Joe from Watershed introduced me to Marah, a band out of Philadelphia that I fell in love with fast and hard. Today Joe wrote me to let me know that Nick Hornby discusses the band in a piece he wrote for the NYT today, discussing Marah, Springsteen, Outkast and everything else in between. Here’s one of my favorite quotes from the piece:
Both “Hey Ya!” and Marah’s new album are roots records, not in the sense that they were made by men with beards who play the fiddle and sing with a finger in an ear, but in the sense that they have recognizable influences – influences that are not only embedded in pop history, but that have been properly digested. In the suffocatingly airless contemporary pop-culture climate, you can usually trace influences back only as far as Radiohead, or Boyz II Men, or the Farrelly Brothers, and regurgitation rather than digestion would be the more accurate gastric metaphor. (full story)