It’s amazing what technology can accomplish in such a short amount of time, especially in the music business. From knee slapping, honky-tonk music, to wooden instruments, to ear piercing amps and electric guitars, and now we are entering the age of synthesizers, computer-generated sounds, sequencers, and keyboards.
Echo Lakes would fall in the category of droning synths, reverberating sequencers and computer-generated sounds. On their debut album, Wild Peace, majority of their songs like “Further Down,” “Wild Peace,” “Even the Blind,” and “Monday 5 am” just to name a few, are introduced with long drones of deeply effected sounds, with an almost ominous echoing vocal cue in the background, adding a generic, yet captivating sound to the already dramatic, done-core, pentatonic scale.
While their music could be said is rather generic for today’s media, what really separates Echo Lakes from all the other sister-synthesizer bands in mainstream music is vocalist, Linda Jarvis. She has a brilliantly, captivating voice that harmonizes perfectly with every single sound.
It is no coincidence that the band decided to call themselves Echo Lakes. Upon hearing their songs, the thick wall of electronic noise complimented by Jarvis’s piercing and captivating voice sounds like one big echo that keeps playing in your ear repeatedly even after the song is over. It is easy to get lost in the haze caused by the harmony of musical instruments and great vocals.
Their debut album is actually quite nice—showing off a dual mixture of sleepy, ominous songs and also a set of dreamy electronic-dance fused songs; however, it lacks substance and variety. All the songs sound the same, and while it may have worked for this album, for how much longer can they keep up the monotony before it becomes boring?
