You without Will Schube is like Harold Melvin without the Blue Notes
It’s no fault of their own that every time I hear a Fool’s Gold track, I yearn for Foreign Born. The two bands are fairly incestuous, with plenty of crossover between the groups. While I’ve thoroughly enjoyed everything Fool’s Gold has put out to date (Surprise Hotel and Leave No Trace are both tons of fun), Person to Person, Foreign Born’s last record before an indefinite hiatus, both promised infinite potential and existed as something wonderful in its own right. Alas, those days seem far gone, and there are far worse things to settle for than the worldly pop constructions of Fool’s Gold.
Led by Luke Top and Lewis Pesacov, the band uses every facet of worldly influence as its canvas, stitching together globe-trotting tracks that are less interested in presenting their influences than they are using them as a jumping off point in musical exploration. “I’m In Love,” their latest track (they’ve got a new record coming out in 2015), continues this trend—utilizing a shape-shifting funk bass-line and stabbing guitars to establish the track as summer’s official sendoff. Luke Top’s vocals are constantly yearning—sometimes dangerously approaching a whine—but his desperation lends itself well to “I’m In Love.” The song hits its stride during the breakdown, as its spaciousness allows the groove to dig in and establish itself as the song’s center-point and foundation. The track could probably do without its last minute—the one knock on Fool’s Gold is that the songwriting has a difficult time differentiating “jam” from “the same thing repeated over and over again”—but there are far worse things than an extra minute of a grooving bass line. Foreign Born may be gone and not returning, but Fool’s Gold deaden that blow with each subsequent release—each world-spanning, summer-loving jam.
