New to Me, and maybe to you too?!?!

My friend Nick recommended this to me. He has good taste and is seldom wrong, and I may have to agree with him that “Sleepwalker” by Johnny and Santos maybe one of the best songs of all time. Everybody has heard this song before. It’s that one song in “La Bamba” when the airplane crashes and Richie’s mom is hanging the clothes to dry and Bob-O rushes to tell mom the bad news while falling over the chain link fence in the process. SOOO GOOD!!! But back to Nick, he use to be a DJ at WMBR Cambridge for MIT which he had a show that had a total of 10 listeners because it was slated from 12am to 6am justly titled “Daydreaming at Night.” So needless to say, Nick has good taste. Now that we have established that fact, he suggested an album by the group Voices and Organs titled “Orphanage” that chronicles the lives of these orphan kids that has all the good elements from groups such as Sigur Ros, Mum, and Manitoba (I think that’s what he goes by now).

and a message from their website-

Voices and Organs – Orphanage

Our idea was to create music emerging from specific ideas; might it be cities, photographs or bicycles. It was (and still is) about trying to get a hold of feelings, making something precious of our precious memories.
Orphanage began as a collection of short stories and when we started transforming these stories into songs we didn’t want to just add melody and rhythm to fixated words but capture the orphans’ with/in sound. Eventually only half a page of text made it to the album (originally being eleven)…and when words were used, we sung them the way they appeared in the stories and not as regular verses or choruses, like a Wagner opera but much more low-key.
We didn’t want the album to be seen as a collection of songs about a certain subject but rather as a great mix-tape where you can’t tell the number of tracks or how long they are. Because early, we realized that not all childhood memories are as direct as 3 minute pop songs. Some are obvious where others fail to get through to you, some are grandiose where others are faint and sometimes all you can grasp is a scent. But then again, once in a while they are pop songs indeed.
The way grainy pictures can come out clear if you let them fill up a wall, we noticed that some of the melodies became so diffuse that we had to hide them beneath noises and voices to make them appear. Maybe that is why the album sounds (to us, that is) so large and small at the same time.
Voices and Organs consists of a small core, but on this album families and friends made many contributions (with or without their knowledge) so we ended up asking lots of people for permission. Sonically it is as if only half of the album is about the fictitious orphanage itself and the rest is about us. Lyrically maybe it has been us all along… In the end we are only very small and life flows on within them and without us. -V&O