Monuments and Statues - 'Red Dress' and Welcome to The Undertow

Following on from a recent post celebrating (and lamenting) the sheer volume of “free” or “name your price” downloads out there, I recently came across a new single by a band called Monuments and Statues, which hails from Canada, or Kingston, Ontario, to be more specific.

The single is called ‘Red Dress’ and it first appeared on an EP called Welcome to The Undertow (which is also available for download) back in 2010. With the prospect of a full-length album on the horizon, ‘Red Dress’ has been re-released in 2013 in single format, and although it took a few listens to really get a handle on it, it’s been well worth persevering with.

‘Red Dress’ is also very representative of the rest of the material found on Welcome to The Undertow – the four-track EP. The band doesn’t really fit any traditional genre labels. The music is fairly ramshackle, it lacks structure, but it’s all the more intriguing just because of that. It feels like it deliberately avoids mainstream pop forms, with focus on instrumentation – cello and banjo to the fore – and strong vocal harmonies. There’s a strong acoustic presence and each track on the EP has a certain charm all of its own.

I think the “folk” label is about as close as I can get, but even at that, there’s classical elements at play, there’s a baroque feel to some of it, and hey, it’s also a little bit country ... have a listen for yourself, and if you like it, look out for the band’s album when it turns up sometime soon:

Download ‘Red Dress’ and Welcome to The Undertow from the Monuments and Statues Bandcamp page here.