Sic Alps (Noah)

It might seem strange to be celebrating Sic Alps, a band that’s been weirding out the San Francisco scene for five albums over a tumultuous near-decade. Yet times have changed for Mike Donovan and his merry band of experimentalists. After years and years of standing behind the tattered flag of bedroom recording, Sic Alps have stepped in to the spit-shined corridors of a proper studio. Glyphs, the first single off their new Drag City release, boasts not only a softer, more melancholy twinge of weirdness, but the presence of lightly strummed orchestral elements and an almost traditional verse-chorus-verse composition. Mike Donovan is a talented musician and the change feels less like a drastic change and more like the beginnings of subtle progress. Give the self-titled album a solid listen to and the strains of strange and kooky takes on 60s songwriting pop up time and time again, but they’re a little bit cleaner, a little more refined, a little more buried in the cleanly lit reality of the new Sic Alps.

:Sic Alps – Glyphs: