City States

It’s easy to start a band. It’s easy to call some friends, bang out some songs, and set up some shows in some dingy neighborhood loft. It’s easy to put on a pair of sunglasses and stand in front of a camera for some hot press photos. It’s easy to pay some PR agent to call you the next big thing. Starting a band is easy, and it happens all the time. Being in a band, however, that’s the hard part. Managing personalities, scheduling time, dedicating oneself to one’s craft, pressing on when no one seems to care—that’s hard. Read more on Last.fm …read full bio

It’s easy to start a band. It’s easy to call some friends, bang out some songs, and set up some shows in some dingy neighborhood loft. It’s easy to put on a pair of sunglasses and stand in front of a camera for some hot press photos. It’s easy to pay some PR agent to call you the next big thing. Starting a band is easy, and it happens all the time. Being in a band, however, that’s the hard part. Managing personalities, scheduling time, dedicating oneself to one’s craft, pressing on when no one seems to care—that’s hard. Most groups simply dissolve when someone realizes that being in a rock group is a lot tougher than it sounds. It helps, though, when the members of a band have known each other for 17 years. Steve Lund and Joel Ebner, the gentlemen of City States, first met in a high-school biology class just outside of Chicago. Like the genesis of their friendship, they’re not particularly cool. However, that long-standing friendship has helped them get past the tough parts of being in a band, ultimately making it possible for them to write better songs than they wrote last week, last month, or last year. Resolution, City States’ debut EP, does indeed trump the songs released by Lund and Ebner in the last six years of writing together. From the first moments of “You Know How It Is,” with its looping rhythms and eerie synth tones, it’s clear that the band owes a sizable debt to Radiohead. Through the course of the EP’s five tracks, however, one can hear a variety of influences bubbling to the surface; “Evened Out” and “Reverse Slow Motion” recall the expressive art-pop of the Dismemberment Plan; the minimal ballads “Breathe” and “It’s Nothing,” at turns ominous and sincere, channel Brian Eno and the darker moments of Talking Heads’ Remain in Light; and throughout, the songs are tinted with the strange textures of Berlin-era Bowie and Chicago luminaries Sea & Cake, nuanced and full of unexpected changes in tempo and mood. Rewarding? Absolutely. Easy? Definitely not. But easy isn’t the same thing as good, and in the case of City States, learning to navigate the hard road has resulted in an ambitious statement of purpose loaded with potential for the future. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.

User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.

…shrink me down again