Tonstartssbandht: Livin’ In Hope

Nestled neatly at the end of Mexican Summer’s compilation, A Decade Deeper, celebrating the label’s first ten years of “living, breathing, and believing,” is a new all-time jammer from Orlando’s Tonstartssbandht. The cover, “Livin’ In Hope,” finds brothers Andy and Edwin White harmonizing in grand spaciousness about a journey from the country to the city. It transports the listener to a zone of languid Arcadian gospel-psych. Lyrically rooted in the blues – “Got no woman/Or a day job/Feeling like a cowboy/And looking like a slob” – the tune takes its sweet time reveling in hard truths (“Nobody told me that the streets are paved with stone”) and a gradual crescendo into belief, into, indeed, a life lived in hope. Despite the fact that “No one wants to know” the story of a hapless hoper, Tonstartssbandht defiantly rockets into glory, putting their faith out in the world, loud and weird and unapologetic…words/c depasquale