You can't be all things to all people, it's quite true: just look what happened to Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers. All right, mass popularity and enormous sales, bad example, but a band who can't decide what they want to be usually ends up as a terrifying mix of song styles and hideously clashing genres, and... hang on, perhaps the Jive Bunny reference was right after all.
The Healing, however, have found a way to combine tiny parts of a hundred different styles from across as many decades as recorded music has existed, and somehow ended up with something like the opposite of a dog's breakfast. Our latest new music tips play a rock, roots, indie, blues, Americana, country and soul combination that we find ridiculously difficult to shake out of our minds.
This is a four-piece whose influences are many. You can hear strains of artists as diverse as The Charlatans, Gram Parsons, The Delgados and even Lynyrd Skynyrd across the five tracks of their Childhood Home EP. Our favourite is the record's title track which, though not necessarily representative of the band's overall output (no single song is, that's the point), it's still a thoughtful, calming song that has the effect of making you stare out of the nearest window contemplating life.
They've also made a video for it, recorded by the artist Alexandra Ross during a visit to relatives in Canada last Christmas — watch it below:
The band's members are Jim Moreton on vocals and guitars, Nicolas Py on drums, Sam Thiery on bass and Ariel Moreton, also on vocals. Until recently they were based around Dalston but now the band members live across both south and east London. They're a multinational bunch — English, American and French — though they've been based here for several years.
The debut EP was released last week, and is available for 'name your price' from their Bandcamp page. The EP acts as a taster for a forthcoming album they are hoping to release early next year. They also play a couple of London dates this autumn, on 26 September at the Alley Cat in Denmark Street and on 11 October at the Gladstone Arms in Borough.
We confidently predict that a trip to either of The Healing's shows will prove just as medicinal as a trip to the Royal Free, without the chance to catch anything more grave than seriously infectious music.
