CD Review

Title: City Of Noise

Artist: The Summerlad

Label: Saved By Radio

Publicity: Killbeat Music

Released: January 8^th 2007

3 Stars

Reviewed By: Kindah Mardam Bey

Summerlad is a rock band from Calgary, Alberta, Canada with a decidedly experimental scope of music. City Of Noise is a homage to the day in the life of a city, which plays heavily on a guitar-orchestrated, choral accompanied, and spoken word collaboration. The City Of Noise by Summerlad was originally commissioned by One Yellow Rabbit theatre company as a piece to correlate with the High Performance Rodeo.

City of Noise has been described as part ‘Peter & The Wolf’ and part ‘One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich.’ The single version of the song has little appeal, like garage band rock, but its substantially longer counter-part, the forty minute rendition has a lot more to offer, so that is the piece I’ll esteem to characterize.

Epic track City of Noise sounds like guitar zen to me; It’s a mixture of slowly paced ebbs and flows gently accumulated in rolls of intention. Listening to City Of Noise sounds like a gentle hum of guitar that seeks to put its listener into a calming meditative state. Simply put, for experimental rock music, it actually sounds good and even has a smooth appeal that almost beckons its listener into the fold. You could put City Of Noise on as a decent piece of background music or drown in its waves for a focused amount of time.

Often artists like Summerlad, escaping the well trod path, can be passed by because they aren’t easy to pigeon-hole. Typecasting aside, Summerlad might have a lucrative career in TV show intros and film soundtracks. Move over Nerf Herder, the next horror-fantasy show featuring a female super-hero could have Summerlad over the title credits.

City Of Noise (Single Version) – 3:50

City Of Noise 40:23