Receiver

Normally, bands’ obligatory biographies just aren’t very interesting. They tell mundane tales of people meeting up and deciding to make music that was going to change the world and that it was their destiny and all kinds of other clichés. But that’s where the Receiver are a little different. The original inspiration for the band and the music on Decades came from Casey Cooper’s senior composition thesis while he was a student at Ohio State University. Based on this project, he signed to a label and also convinced his equally musical brother Jesse to join him and thus the Receiver came to be. Considering its mandatory origins, Decades is a remarkably good album. Hinting at the likes of the Postal Service, Manitoba and even Air, it mixes piano and keyboards with dreamy vocals to make atmospheric music that struggles to be divided into tracks. Instead, they merge together and sometimes shift moods mid-song until it can be hard to tell where things begin or end. But it is obvious that the results are impressive. It is definitely not an album that gives up all its secrets on its first listen, yet it isn’t as difficult as some similarly-minded record are and that’s why it is such an intriguing release. Maybe in the future all bands should have to defend their music in front of an examining committee before it sees the light of day because it appears to have worked this time. Just a thought.