Antonioni, a four-piece rock group, was founded in 2016 when lead singer Sarah Pasillas decided to put together a band in an effort to add some meat to her previously written tracks. Pasillas, the main songwriter and frontwoman of the group who also contributes to guitar and keys, has a powerful sound that grabs you right in the middle of your chest but that also evokes a pure sense of flowing, feminine emotion. Akin to The Cranberries’s Dolores O’Riordan’s iconic vocals, Pasillas utilizes a smooth melodic delivery mixed with an almost yodel-esque technique. It’s reminiscent of a voice crack, but instead of feeling like the embarrassment of a middle-school boy, it’s trendy and hardcore. The group’s sound sits somewhere between indie and grunge rock, made by the layers of grit in Pasillas’s voice.
The Odds Were All Beating Me, a five-track EP, is one of the few compilations of musicality that makes me want to vomit with completely obsessive absorption. This EP has the overall magic-like effect of throwing the listener into a trance of bliss and groovy electronics, kind of like when the guy next to you at Bumbershoot blows too much of his weed in your face and you get a little surprise head rush. The Odds Were All Beating Me also displays noticeable growth in the band’s sound from its 2017 EP, Lullablaze, with a brighter, more modern tone, upbeat tempos, and psychedelic, spacey electronics and reverb.
The first track, “Creature Feature,” starts with an easy beat and guitar embellishments. Pasillas’s vocals bring the track together and push the momentum forward with her steadily throbbing lyrics. While it can be difficult to understand all the words due Pasillas’s bleeding-into-each-other delivery and disregard of strong annunciation, the verses hit with a hard “happy birthday,” which has a really fun, catchy effect and elicits a wanna-be sing-along with a garble of syllables I can only hope are correct. Do I know what the song is about? No, not really, but, wow, it sounds amazing.
The second track is (a little ironically) titled “Easy Listener;” it rocks the hardest out of the five. Drummer Kyle Todaro makes his presence felt with a heartily-tuned snare beat and thick, full drum fills. After the second verse/chorus, guitarist Austin Dean layers a guitar solo over a dreamy, whispering vocal effect that leads into a bridge of zen trance. The guitar melody flows into a beautifully light ballad, and Pasillas’s vocals come back in with an echoey, layered style that allows for a neat emotional transition into the next track.
“Snow Globe,” track three, is the perfect climax in the trajectory of The Odds Were All Beating Me. The song cuts out instrumentation and focuses primarily on Pasillas’s vocals, which echo over and over each other, overlapping into a soothing, drone-like pool. The open space in the track has a continuous psychedelic feel that makes you feel like you’re staring up into a vast expanse of sky. The sound of coins and metal tapping as embellishments pop up throughout the tune, while the lyrics follow a rhythmic, rhyming pattern that feels as smooth and continuous as molasses. It truly feels like you’re sitting in a snow globe — with glittery snow flecks slowly falling all around you and infinite space radiating from your body.
Fourth track “Old News” brings the sound of the full band back in with a simplicity that fluctuates in intensity from sweet and Beatles-esque to an all-encompassing crash of sound. The song follows the flow of waves crashing into a shore — big peaks trickle back into a sense of simplicity.
The EP goes out with track five, “Stutter Step.” The upbeat tempo and hype drum backbeat makes you want to twirl and head bang — or to stutter step, I suppose. This finale also contains the namesake lyric of the album. The just-over-five-minute track ends with with a melody of “no-oo-oh”s that lasts for almost a full minute before masterfully fading into reverberating distortion of the guitar that leaves you feeling like you just sunk down into a bathtub filled with pure bliss.
The Odds Were All Beating Me
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