Now It's Overhead

Dark Light Daybreak (Saddle Creek)

By Anne C. Johnson
Published: September 19th, 2006 | 2:57pm

Andy LeMaster of Chase Park Transduction Studio has recorded such names as R.E.M., Chris Martin, Drive-By Truckers, and various Saddle Creek artists. He is also the core of Now It’s Overhead. For the band’s third full-length album, Dark Light Daybreak LeMaster once again straddles both sides of the recording booth.

Now It’s Overhead is often compared to such ‘80s luminaries as the Cure, but their sound is more akin to the Verve (whose vocalist Richard Ashcroft seems to be a huge influence on LeMaster) imbued with vague flashes of R.E.M. Save for the lonesome minor chord melancholy and excellent production that are constants throughout, it is difficult to get a firm grasp of the band’s overall sound, but on Dark Light Daybreak something their own is beginning to take shape. Andy LeMaster’s subtle but nonetheless omnipresence at the helm makes the most of the less memorable songs on the album. His ability to both isolate and fuse some of the great talent at his disposal — drummer Clay Everett and Azure Ray’s Orenda Fink and Maria Taylor — is impressive indeed. Even the seemingly bare, “Let Up” has such intricate detail as to make it deceptively simple.

LeMaster announces “These are end times,” and Now It’s Overhead has a knack for conveying the anxiety that goes together with living in such an age (the appropriately discordant “Walls” and the jittery “Type A”), as well as the heartbreak (“Estranged”). Now It’s Overhead are reassuring in that that they don’t intend to give up without a fight.