The eclectic mix found on Little Green Cars’ debut Absolute Zero is a stunningly seasoned and promising blend of poppy numbers and powerful ballads from the Irish quintet.
The album is a collection of light and dark tunes wrought with striking introspection on life and love; the contrasting sounds of co-lead vocalists Steven Appleby and Faye O’Rourke bring a fantastic and interesting blend of raspy dramatic hits with soaring pop tracks.
Album opener ‘Harper Lee’ shows off the beautiful harmonies that litter the rest of the record, with Appleby doing his best Ben Gibbard impersonation and echoes a tale of innocence and sanity. The soaring melody on ‘My Love Took Me Down To The River To Silence Me’ sees O’Rourke painstakingly long for a lost love, set with beautiful lyricism and dizzy guitar work.
‘Red and Blue’ is rife with auto-tune, and is seemingly a miss, but on second look it’s actually a pretty interlude for the 11-track album and leads well into eye-opening ‘The Kitchen Floor’. Lead single ‘The John Wayne’ has been making waves for its powerful percussion and crescendo harmonies. Delivered with so much passion and excitement, it’s a simple but catchy pop number and is probably the most straightforward single on the record.
The best thing about this record is the stark contrast of Appleby and O’Rourke’s tracks which feels like the record is constantly jumping from two different perspectives, with the hopeful almost naïve voice of Appleby juxtaposing with O’Rourke’s dark and lonely lyricism epitomized on stunner track ‘Please’.
Taken under the wing of epic-producer Markus Dravs (Mumford & Sons, Arcade Fire, Coldplay) straight out of high school, these 20-somethings have created a fantastically earnest and powerful debut in Absolute Zero; a brilliant first album from the quintet.
