Empire Safari are a polished indie-pop band with hints of a slightly darker, stranger aspect to their music. On this three-track demo, their sound is introduced as a relatively sparse combination of guitar, bass and drums, arranged with an ear for clean melodies, and with some suggestions of an exploratory sense of songwriting.
The song ‘Output’ seems itself to represent the band least accurately, with a faintly angular feel and somewhat creepy echoed backing vocals, mixed up with a detached vocal style that I hope is more by design than through a lack of confidence. It’s on two further tracks, ‘Old Days (Happiness)’ and ‘I Think We Drove Too Far’, that the band position themselves more strongly – by not sounding like they strive to become yet another Youthmovies/This Town Needs Guns-influenced outfit. I’d be surprised if this is the case, but it’s almost as if Empire Safari have been imbibing deep of the spirit of late-1980s indie-pop, a la McCarthy or the Woodentops. The chugging guitar of ‘I Think We Drove Too Far’ brings to mind the simplistic thrill of The Wedding Present; but if it’s more contemporary references you need, I don’t know if it would be too soon to suggest a certain Stornoway-esque atmosphere at play.
There are a few odd production and songwriting ideas in this demo – those backing vocals on ‘Output’, and the nasty-sounding effects on a guitar break in ‘I Think We Drove Too Far’, for example, and the handclaps in the intro to ‘Output’, which remind me just how many bands are doing handclaps these days. Pretty much, though, Empire Safari sidestep the formula that might be expected of a band coming out of Oxford at the moment, and seem to concentrate instead on decent arrangements, interesting counterpoints between bass and guitar lines, and the exploration of a style that could, in time, become unique to them.