![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/explorers_club_tsabba.jpg\")
For more than a decade now, The Explorers Club have been bringing their brand of ear candy pop to listeners. Essentially a vehicle for songwriter, musician, arranger and producer Jason Brewer, the EC\u2019s lineup has been fluid. Originally a band based in Charleston, today The Explorers Club is the creative product of Brewer and whomever he chooses to help out in his base of Nashville.<\/p>\n
The group\u2019s early albums \u2013 most notably 2008\u2019s Freedom Wind<\/em> and the wonderful Grand Hotel<\/em> from 2012 \u2013 made the point that The Explorers Club could faithfully channel the vibe of peak-era Beach Boys, but with original material. In that, they were a kind of equivalent to Charlotte\u2019s Spongetones, who operated in much the same way with regard to the Beatles\u2019 body of work.<\/p>\n But as with the Spongetones, Brewer\u2019s group has always been about much more than creating a modern-day pastiche of a single group. Brewer\u2019s deep love (and more importantly, his thorough understanding) of what we might call “late \u201860s and early \u201870s AM gold” has long been evident in his writing and arrangement.<\/p>\n Not that anyone who\u2019s been paying attention would have ever missed that fact, but as if to underscore the point, The Explorers Club\u2019s latest album \u2013 well, one of two concurrently released albums; I\u2019ll get to the other presently \u2013 is a collection of carefully-curated covers. To Sing and Be Born Again<\/i> brings together ten songs, any of which might fit comfortably on the countless Today\u2019s Greatest Pop Hits<\/i>-type various artists releases from, say, 1969 or 1972.<\/p>\n The manner in which Brewer and his associates deliver this material is nothing short of stunning. The Explorers Club manages to have it both ways: the songs are at once true to the sound and spirit of the original versions. But too, they all sound uniformly like the work of a single group. It\u2019s as if one band<\/i> had created some of the best songs by Boyce and Hart, Manfred Mann, Paul Revere and the Raiders and even Herb Alpert.<\/p>\n Of course they didn\u2019t. But To Sing and Be Born Again<\/i> somehow connects the dots between Danny Hutton\u2019s 1965 single \u201cRoses and Rainbows,\u201d The Zombies\u2019 scintillating \u201cMaybe After He\u2019s Gone\u201d and the Walker Brothers\u2019 \u201cThe Sun Ain\u2019t Gonna Shine Anymore.\u201d More rocking than so-called yacht rock, more catchy than most riff rock and more sophisticated in execution than most of what passes for pop, this collection of songs is a thing to behold.<\/p>\n It\u2019s near impossible to pick the \u201cbest\u201d tracks from the album, though the stirring, Spectorian splendor of the Walker Brothers cover may just get the nod. Each of these songs has long since established itself as a pop classic, even if some \u2013 nearly half \u2013 have faded into obscurity, rarely heard even on oldies radio in 2020. But Brewer\u2019s unassailable taste means that when he dusts off Orpheus\u2019 \u201cCan\u2019t Find the Time\u201d that his shimmering remake is simply swoonworthy.<\/p>\n Anyone who has fallen prey to the charms of The Explorers Club will know \u2013 even before hearing this album \u2013 that the vocal harmonies are deeply layered, creamy, note-perfect and soulful all at the same time. And it\u2019s a given that the arrangement and production is very much in a Brian Wilson\/Wrecking Crew style. If you hold any nostalgia at all for the AM radio pop of yesteryear, To Sing and Be Born Again<\/i> is likely to bring a mist to your eyes and a smile to your lips.<\/p>\n In my next installment, I\u2019ll take a look at The Explorers Club\u2019s other<\/i> 2020 release, their self-titled album.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For more than a decade now, The Explorers Club have been bringing their brand of ear candy pop to listeners. Essentially a vehicle for songwriter, musician, arranger and producer Jason […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18883,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,51,65],"tags":[1103,2157],"class_list":["post-18882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-release","category-pop","category-review","tag-jason-brewer","tag-the-explorers-club","cat-49-id","cat-51-id","cat-65-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18882"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18984,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18882\/revisions\/18984"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}