Warm Melodies // Cold Memories
Baby Jey are back in their hometown of Edmonton, Alberta with a brand new album, Crop Circles. Crop Circles is more danceable than their previous album. The songs have stronger hooks, and the instrumentation is more electronic and less acoustic, with many drum machines and synthesizers. There is still pedal steel guitar on the record, which has become a recognizable part of their sound, but there is no acoustic guitar, banjo, or mandolin as there was on the last record. Crop Circles is like Someday Cowboy but with glitter and bigger production. Someday Cowboy mused on the cultural motif of the “space cowboy.” On Crop Circles, the band has lost their cowboy hats, though there still is a continuing fascination with a meeting place of the cosmic and the rural. Crop circles are always found in the countryside, though they suggest a profound cosmic connection.
Crop Circles takes on a darker approach to their infectious pop melodies that feel as if they were born out of the middle of a deserted plain. On top of that, the album is interspersed with old radio interludes from when Alberta farmers began finding crop circles in their fields in the 1980s. And yet, the band's fascination with "crop circles" moves beyond their Canadian prairie context, floating high above the stratosphere, reaching for the ones who formed crop circles in the first place--with an impressive arsenal of spacey synthesizers and an array of cosmic samples.
