Album review: Foreign Born - 'Person To Person'

• More Foreign Born news, reviews, videos and tour dates
• Buy Foreign Born music from Amazon
• Foreign Born news RSS Feed

7 / 10 Ever since Win Butler did a BBC interview wearing a hoodie, it’s been tough to take Arcade Fire seriously. Hence, there’s a vacancy for an adventurous North American trad-pop band with a taste for the epic. California’s Foreign Born seem like suitable candidates. Evocative of the Fire and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, this is a half-melancholic, half-euphoric surge of folkedelia, in which ringing guitars and layered vocals compete with strings, horns and inventive drumming. Singer Matt Popieluch transcends his past as Peter Bjorn And John’s bongo player as he helms the hyper-melodic ‘Vacationing People’, while ‘Wait in This Chair’ proves a moving ode to inertia, casting a spell only a televised fashion disaster could break.

Niall O’Keeffe

More on this artist:
Foreign Born NME Artist Page
Foreign Born MySpace

Click here to get your copy of Foreign Born's 'Person To Person' from the Rough Trade shop

To read all our reviews first - days before they appear online - check out NME magazine, on sale every Wednesday

For the latest music videos and backstage interviews, check out our sister site, NME Video.

• Previous Album Review : Album Review: The Ghost Of A Thousand - 'New Hopes, New Demonstrations'
• Next Album Review : Album Review: Joker's Daughter - 'The Last Laugh'