Page France

Hello, Dear Friend

(Suicide Squeeze)

Record Review by Amber Henson

Hello, Dear Wind is an album made for summer nights at the beach, or, considering it’s winter now, pretending it’s summer and that you’re at the beach.  Even the album cover is given to this feeling: laundry blowing in the breeze.  Page France is a melodic lo-fi indie band, the kind of which is often heard on Saddle Creek.  There are a lot of synths, a lot of guitar strumming, and a lot of very lightly sung lyrics by Michael Nau.  They have the upbeat happiness of The Brunettes, and, like that band, also an occasional duet thing going on between Nau and Whitney McGraw.

The lyrics are not to be ignored, although they’re often hard to understand (it bugs me when bands record their albums like this, where the voice sounds far away, because if I really like the cd, no matter how loud I blast it, I still feel like I have a bad copy of the album).  Anyway, the actual words.  There are things like “Jesus came up through the ground so dirty,” and “…I won’t say I love you ‘cause it’s all been said before, let’s not say it anymore, ‘cause nothin’ here’s for sure.”

“Grass” keeps the upbeat feeling going with a chorus background a la the Polyphonic Spree.  The whole album sounds very live—in a good way—as though it was recorded in a single weekend.  All the song titles are one word, like “Windy” or “Trampoline” or “Feather” and just those three words actually give a pretty good description of Page France.