About Me
MyGen
Profile GeneratorIn 2006, every schoolboy knows the path to rock n' roll stardom. It's writ large across the pages of the music rags on a weekly basis. Go on a crash diet, spend 200 quid on a measuredly 'scruffy' haircut, write some third-rate Velvet Underground pastiches, and claim a long-standing friendship with Pete Doherty and hey presto! You're sneering from the cover of the NME, bisected by a headline about being The Best New Band In Britain, before you've even played the Barfly. It was a lingering distaste with this climate of fuzzed-up vocals and hyped-up bands that saw Skoona produce his startling debut album 'From Pico To Park'.Not that writing songs was anything very new for Skoona. A stalwart of the Leicester music scene in his teenage years, he'd already cut his teeth in twin schizophrenic musical roles: by day, as a clarinet-tootling member of the Leicester Youth Orchestra, and by night as the frontman for local ska-punkers Charybdis, whose brash, brassy theatrics garnered them support slots with Less Than Jake and Reel Big Fish.No wonder, then, that this album sounds quite unlike anything you'll have heard. It's a common boast amongst new bands, but one which From Pico to Park can lay a fairer claim to than most. For though largely acoustic, softly-strummed and sensitively written it is, James Blunt it certainly ain't. Lashings of jazz, echoes of folk, and vestiges of classical training emerge at every turn; whether it's the jaunty shuffle of Swing Time Story, Alive's twisted madrigal stylings, or the wandering brass that sinuously intertwines with campfire singalong The Biftah Song, the next surprise is only ever seconds away. Topped off by Skoona's distinctive vocals defiantly English, naively vulnerable it's a sound which nods to many but steals from none.So if you're tired of po-faced haircut rockers, sickened by Pop Idol puppets and disenchanted with chart-clogging balladeers, look to From Pico To Park for something else; a singular voice in a choir of clones, Skoona has made one of the most invigorating records you'll hear this year.
