To accuse a musician of just copying earlier styles is a review-anachronism itself. Still, the well-known criticism often stems from a true core, considering that there’re many musicians who appear to be quite contemporary, while their content has been used over and over before. In the end, it all comes down to the attitude with which the individual bits are being arranged. It would be easy to slander the 25-years-old musician Stephen Steinbrink as a hopeless epigone with a soft spot for 70s rock. But you’d have to be quite a cruel and heartless bastard to do so, considering the way he turns the inspiration from idols like Simon & Garfunkel or Nick Drake into his very own songs – it’s so classy that we’d even happily buy a complete cover-album made by Stephen Steinbrink. In addition, between his usually somewhat nostalgic tracks, you can always find new experiments, bearing signs of hauntology, so that the seemingly known music actually becomes something very modern and very new, in which sounds are being distorted or in which structures are being dissolved. Steinbrink seems to be at home in both worlds, which is why nothing can go wrong with his »Arranged Waves«.
Matt Berninger
Get Sunk
Concord