Largo - Heal In Time

Hear The Track Here

Third time around for US based Alternative Indie artist David Katsikas (aka Largo), this time with a song he wrote for his little boy when he was born. Being a proud pop myself, I'm bound to like that. Largo hasn't done too badly by me before either, he's had a couple of highly recommendeds from me and that's not bad going - at least by my rules. Which only I know of course. Megalomania, gotta love it. Largo has shown over that couple of tracks that he is a musician who takes this seriously, as the cover of Toy Soldier (March 2008) showed. So, one original, one cover....

Having said all that, I have to say that - under other circumstances - music like this would have me running for the hills. There is a particular strain of American rock music that is plagued by saccarine, sickly sweet almost rock ballads, sung in the most twee manner that instantly sets my teeth on edge. Heal In Time skates right on the very edge of the line between flight and fancy, and most of the kudos for that trick has to rest in the competence and good musical sense of Largo, because the production, arrangement and mix on this are just right. Remember, this is a genre I most definitely dislike with a vengence.

To its eternal credit, the song never wallows in the bathos, merely hints at the sickening depths that most artists of this genre plumb on a regular basis. He's careful with those little production details too, which helps the vocal treatment of this track enormously - especially when faced with an emotional philistine like me. To aid all this, there's a wonderful piano progression punctuating the vocal that I know will have a few thousand other musicians going 'how did he do that?'. There again, I've learnt that this artist always has a few of those moments tucked away. The real big kick in the pants came towards the end of the review process when I found myself humming along with this, that is when it struck me. No matter how hard I tried to convince myself otherwise, I had no choice. I will worry forever about how my reputation will survive this but....(gulp).....

MUST HAVE Indie ballad.