Ljubinko Zavkovic, Rock At Night The Netherlands
Review: Eric Anders & Mark O’Bitz’s album Stuck Inside
If ‘Stuck Inside’ as an album title speaks too much of the Corona virus times, well, somehow those times don’t seem to go away as fast as we wish they would. It is also times when quite a few, if not most musicians had to be stuck inside and very often do their music remotely.
That is exactly what Eric Anders and Mark O’Bitz, the duo of singer-songwriters from Northern and Southern California had to do. So they created a musical series they named MTC – music in the time of the coronavirus.
After their two singles,’Careful Now My Son’ and ‘Sirens Go By’ in their MTC Series Anders & O’Bitz extended the series with the album ‘Stuck Inside.’
Now, the album title could be something that you could expect, considering the series theme, but what about the music?
The artists themselves had something to say about it:
Many of the songs on Stuck Inside are about the extreme self-centeredness and pathological narcissism that goes hand-in-hand with the Santa beliefs I sing about in the song “Big World Abide”–being trapped inside yourself, stuck inside, and lost at sea.
I believe that millions of people have responded to the trauma of the pandemic (combined with the trauma of Trump and the effects of global warming) by retreating into their narcissism, commodity fetishism, fundamentalisms, and the simplistic right-wing ideologies that grow out of all of these.
Sounds hard and heavy, but, then, so are the times and what they brought along. Essentially, as on their previous releases Anders and O’Bitz operate within that loose genre of Americana.
On ‘Stuck Inside’ the duo go a bit more to the moody rock side of that genre, picking on bits and pieces of artists like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty when they are covering the more darker, sombre themes.
Yet Anders and O’Bitz have both the capabilities and good sense to come up with music that is of high quality and that possesses ample personality of its own to reach the lofty goals the artists set for themselves.
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