Reviews:: The Foxglove Hunt Stop Heartbeat

One of the nice things about being one of the oldest bloggers on the internet is that when a band like The Foxglove Hunt comes along, you can add some sort of little anecdote to the mix for insta-cred. In this case, my back story comes from 2000-2002. The Foxglove Hunt is the work of Rob Withem and Ronnie Martin. While those aren't exactly household names, I was excited to see that Rob was still writing music.

His old band, Fine China, wrote terrific Smiths/Joy Electric inspired tracks and I listened to You Make Me Hate Music more times than I care to admit. Fine China was one of those random acts I stumbled on courtesy of EMI (Tooth & Nail was one of their imprints) that really stuck. For every 10 CDs I threw away, one really hit home and got a lot of spins. Even more exciting was that he hooked up with Ronnie Martin (of Joy Electric) again and the duo still crackles. Stop Heartbeat is an unashamed trip to the 80's. It's electro pop synth that could have been unearthed from a Class of '84 time capsule.

Seriously. If this was a band of 18 year-olds from some art college, people would be hating on them, but the fact that two music vets are still creating beautiful music with shimmering guitars and synth driven riffs is kind of a-ok in my book. There are some standout tracks - The Mayflower Compact and Don’t I Know the Way for example - that would make the stiffest jerk break into the Molly Ringwald dance, but the whole record speeds by pleasantly. They continue to pay tribute to the past by throwing in a Psychedelic Furs cover (Love My Way) and seem relatively uninterested with the state of music today.

And I would wager there are a lot of people that could care less about the new music and just want something as fun and familiar as the Foxglove Hunt.