Please check out this amazing review of our new album, Mutanten, in Performance Magazine!!!
Happy Valley - Mutanten
Birthed, fed and raised by Happy Valley
Orlando’s Happy Valley has done its damnedest to turn synth, pop and space rock on its ear. Mutanten is more than a collection of strange sounding tunes about alien mutants taking over Planet Earth and turning its inhabitants into likewise mutants. Mutanten is more than a concept album. Its theatrical qualities measure closely to its oblique and ever inventive strangeness. The band spits and finesses the ear, teasing it with an elliptical, genre-defying album that is noisy, loving and weird. Mutanten is like musical silly putty with all the good, wild colors.
“Hollywood Monster” is funky and trippy. The vocals are vampish, like a lounge lizard singing through a fuzzed out electric megaphone. The singer is derisive in the song; “Your face is hamburger helper / The road kill of the world / I doubt you could get a job as a waitress.” “Don’t Look Outside” soars like an anthem and “Metallic Birds” boasts an aural quality that is sonically tingling. Vocal duties are shared between Darin Hughes and Evan Shafram throughout Mutanten. They are yin and yang, one sounding like a blend of whiskey-smoke throated Jim Morrison and Brad Roberts from the Crash Test Dummies, the latter a more youthful version of Tears for Fears.
Mutanten, with its wonderful and contorted album artwork, takes the moody theatrics of Pink Floyd and pomposity of Frank Zappa to create dreamlike and nightmarish ambiance. The result is a collection that is sometimes catchy and sometimes indifferent. It traverses between playful and serious, driven with harsh and otherworldly sound effects. Much of the album is driven with keyboards, echoing futurism, 1980s video games and New Wave. At times whimsical and rich in musical fantasy, Mutanten also digs deep into gothic drudgery. It’s Tenacious D meets Rush with a plan, albeit with a story to tell.
(Sleepy Bird Orphanage)
Post Records and Sleepy Bird Orphanage team-up for the banginest Summer Comp full of Summer Bangers. $4 for 18 bands. surrriously. click to ch-ch-check it out:
"Evan, got a cigarette? HEY! HEY, YOU GOT A CIGARETTE??" hehe, good times! and great set (except when I had to vacuum up my mess in the morning). Next time I'm bringing this...
