- Welcome to Daytrotter
- Gregory’s Chant
- Ordinary Song
- Tangerine Visions
- Morning Tide
Ordinary life finds a way of listlessly shuffling along, making few imprints and little impression. It barely kicks and never screams. It hardly lifts its feet off the ground to move by the ground. Ordinary life, though, is a silent cabaret that’s festooned with little blushes and sweetened views that only unlock under very specific circumstances, if anyone is looking or tasting for them. Ordinary life doesn’t have to be a television set that comes in fuzzy and dull when it’s hot. It doesn’t have to be a half carton of milk in the refrigerator or pulling socks over tired feet and dry ankles. It doesn’t have to be simple humdrum and the tedious meeting points between the hard crust of a piece of frozen pizza lying dead on a plate and the next beer.It doesn’t even have to be the routine drive from your home to the office, every day taking the same route and feeling as if you’re seeing the same faces in the same static looks every morning and every afternoon on the drive home. It can be noticeably more substantial when the seemingly ordinary times – the sun-ups and the downs, the ways in which the breath takes – fraternize with some lucid dreams. It’s a dichotomy that California’s The Little Ones don’t have to explain too much. There has never been and likely never will be a time when it’s felt as if the band hasn’t been completely at ease, as if there was no way that they could sound any differently if they tried. It’s as if they take in that bountiful sunlight, just as the maturing oranges on all those trees in the orange groves and all of those Napa Valley grapes do on the vine, and use what they get to form their own pulp. It’s as if they’ve found a way to retain all of the light that they get blasted with and it gets consumed as the vittles and the drink needed to power them through the long days and nights. The ordinary occurrences and tendencies of the world that this five-piece finds itself plopped down in the center of are astounding bits of sensory royalty. Without having to strain at all, one can feel the ocean breezes and sweeping eyefuls of absolute geographical perfection levitate out of the songs on the band’s latest album, Morning Tide. It’s not a fussy notice or a lame contextual stab, but a luxurious appreciation for the kinds of uncelebrated beauty that just eloped with the sky thousands of years ago and lives quietly against the water – pressing against it – and hanging off of the edges all windswept and daring. The Little Ones notice these flourishes and instinctively apply them into the mixes that they make, when the reds and the buttery golds that they love to use in their gorgeous pop songs are whisked up with the odd nocturnal meanderings that singer Ed Reyes’ dreams bring him. Those dreams make able bedfellows with the stunning natural looks of the Californian sightline and the grandeur of man’s recognition of them in their holiest of relations. Reyes and the Little Ones operate having already settled the discussion of the preponderance of doubt that there’s a majesty of some sort that has called many of the shots since the whole she-bang got to cooking. It’s a radiance that has four or five or hundreds of different ways of glowing, or giving off some of that sunshine that’s been hoarded and hoarded for dozens of years, enough to fuel Atlantic City and Vegas for decades. It deserves and gets feverish dancing and beaming faces and that’s not ordinary.