Amazing Baby - Rewild Review

While many bands fail in finding an autonomous sound, Amazing Baby finds their form, despite heavy affiliations with 2008 surprise stars MGMT. They’ve managed to meld sundry lead guitar hooks and soft-spoken vocals as well as studio efforts comparable to Brian Eno, to create a hybrid of psyche-rock and pop. Each song is liable to give way to disco violin, lead guitar assuming the role of the rhythm, and even horns, all without a moments notice.
First single “Headdress,” begins with guitarist Simon O’Connor channeling a Thin Lizzy-esque riff, leading into vamped piano chords, a background choral arrangement, and front man Will Roan’s aggressive and subtle vocals perched on top of both....full text Touted as fellow psychedelic adventurers of MGMT, Brooklyn’s Amazing Baby here prove their third eye is of far wider scope than the press shots of the band lounging rockishly in wolfskin jackets might suggest.

While retaining Hunky Dory as its ground zero, their debut trips Floydishly around two decades of chiffon pop to take in elements of Imperial Bedroom-era Costello (“Bayonets”), early baggy (“Deerripper”) and Afrobeat-period Peter Gabriel (“Roverfrenz”)....full text With graduate employment prospects looking about as rosy as anything else in this current financial apocalypse, Wesleyan University in Connecticut, USA, must be thankful that their alumni are practically guaranteed elbow room in Brooklyn New York's burgeoning post-psychedelic melting pot, subsequent major label riches and probable worldwide notoriety. Following the '80s-pop slickness of Boy Crisis, cutesy iPod-soundtracking of Chairlift and the scene's garishly dressed-up crown princes MGMT, come the awfully monikered but just about as superior as they claim to be Amazing Baby.

Comparisons with platinum-selling trailblazers MGMT are necessary, not least because of the shared campus, but also because of their composition (two whacked-out hippie-looking lynchpins, assisted by further band members live) and the clear audible similarities; the future-tribal "Roverfrenz", forcefully baggy "Deerripper" and spaced-out "Dead Light" could make easy, unobtrusive appearances on "Oracular Spectacular", particularly if you slowed their pulse a little....full text