On first listen, Woodpainting’s music is very difficult to wrap your head around. Their track "A Hot Gust of Wind" (streaming below) darts back and forth between rhythms, drifts up and down in dynamic range, crashes, bangs, strums… Woodpainting describe themselves as "a grand multimedia narrative work, an infectious bubblegum-pop melodrama, a lyrical folk opera, a pan-idiomatic chamber piece, an anachronistic daytime-soap, and a rock epic." All of those things are probably true. But what you should cling to are the juicy guitar licks and soaring drums, especially on "Danse Macabre," which drifts into a slightly more atmospheric soundscape. The second you decide to simply let the music wash over you is the moment when it becomes a blissful concoction of sound. –Geena Kloeppel
