A lonely astronaut slips a record from its tattered sleeve. He drops the gramophone’s needle onto the crackling vinyl, sending banjos, clarinets, and ukeleles echoing across the craters of the moon. As the wistful notes drift into the emptiness of space, he watches the sun as it sets behind the whites and blues of his distant home.
Taking folk music sounds into the frontiers of space, Pepper Rabbit’s hand-clapping songs orbit the planets, reverberating into something not meant for this world. On their soon-to-be-released album Beauregard (October 26), lush orchestral layers often fill the foreground as Xander Singh’s melancholy voice wanders in the distance. On "Red Wine", a piano and banjo emerge out of twisting electronics. Like a trippy marching band, they keep a steady pace on their trek through the stratosphere of synthesized hums and whistles.
The sentimental and reassuring “Older Brother” is a memory of life on earth; where children pluck green grass like ukelele strings, and an organ warms the ground with the late summer sun. After each verse, a second voice joins Singh to sail in unison over the organ swells of the chorus. And for a moment, our astronaut forgets his loneliness as it escapes in wordless "oohs" into the fading ether.