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A lot of bands these days have been rehashing the 80s, but very few of them bring anything particularly new to the table. For me, it’s really dull to have your own teenage years spit back to you as if it’s new, so it’s refreshing to hear a band do something interesting with it. Foreign Born are pretty steeped in the 80s, but they are most definitely not regurgitating it back. Instead, they take that era of post-punk, new-wave and pop, dig back to its influences and come up with their own sound.
Foreign Born’s guitarist, Lewis Pesacov, has a degree in Composition and considering how carefully their songs are constructed from influences ranging from the Beatles to Mott the Hoople to early INXS, it’s really not a surprise. Unlike many trained musicians though, Foreign Born don’t find themselves constrained by that training. Instead, they’ve created an album that ebbs and flows in layers, from thin to thick and back again. They don’t rely on overt hooks, but instead on an implied catchiness that makes the songs memorable as a whole rather than just a riff here and there.
After releasing two EPs, On the Wing Now is Foreign Born’s first full-length. Not only is it full of material that could share a stage easily with indie, emo, punk or post-rock, but it also makes an open-ended promise for the future.
