Every Thursday, well most Thursdays unless we're down the pub, a crack team of orphans are bribed by hecklerspray with a multipack of McCoy’s crisps to trawl through the ever-growing love/hate inspiring site that is MySpace. The shit is filtered away and we're given the best bands and artists that it has to offer. We enjoy doing this. It gives us a piss poor excuse to listen to decent music and pretending to work whilst we do so.
Unfortunately for nearly all of the staff here at hecklerspray, we're all musically useless. This was drilled in to us in our childhood when we were little tots without a care in the world. One day the butch-looking music teacher grunted at us “Who wants to learn to play an instrument?” Us, we thought, since it'd probably be a useful skill to have, and would maybe impress the ladies in future life. But when we went out to audition playing the guitar we were bluntly told by the horrible bulldog of a teacher that we had no musical ability. Our souls were shattered.
After about ten seconds of trying to impress her we were told to pretty much bugger off and play the triangle – the only instrument we were apparently good at it. This hurt us a lot. But it’s good to see not all children are told they're shit; this week’s MySpace Trawl brings us to Smoosh. They are two sisters, who aren’t even old enough to see The Grudge 2 because it’s a 15. Not that they’d want to, anyway. It’s shit.
Chloe and Asya are two sisters who hail from Washington, Seattle in the good old US of A. Even though they're only 11 and 13 years old each, they’ve released two albums, a few singles, done radio sessions for Radio 1 in the UK and KCRW in America and toured around the world where they’ve appeared at various festivals, and supporting bands like Death Cab For Cutie and one of our favourite bands The Go! Team. This is where we first got to know Smoosh. We gave them a pretty decent review, but we never really heard much of them again after that. The assumption was that they were some kind of childstar band who were forced in to performing by pushy parents who had previously failed to start a music career when they were young. So they forced their kids to follow their dream by making them practise for 16 hours a day, harshly beating them if they didn’t comply or got a single note or beat wrong.
Amazingly, as you are probably thinking, our sick and twisted and theory is not right at all. Chloe, the elder of the two who plays the piano and Asya who plays the drums have made a steady progress with their sound which has been documented on their MySpace description/ blog thingy. Chloe was taught the drums a few days a week and slowly built up her skills to accompany her sister, who belts out Smoosh's blissful sounding songs on the piano/keyboard.
Traditionally, a lot of musicians have to practise hard and work to gain some degree of success. It’s not usually until their mid twenties until they can slowly break through and market themselves as a credible band. With Smoosh, age doesn’t seem to matter here at all. The lyrics that are written by the elder sister Chloe have a childlike quality to them but deal with situations that the both young and the old can easily relate to. Whilst the track isn’t on their MySpace page, a track from their debut album, She’s Like Electric called Not Your Day To Shine deals with how sometimes how life can really drag you down and you make you want to forget everything. Pretty deep stuff coming from someone aged 13, who society would still class as a child and unable to deal with such sensitive issues. If we were to remove the fact the songs were by kids, it would surprise a lot of people. Maybe age shouldn’t matter.
Smoosh's music doesn’t sound like it’s by a few kids jamming around on the instruments either. It has a warm, mature quality to it which doesn’t sound like its been done by two children still trying to learn their musical trade. While both of the girls have extremely strong-sounding voices and have talents on the instruments they play, you do know that as they get older they'll develop their skills further. Who's not to say that they may include other sounds into their dynamic of piano and drum kit. There is another member of the family who can play the bass guitar, so there may be an addition at some point. For the fact fans, she also designs their artwork!
If you ever thought that all kids were ASBO-ridden crime-committing scum then Smoosh should change your mind on all things musically possible with children. Three tracks are there for you to listen and one is even there for download! And who says you get nothing for free in this life?
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[story by Matthew Laidlow]
Dyrkness says
Nice review except “Chloe, the elder of the two who plays the piano and Asya plays the drums” isn’t true. Asya the older (14) plays the keyboards and Chloe (12) plays drums.
Matthew Laidlow says
Really? Oops our bad. Thanks for the correction!