[rating=4.00]
Are you looking for a great new American indie-folk singer? Look no further than… Faroe Islands native Marius Ziska. Following on the heels of Britons Mumford & Sons, whose songs have reinvented banjo-driven Americana, Ziska is making great American music – far from American shores.
His new album Recreation, not yet released Stateside, is quite catchy, a perfect balm for whatever may ail you. It opens with a track featuring the best whistle hook since Peter, Bjorn and John, the straight ahead pop number “Nice Day.” Carrying on, the album carries tracks in shades of everything from Simon & Garfunkel (to wit, “Restless Mind”), to vaguely Beatles-esque (for some reason the clapping on “Into the Silence” brought to mind “Ob-La-Di,Ob-La-Da”), to David Gray (see “While You Were Dreaming”). Ziska’s voice is beautiful, his singing (in accented English) solid alone and at times complemented marvelously by other voices, as on the haunting “The Middle Way.” The instrumentation on the album ranges from lightweight guitar to fun (see the honky-tonk sounds on “One in the Masses” for an example). Production is a bit rough, but the quality of the music shakes that off.
Overall, this is a great effort from a new (to the US) musician. You will helplessly finding yourself humming its tracks endlessly as you proclaim, to the annoyance of those outside of your headphones, “just how darn catchy this is.”
