I have seen a lot of these happy-tunes-makers-hippie-revival bands at their beginning, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Grouplove, and they all seem to do very very well, so there is no reason Family of the Year will not do the same. The quintet was playing at the Silverlake Jubilee, and their uplifting folk songs had these poppy melodies that you catch at the first listening. With multi-voices harmonies, ascending choruses, bright guitars and a jumping-around-hand-clapping dynamism, they sure had all the recipes to capture the attention of the crowd around the sunset stage.
Sing-along bright choruses? They have plenty, like in this ‘Chugjug’ song you must have heard – it is used for that Advil commercial inexplicably starring Jon Bon Jovi – and it was not the only one that they played during their set of pumped-up folky tunes. There was no real frontman, as everyone was singing at one point and everyone seemed to have fun.
Their songs were nevertheless going from a straightforward foot-tapping pop-folk evoking bands of the past, whereas others had a more modern feeling, a little too complex to be qualified of ‘commercial’, but still exuberant and catchy.
Brothers Joseph and Sebastian Keefe formed the band a few years ago with friends James Buckey and Christina Schroeter who was singing behind an old-looking keyboard, and they announced the release of a new album soon (I think I heard July 10).
They looked a little bit like a much happier incarnation of,… Fleetwood Mac, the name of the band crossed my mind, traveling in a beat-up van with the wind in their hair.