The Court & Spark draw their name from a Joni Mitchell album...the best Joni Mitchell album in my opinion. Hailing from San Francisco originally, they produce a spacey, alt-country kind of sound. Their first album, Ventura Whites, has a more twangy and rough sound to it, but their second album, Bless You, shows a band with a clear direction, picking up momentum.
Their second album, Witch Season, offers more of the same, and differs little from Bless You...but that's not a bad thing!
It was after these two albums, that the band began to be pigeonholed as solely a folkish/countryish band, and was being included as just another band in an increasingly crowded alt-country genre. Their answer to this, Hearts, they doubled down on the slight spaciness of their previous albums, and went full sci-fi country. Hearts sounds like the kind of music that space colonists on the fringes of humanity will be listening to a thousand years from now.
While not critically well received, this album served to prove that The Court & Spark were way more than the genre that critics had lumped them into. Perhaps the critics did not appreciate the blatant slap in the face...perhaps they were expecting more of the same. The Court & Spark disbanded shortly after, but not without twisting and expanding on what could be considered alt-country.
Not bad, but I like it better at 1.5X speed, feels more up-beat.
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