EP Review :: Sandy - Sandy

Sandy

Sandy

November 18 2014 (Night-People Records)

7/10

Words: Richard O’Hagan

The latest fad in music has nothing to do with what actually reaches your earholes at all. No, it isn’t enough to make beautiful, wistful, fey music like someone dropped an angel onto a synthesizer from a great height. No, you have to do all of this and then be as wilfully obscure about who you are as possible, too.

Sandy are all of these things, and a little more, too. Their debut EP is released on cassette by those lovely recidivists at Night-People Records and it seems that even they don’t know much about what might be their greatest find of 2014. All we can tell you about the band is that one of them has two x-chromosomes, one of them has only one, and the third one might be a Martian for all we know. Heck, we don’t even know if they are ‘Sandy’, ‘SANDY’, ‘S-A-N-D-Y’ or even ‘sandy’.

But we shouldn’t let this detract from the music, three tracks of which are every bit a part of the plummeting angel scenario described above. Electronica burbles along happily as delicate harmonies waft over the top in a way that is so pleasing that you almost feel guilty for enjoying it so much. The slight disappointment is fourth track ‘4’, which the band not only forgot to give a decent title to, but to put anything interesting into.
To give you some sort of marker, it is all a bit as if The Cocteau Twins suddenly started singing in real words, and then were produced by the early-2000s incarnation of William Orbit.

But go out and discover Sandy - because we bloody well couldn’t.





This review was written prior to our talking to Samantha Pathe, vocalist with the Brooklyn three-piece. And far from intending to be 'mysterious', in this case it is more that they are a very newly-formed outfit, and without the backing of a major label and PR resources it can be a tough time trying to get your music heard (as many bands will attest). We, Little Indie, heard them last month and immediately felt that Sandy have very bright prospects indeed, not least in Pathe's seductively enticing vocal, if they manage to get enough exposure.

Sandy consists of Samantha (vocals/guitar/bass/synth), her brother Stephen (drums), and their mutual friend Jeff Carter (vox/synths). "My brother and I met him [Jeff] through some mutual friends. We ran in the same musical circle for years, playing in bands but never together. Then in 2012 he moved to the same town that my brother and I were living at the time - a small beach town in New Jersey - to work on another project," explains Samantha. "A couple months later, Hurricane Sandy hit and destroyed the house he was living in (hence the name). My brother took him in, and the three of us started making music together."

With just a handful of live shows under their belt, and this four-track debut EP, it's still very much early days for Sandy, but we look forward to hearing more of them in 2015. [Editor]

Follow Sandy on Twitter.