It would be easy to bash Blind Man’s Colour – very easy. Wooden Blankets wears its influences on its sleeves. It’s one part lo-fi indie pop, one part chillwave, and about one hundred parts Animal Collective, but somehow this doesn’t come off as a bad thing. With their efforts on a lowly four-track cassette recorder, they’ve collected four songs that are astoundingly catchy, extremely personal, and (if I may be so bold) on par with the majority of the Animal Collective catalog.
With last year’s Season’s Dreaming, Blind Man’s Colour put themselves on the map as the latest in a field of Animal Collective acolytes, and with Wooden Blankets they’ve taken a massive step forward. It’s a whole lot easier to look at them as a creative entity all their own. Save for the poppy closer “Sleeping Bag,” they haven’t made the influence any less obvious, they are just making music that can compete with the band that they are striving to sound like.
This time around, despite the obvious do-it-yourself recording strategies, they sound like professionals. “Sleeping Bag,” for example, is driven along by some sort of mouth percussion that could easily be at home on an Animal Collective song, but its slowly strummed acoustic guitar and downcast vocals provide an extremely interesting counterpoint to an EP so reliant on buoyant electro-pop. This maneuver isn’t the sort of device that duos of recent high school grads often employ.
It’s easy to see why early on this was being billed as a mini-album and not an EP. At thirty minutes its quite the formidable piece of music, and perhaps more importantly if flows so well. EP’s often are merely odds and ends collections that exist to make a cash grab on the material that was left over from an album. Wooden Blankets obviously does not fall prey to this. The transitions, anchored by the cheap keyboards and clean guitars, allow Wooden Blankets to exist as a singular piece of music instead of a collection to be sampled from.
So yes, some of the songs represent obvious bites at their influences, but the songs are just too good to ignore. “We’re Treehouse Kids!,” perhaps the most obvious Animal Collective nod, pulses with the unbridled joy that comes from enjoying you, and bashing away at cheap keyboards. It’s only Merriweather Post Pavilion smeared in grime, but it’s still an interesting piece of spiraling art pop in its own right. Actually, that’s probably the best summation of the EP as a whole, it’s nothing new, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good.
