The August 13th issue of Real Detroit Weekly has a review of our new album, "Dear Emily, Best Wishes, Molly".


With Love

Prussia
Dear Emily, Best Wishes, Molly
Common Cloud

At one instant, you're at a soda fountain, surrounded by day-glo hues and crew-cuts and glowing jukeboxes. Next thing you know, you taste the scorching air of a Jamaican shantytown and start bobbing to a reggae ballad. Or you could be dancing in the streets to jangly rhythms, with the alluring grooves and hard hooks of R&B or classic '60s pop. There may be a lot of screaming. There may be a lot of crooning. It could be romantic, it could be dark.

Prussia, on their debut full-length, hits pure pop elegance with subtly primal energy, with head-scratching grins and casual shrugs toward any preconceived domains of suburban white indie-rockers. It's tribal pop with a crackly, starry-night classicism.

The local quartet enthusiastically delves into soulful pop and roots reggae, transposing a refreshing timelessness onto this nihilistic technological age, with Morrissey-esque sonnets sung in raspy Drifters-esque high-range vocals and Four Seasons melodic refrains, over bounce-to-groove Jamerson-inspired bass lines, with intricate and inventive percussion spawned from Talking Heads' art-punk take on the Afro-Cuban allure.

With "Indian Girls," a warm-toned guitar sways and strums lazily over tropical clave claps and tambourine jangles, with theremins delicately haunting this song's sleepy-town back alleys. On "Lenin," sun-soaked surf guitars ride a beach shore tide of rhythmic scrapes on guiros in some beautiful, sandy, torch-lit folk lullaby, with a serene sing-along chorus.

The opener, "Plantation Workers (Unite and Takeover)," is a slow-burning groove march, with bassist Bober's hooking boom creating a unique take on the rhythmic chording of roots reggae, allowing their singer, Spencer, to spew an arresting up-and-down vocal melody, an anthemic, weird-Rasta-rant that transitions into a glorious smorgasbord, growing from a distant clacked train-track percussion from their drummer, Remdonek, that churns into a tribal pounded storm. "I Misbehave" is a scruffy troubadour resolution of debating to find God in an ambitious trek around the Rocky Mountains; minimalist bass bounds and a gritty buzz feedback ride shimmering daydream bells. On "Oil," a looped log drumbeat sets a driving, sunny vibe in the most unabashedly soul-pop attributed hook, but features Spencer at his best murky-romantic.

Centerpiece "Supreme Being" may be the quintessential statement for their perfect pop hybrid of aesthetics with crazed, edgy avant-garde waltzing rounds, serenely supplemented with a sunny Western-woozy violin that topples into a rousing machine gun percussive romp culminating in an entrancing chanted chorus. It winds down to a folkier mellowness on side B, but it's still a captivating listen: a diverse sound, filled with melodic hooks and unconventional instrumentation. — JEFF MILO