Paper Tongues' A&M/Octone Records release a couple of years ago was a good album but clearly its not real Paper Tongues. After listening through the bands new Crowd Surfing EP and comparing it to that old release, it makes you kind of scratch your head. Why would someone take something so unique, original, and purely fantastic and try to commercial it to the point to where it's unrecognizable. That's what happened to Paper Tongues on a label, but now that they're independent, it's no longer a concern. The real journey of Paper Tongues starts now.
The Crowd Surfing EP is great mainly because of an intensely organic sound. The. Production on this EP doesn't even seem like it was done by the same band that put out that album in 2010. There's a production style on this EP similar to 60's/70's era recording. It sounds cleaner of course, but there's also a very natural vibe to these five songs.
These five songs are some of the band's best work too. "Horse on Fire" and the title track are favorites but the other three songs aren't far behind. These five songs also feel like they were written from a different place than the the album the band released a few years ago. There's ambitious desperation that was clearly used to the group's advantage in the process, but there's also an untamed element to these songs that makes them unpredictable.
This EP will immediately turn away some people who were crazy about the band's debut album. But for fans of the band that have seen them live and heard how they sound in that environment, then they will latch on to and love this EP. It's not the Paper Tongues we've heard in the past, even as recently as "Amen," but its how they were meant to sound.