The Everettes
s/t

We get all kinds of records here at Hallowed and from time to time I miss sorting out those that doesn’t quite fit our genre profile, this is one of those. As I have the principle to review everything that I start working on I had to review this album, the debut by German band The Everettes. They were founded from Berlin soul band The Floorettes who apparently were pretty popular. Five of the members comes from The Floorettes, two of the three singers were not part of the band then. It is a pretty large band with nine musicians, that had me wondering about the economical, you have to earn quite a lot to make a living for that many. In Sweden you would need to have an income of about six million SEK, 600 000 Euros just to pay a slightly below average wage to each of them, that would mean selling about 35 000 albums if there was no cost in producing them and the label didn’t want anything for the promotion, and I think they would need very many streams to make that kind of money. I don’t think they will do that, good thing that bands usually like to do their music as a hobby.

So, they aren’t exactly original, and their style is nostalgic for the sixties. I think of band like The Supremes and things like Motown and soul, and that sort of thing. It feels like a band looking backwards and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the album was released in vinyl and 8-track rather than the more modern cassette and CD-formats. I do know that it comes in vinyl but of course also in the digital download or streaming format as well as CD as I got a CD. A CD that doesn’t have a great looking cover by the way, but a decent production, and the vocalists do a pretty good job. The problem is though that it all feels very familiar and derivative, not like something they have worked hard to write themselves, but they have rather borrowed from the classics.

Pretty decent album all in all, but I don’t really like it. I find it to be pretty boring and too nostalgic, it doesn’t really offer anything in terms of novelty or really strong hit songs. The songs are all too repetitive and you grow tired with this album very quickly even though there is a pretty large number of songs, but they sound quite similar. Maybe it will be a nice thing for the seventy or eighty year olds that were young when this kind of music were the fresh and new thing, the music of their youth, but to me it seems as pointless as most other derivative stuff – and this one doesn’t even have the hits to sell it.

Now, I am not really well informed in the soul and that sort of stuff so my perspective might mean less for those that really are. The problem is though, that I think most of the Hallowed readers will look upon this album the same way I do, and in this forum it is not very impressive. I think The Everettes, like so many other bands should take a step back, look at their work from a distance, and realise that there is already more than enough of this stuff out there for anyone to find – why should anyone find this album? And if you derive your work from others, you will never be as great as them.

HHHHHHH