Moi, le voisin
Moi, le voisin ("me, the neighbor") is a sweet little acoustic 3-piece from Utrecht, Netherlands. It is composed of two boys and a girl. The boy Benjamin van Vliet sings with his guitar, the other boy Laurens Ham plays acoustic bass and a little casio (but not casio-pop 🙂 and the girl Lot Broos (don't Scandinavians have such neat names?? god!) she plays the cello. They are an acoustic folk-ish group in the line of Palace, Devendra Banhart, Damien Jurado, all those guys.
The band has just hand-released (literally, all the cds were put together by hand, printing, folding, pasteing) their debut album, "Viola". Their songs sound well produced and clean, with the guitar and cello coming through clear and crisp, that's the best way for acoustic music to sound. I am impressed with the recording, probably because I'm used to hearing so many lo-fi indie bands recording in their parents' basement :) Considering they are a small indie band and this is their debut recording.
Please see Moi, le voisin for yourself in the following video, courtesy of Zomp online magazine. It is a Dutch publication., and in fact on the video they are all speaking Dutch (but sing in English) and it sounds so neat, like German but cuter! Watch on the video as they play with bathtub animals and then play a few songs. On this video his voice sounds nasal like Damien Jurado. It sounds nice, however, and meanwhile the other boy is playing another guitar and the girl looks lovely with a cello. His voice is much better on the recording. It sounds strong and somewhat folky. They are playing in a small bathroom.
Please follow this link, as I have no idea what else to do 🙂
They also have a Myspace page, where I highly recommend you listen to the song "Return to Monster" because it is cascading and lovely. As far as I know they do not have a web page, or any place to download songs. But you can look at more pictures of them and listen to 4 songs at Myspace.
update 3/2/2007: Official website went online today: www.moilevoisin.nl
Love,
Jamie, Vu's friend.
www.myspace.com/pas_non
haha! I was going to comment on the Scandinavian comment, too. They are northern European, but definitely don’t consider themselves Scandinavian.Also…I don’t think I’d compare their language to German, either (even though it does sound slightly German, they don’t want to admit it!)
i hope team jaime will post more
oh.. gosh i dont know! it isn’t? i guess i will amend “scandinavians” to “everyone who speaks and spells in dutch” 🙂
[this is good] very cute little video! lots of toilet. 🙂
Since when was Netherlands (= Holland) part of Scandinavia ? I hope you didn’t pay for those geography lessons 🙂 Sorry for teasing you on your first post here! Keep the posts coming!