Donny Hue and the Colors Get A Letter From New Virginia

I have to admit, I'm kind of over the whole folk revival thing currently making the rounds in indie rock. It's beginning to all sound the same. Every sucker knows anyone w/an acoustic guitar can play "folk music," but to make it interesting you really have to do something different or at least attempt to. So many artists today just don't and it's gotten really boring, really quickly. There are artists however, that don't fall into that quagmire of cliched, boring acoustic garbage. Donny Hue and the Colors is one such artist.

Donny Hue's album, Letter From New Virginia thankfully is an amalgamation of styles and emotions that keep it from being just another boring folk record. At times sounding like Dylan and others sounding as quirky as Of Montreal this group seems to excel at taking the best bits of all sorts of music and pasting them into some sort of folk-like template that works. Sometimes tearjerkingly sad, other times upbeat and darn near jovial, Letter From New Virginia is a exceptionally nice listen that doesn't wear on you.

Somewhat shy and apparently in love with the ocean (waves crash in on so many songs I lost count), Donny and his band kind of shuffle around the fringes of genres never quite getting lost in them but dabbling in them just enough to make songs interesting. Letter From New Virginia is loaded with honky tonk blues, harmonica led country, acoustic meanderings, and full on jumpy pop music. It's a record that keeps you guessing and that's really it's strength because if it had been lost in a field of purely folk influenced songs Letter From New Virginia would have fallen flat on its face and you and I both to sleep.

Thankfully, Donny Hue and the Colors have created a thoroughly enjoyable record that stays clear of all the cliche's that could have potentially killed it. Instead they approached the record with a whimsical sense of musical wonderment and wrote the songs to match. In other words, Letter From New Virginia is the kind of folk music it's ok to like and like it I do. So give yourself a pat on the back Donny...you did good.