Forever Sounds Great

Album review

The Green Apple Sea hail from Nuremberg, Germany, a fact worth mentioning primarily because listening to their second album, one would automatically assume that they were from, say, Portland, OR. Forever Sounds Great is archetypal indie Americana, triangulated somewhere between early Wilco, Red House Painters, and Will Oldham's various guises. For example, "A City and a Woman" commingles a lazy dream pop tempo, narcotic pedal steel fills, a slightly croaky lead vocal à la Oldham or Smog's Bill Callahan (though with far sunnier lyrics than either of those chronic curmudgeons usually offer) and, on the fade out, the sort of semi-Beach Boys backing vocals that were all over Summerteeth. A charming albeit slightly too faithful cover of the Mountain Goats' "The Best Ever Death Metal Band from Denton" suggests another point of comparison, but overall, these 11 slices of mellow Americana stick to the above-described "one from column A, one from column B" approach. Stefan Prange's voice is both pleasant and a little anonymous, and Christian Ebert's piano fills on tunes like the dreamy closer "How Could I Get So Wrong" bring in occasional flashes of the Band's Richard Manuel, all of which adds to the overall sense that Forever Sounds Great is at heart an earnest evocation of the bandmembers' favorite albums in the alt country style. However, it's a perfectly good example of same, and the band's songwriting is just strong enough to suggest that if they don't take the same seven year break between their second and third album that they took between their first and second, their next could be better still.
© Stewart Mason /TiVo