Literature are a book smart band from Austin, Texas who sound like they come from a long line of artists who have embraced jangly, jumpy pop generations before them and beyond. With influences ranging from obvious ones like The Strokes, to less obvious ones like the Stiff Records catalog, the band clearly know how to write strong, memorable songs that are straight out of the garage and into your frontal lobe. Their album Arab Spring kind of looks like an old Darling Buds single but sounds like reckless abandon recorded to tape.
With rumbling bass lines, driving drums, jangly, distorted, and whacked out guitars the band plough through songs as if their lives depended on writing power pop and classic alternative songs in rapid succession. Arab Spring is so classic sounding you'd swear it was secretly recorded in 1987 and that Literature are really 55 years old. This sounds like so many classic 80's British indie records it’s got me confused. I can hear all sorts of classics running through my aural inventory and it impresses me that someone, unbeknownst to them, has stumbled onto so something that's so good. Arab Spring is a nervous, jittery, energetic record that's fun. This is carefree slightly angsty pop music that's so pure and honest it’s hard to no listen to it.
Folks, it's time to get buried in a good work of Literature and I've found it for you in Arab Spring. Like all the best page turners this record will keep you gripped, it'll make you smile, it'll make you jittery, and it might even make you cry; it's that good. They don't make bands, much less records, like this anymore, so to stumble across a band that so readily embraces a sound and runs with is awesome. I've seen the future of music...and it involved, um, Literature.
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