The World Forgot

What would you get if you blended together the compositional sounds of Sufjan Stevens with modern day sing song pop folk and then poured that topping over a cake made out of Final Fantasy?  (And I guess I should clarify here; this Final Fantasy cake is the live version of Owen Pallet’s shows, not the quasi lame studio albums he continually puts out).  Stumped?  Well you won’t be for long.  What you get is Anders Ponders (and coincidentally one great album that I simply didn’t get to listen to last year.  It might have wormed its way into my best of 2009 list if I had just given it a listen last year.  Sigh).

mp3 : Anders Ponders – The Discus Incident
mp3 : Anders Ponders – Slowest Motion Miracle

From the start of the album, 2009′s Nodes of Overtones (amazon) (itunes), the similarities to Final Fantasy should be evident.  Every track contains ample amounts of violin (or possibly viola, never could tell them apart), a depth of arrangements, and the lyrics on each song tell a catchy story.  The one main deviation from the parallel comes in the content of those lyrics.  Where Final Fantasy sings songs about random events, (such as on He Poos Clouds), Anders Ponders tells short vignettes about Icarus (track 4) or his favorite fruit, Pomegranate (track 2).  In his own words he describes his sound as “A Fairy Home Companion” and I would definitely agree with that.

The allusion to Sufjan Stevens becomes more and more apparent the longer you listen to the album and culminates on the last track, Slowest Motion Miracle, where if you weren’t listening closely you could easily mistake it as a Sufjan song.

The bottom line is that Anders Ponders has created an infectious debut album that all readers of The World Forgot should listen to as soon as they can.

+ more Anders Ponders @ twf hype elbows site myspace amazonmp3 itunes
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