Idaho
Levitate
Idaho Music

Jeff Martin’s music is strangely wooden and catatonic. Yet with repeated exposure, you’ll find that even the stiff with sorrow can blanket their own frigid overtones with warmth and hopefulness. The music moves slowly but charmingly, and builds to moments of pure honesty and emotion- never too modest to shine out with pop hooks and elegant songcraft.

Without a proper back-up band, Martin utilizes the sparseness of arrangement to his advantage. Drummer Alex Kimmel appears on five of the 11 tracks, leaving for the rest the usage of subtle electronic editing, and minimal drumming. The construction of vocal imagery, white noises, and clean glass guitar sound paint Levitate with the one of the softest brushes around. And that’s the way Idaho’s sound has always been.

But Levitate isn’t just another walk down Martin’s dark memory lane, it extends its sensitive feelers to a new batch of undiscovered stories. There is, of course, love and longing and staring and wishing and dirt and sin, but where Martin really seems to want to go is to return to the place which he called home. Levitate almost seems like the chronicles of a traveler, or some hideously lost angel in a world that seems almost too damaging to bear.

Reviewed by Trevor Naud

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