Retro!

When I was a young man and even teenager, people would occasionally tell me about “new” artists that did music from the 50s, 60s, or 70s. And what they usually meant by that, until recently, is that these artists did karaoke-esque covers of hits from another era. Oft times this was the artist’s entire gig, like the band Sha-Na-Na that capitalized on the Happy Days and Grease fueled nostalgia craze.  More often than not these artists brought nothing new to the table, save the warm glowing validation of their listeners’ taste in “oldies.”  And for years whenever anyone pushed a “retro” band on my I resisted, because I frankly always found cover bands a little sad.

Over the past two decades, however, there has been a new breed of musical artist that manages to create their own unique sound that so matches the flavors of a bygone era that, upon hearing their songs for the first time, you could swear that you’d heard it before many, many years ago. This is no small trick.

And so for today’s Wednesday music selection, I thought I’d bring to light some of those artists who, in my opinion, do this style of retro-pastiche better than anyone. Many of these artists are ones you will of course be familiar with, but I dare say there will be some that will be new to most here. All of them have this one thing in common: When I first heard each of them, I honestly believed that I had heard them decades prior to their recordings being made, so good are they at harvesting the very DNA of the retro sounds they love.

And on that note, it might be best to start with the band that can arguably have been said to have started it all — or at least they were the first of which I ever became aware. That band of course is Oasis, which pulled off the remarkable trick of building an entire career off of playing with a mid-late period Beatles sound. Indeed, I would argue that every Oasis song ever written is essentially a reworking of one single Beatle song: Rain. Don’t believe me? Here’s Rain:

And here is a fairly prototypical Oasis song, Hello. (It is the first Oasis song I ever heard, and I heard it right around the time that the surviving Beatles made headlines by releasing some previously unheard material. When I first heard Hello, I was positive that it was one of these newly released Beatles songs.)

More recently, the Noisettes had me convinced that their Never Forget You was a song I had heard before in my youth. It’s its own song, but every tiny note of it screams Marvalettes-era Motown:

And even more recently that the Noisettes are the Marvin-Gaye-era Motown ghost that go by the name of Fritz and the Tantrums:

In addition to the Motown Sound, artists have been mining those campy mines of overly-produced white 50s and 60s lounge music — the sounds that once led into every Sean Connery Bond move made back in the day — and are producing songs I actually find superior to those to whom they pay tribute.   The best of these by far is Portland’s own Pink Martini:

But right up there with Pink Martini is the fabulous Nellie McKay, who might well be the reincarnation of Doris Day:

And although she’s become known primarily for being a fatally flawed human train wreck, it should never be forgotten that the young Ms. Winehouse did 70s soul better than most should singers in the 70s.

And if that Winehouse sound is a little too modern, and you’re really more of a ? and the Mysterious or Zombies junkie, might I interest you in some Modern Vices?

For fans of the groovy beats of Donavan, however, The Goast of a Sabertooth Tiger might be more your speed.

And I’ll close out this post on a late-50’s retro soul band that I swear was transported to 2015 by some kind of time machine, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings.

What about y’all? what are those modern artist that you heard for the first time and mistakenly assumed you were hearing a classic recoded decades ago?

{Picture via Wiki Commons}