Great Northern
sleepy eepee
eenee meanie records

sleepy eepee may be short, but is it ever so sweet! Consisting of 5 brief songs, this prequel to Great Northern’s highly acclaimed Trading Twilight for Daylight, packs a whole lot of talent into a teeny (eenee) space. For starters, the vocals are pretty great. Great Northern’s primary songwriter, Solon Bixler, delivers his disaffected lyrics with a scratchy voice that is perfectly picturesque. However, the songs get boring somewhere in the middle of the album, on tracks like “summertime,” in which Bixler’s vocals are not heavily featured. But the album’s best songs – “loose ends” and “this is a problem” – feature memorable vocal melodies and skillful harmonization over a spare instrumental framework of piano, guitar, and percussion. And as if simple, adept songwriting weren’t enough to make an album great, producer Mathias Schneeberger has helped create a highly polished package, with sounds reminiscent of works by New York’s The Fireflies.

—Gregory Hyman