Review Summary: You fill my lungs with sweetness and you fill my head with you.
After producing several locally distributed EP’s/singles, Australian indie folk quintet The Paper Kites released a music video for their single “Bloom” in 2010, which steadily grew recognition and acclaim via YouTube and general word-of-mouth, making the band internationally known amongst the indie landscape. The success prompted the Nettwerk label to take an interest in them, and by the beginning of the new year, the band was in the midst of producing what would become their first international release, the
Woodland EP. Conscious of the lightweight, easy-on-the-ears atmosphere that helped make “Bloom” as successful as it was, the band attempted to steer the other tracks towards this type of style while simultaneously not shying away from spicing up the instrumentation a bit here and there. And the combination of lead single “Featherstone” reaching similar critical acclaim to “Bloom” whilst also including the latter as a bonus track gave the EP (and thus, the Paper Kites themselves) some staying power.
One has to take
Woodland for what it is in the grander scheme of things. Indie folk is a genre that, when not dealing with the “sad guy with a guitar” stereotype, can often get very cheesy very quickly. And while The Paper Kites have merit to their artistry (a merit which is more tangible on their more ambitious albums to follow), this EP is as cheesy as they come.
Woodland is essentially a collection of love songs given that sort of forested, coffee-shop instrumentation that every 2000’s indie folk band used as their proverbial bread and butter. You have the dual acoustic and electric guitars, the subtle bass inflections, the percussion that can remain completely absent for one song and be the pounding center-point of the next: have we seen any of these before on an indie folk record? I think yes.
But if there’s one thing I can’t deny about this project, it’s how sincere the sentiments seem to be. I wouldn’t consider lead vocalist Sam Bentley to be the premier example of how to convey emotion in a folk track, but there’s something about his feather-light vocals that give off this youthful innocence, and it’s not a contrived-sounding innocence either. Listening to him in “Bloom”, I feel as though I’m honestly listening to a very quiet, soft-spoken guy in his late teens who’s trying to understand his romantic feelings for the first time. The backing vocals from Christina Lacy and David Powys combined with just how wonderfully warm the guitars are mixed make this one of the most affecting “cheese-folk” tracks you will run across.
Unfortunately, nothing else here is quite as strong as “Bloom”; “Halcyon” comes closest to capturing a similar feel, and the energetic percussion-fuelled charge of “Willow Tree March” is invigorating to the ears, but everything else merely passes by as entertaining-yet-sometimes-overwhelmingly pleasant indie folk pap. This is to be expected considering
Woodland’s backstory, however, so the lack of artistic experimentation is a relatively forgivable offense here. At the end of the day,
Woodland accomplishes what it needs to as a debut project; it kicks The Paper Kites into some form of mainstream prominence (if only in relation to indie folk) while producing a consistently enjoyable product overall (not to mention the excellence that is “Bloom” on top of that). There may be better things to come for this band, but as starts go, this is a damn fine one.
