State Bird’s new CD, Mostly Ghostly, has a certain innocent charm and the music held my attention from the first track onward. It is hard to pin State Bird down with a label – there are elements of freak-folk, Americana/alt-country and sonic dissonance of The Annuals in their music but the music spans across all of these genres. As the band uses a mix of non-traditional instruments and each of the songs seems to have some sort of musical surprise, a hypothetical point of comparison may be Devendra Banhart meets Danny Elfman.

Mostly Ghostly is the second release from Coby Hartzler, Jared Riblet and a cast of friends. Here is a link to the first track from the CD, “I Saw the Light”, which is a good representation of what the rest of the disc sounds like. The band also has an online video tour journal so here is a song from one of their shows from late last year.



In other reviews, I’ve tried to highlight stand-out tracks. In the case of Mostly Ghostly, the whole album works well as a cohesive unit and there really isn’t a dud track on the disc. If you want to check out a couple more tracks though, the band just recorded a four song live set for My Old Kentucky Blog/Sirius radio which are posted as a free download.

The other point worth mentioning is the CD packaging is one of the more interesting that I have seen in a while. The picture of the CD cover doesn’t do the experience justice as there is unusual artwork in the cardboard cover + a fold-out poster on the inside. After the “death” of the LP, I missed the experience of the gatefold cover art and the posters/booklets that used to come with some LPs so it is nice to see a band focus on both the music and the overall experience.

Mostly Ghostly comes out on the Record Machine label on February 26th and the band is currently doing a tour of the Mid-West.

Links:
State Bird's Website
State Bird's MySpace Page