Review: Innaway, Innaway

Innaway doesn’t make the kind of music you’d expect to come out of Orange County in 2005.

Innaway, InnawayInnaway doesn’t make the kind of music you’d expect to come out of Orange County in 2005. A fusion of classic rock and modern electronica, the O.C. five-piece’s music is dark and moody, sporting a singular sound that, like Air’s ethereal ambient pop, is familiar but not nostalgic, atmospheric but not alienating or inhuman. Innaway’s self-titled debut begins with the Zeppelin-style “Threathawk,” a lone harmonica joined by drums, guitar, and backseat vocals that weave in and out of the band’s tightly textured song-work. This attention to detail makes Innaway ripe for repeat visits: the album’s centerpiece, a suite comprised of the dirgy “Rise” and “Fall,” begins with crickets chirping and moves fluidly from an organ melody that sounds like it was lifted from an old ColecoVision video game to melancholic guitar and a bristling, electrifying coda. A pair of brief, Eno-esque instrumental soundscapes come three-quarters through the album, the first (“Post FM”) transposing a wispy Fleetwood Mac-sounding melody onto a plot of break beats, and the second (“Golden”) mismatching distorted, spliced-up beats and a mesmerizing ’80s AOR keyboard-synth hook. If Innaway’s sound is hard to pigeonhole, it’s because their myriad influences (from Pink Floyd to Air and even The Flaming Lips) are so starkly contrasted that it makes for something almost entirely new, if not completely original. And, with the sole exception of the final track, the pointedly titled “George Walker On Water,” the album skirts being time-stamped—in a way, it could have been recorded at any point in the last 30 years.

Score: 
 Label: Some  Release Date: June 13, 2005  Buy: Amazon

Sal Cinquemani

Sal Cinquemani is the co-founder and co-editor of Slant Magazine. His writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, Billboard, The Village Voice, and others. He is also an award-winning screenwriter/director and festival programmer.

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