Instrumental music is hard to nail if you’re looking for a decent audience in the contemporary age. Either you’re way too technical and/or conceptual, or you’re putting an excessive focus on being weird and experimental, and you alienate a huge number of listeners. Or, you could be Austin duo Chipper Jones, and you somehow both make music that’s both named after a hell of an Atlanta baseball player and which is also instrumental while still being fresh to death and not boring for a second. Their latest work, the Tropics | COSM EP, is not really post-rock, though it can go there in parts of songs like the end of stand-out track "Tropics," it’s not jazz or anything else so well-worn, and it’s not fully pop (that’d take way more of a standard radio structure and some vocals), but it’s somewhere between all of that in all the best ways it could be. At the very least it’s instrumental music with some fucking real energy and little for an ear to apologize for, and you should certainly give the badass "Tropics" a try if you’re a person who can get with the non-vocal music even a tad bit. It’s better than that, but damn, we know it’s hard to convert some of you vocals-needers to the ways of the instrument-only sound. Music is music, g’damnit, but we get that sometimes you just like what you like. Aforementioned all-inclusiveness aside, Chipper Jones is one we think is likely to be a hit with most anyone willin’ to take a swing, and you can below with "Tropics," or you can listen to the whole EP here.
