture of hero-worship and springboard.

The dizzy indie spin of "Home from the Blues" is the kind of song that Beck, another sonic touchpoint for Coming Soon, would have put his other foot in the grave to have written: ("This morning I felt Hamlet baking up a pie / for my mother's new wedding, oh man she is wild"). The song, about gulping in the fresh air of freedom, bounces from image to scattershot image behind a lurching drum beat; the guitar sounds like the Basement Tapes if the only amp Dylan had owned was a 15-watt Peavey. By the time the chorus resolves into its clincher "I'm home from the blues, wait till I'm loose," Coming Soon have successfully created an entire world—as far from Annecy as from any other place on earth.

click the image below to listen to song previews or buy the album: