Search - Now It's Overhead :: Now It's Overhead

With its self-titled debut album, Now It's Overhead put to shame latter-day indie bands from a cross-section of genres--from emo to new wave and industrial--while still sounding remarkably original, coherent, and extremely listenable. Steeped in the relative eclecticism of '80s and '90s "alternative" music, the band uses its considerable skill to turn numerous great moments from that period into four-minute slabs of brilliant pop. Songs like "6th Grade Roller" suggests there's a Nitzer Ebb record somewhere in singer-songwriter Andy LeMaster's closet, while "Blackout Curtain," does Thompson Twins almost as well as they did themselves. Though a fuzzy curtain of distortion is a constant backdrop to NIO's sound, in front of it the group creates as affecting a song with mellow guitar and vocal harmonies as it does with dramatic electronic displays through "Goodbye Highway." The concluding "A Skeleton on Display," meanwhile, with an added string or woodwind part, could easily have come from the Delgados' gorgeous The Great Eastern. --Sarah A. Sternau