Guelph (Ontario, Canada) based act, Excuse Me, have been making music together since 2017. We’re taking a listen to their latest single, The Miser, today here at the Send Me Your Ears studio.
Like many new songs at the moment, The Miser speaks of anxiety and low points during the writer’s life.
The band write;
“A miser is someone who relentlessly gathers possessions and shares as little of their wealth as possible, and sometimes when I’m at my worst I find myself pushing people away and focusing on what little I still have control over, like a miser.”
The Miser starts with a great high passed section on drums and you can hear gentle breaths over the top. It just feels slightly ominous. It reminded us of OMD for a moment.
Once the vocals come in they are smooth and breathy with some stunning vibrato in places. The vocals are clear and they have that wonderful, slightly husky tone reminiscent of Caleb Followill of Kings of Leon.
The drums remain fairly constant throughout the track and keep the song marching along. The bass work in this track is outstanding. Some really melodic, almost lead instrument playing that add so much character to the song. Some synth like sounds and effects fill out the sound, together with some occasional vocoder moments.
The Miser is 3 minutes and 16 seconds long. A perfect, radio friendly length. Interestingly, though, the final minute or so is purely instrumental. There’s no real lead instrument during this section, apart from perhaps a few electric guitar riffs here and there. We think this makes The Miser a perfect track to have on in your ears during a work out. At 125BPM it would be a great track to use to keep your walking speed up!
Because of the long, cinematic instrumental section, we also feel that The Miser would be a great candidate for use in TV or movies and we would urge Excuse Me to try to seek out some options in this area. The pounding rhythm makes this feel like a great song to have in the background during a montage scene.
Our thoughts on production would be to suggest a high pass at around 35Hz. There’s a lot of information in this area in the track that most speakers can’t handle and removing it will give a lot more head room to the rest of the track. We’d suggest the band consider a dip around 60-70Hz to balance out the kick a little, as well as a tiny cut around 1200Hz to balance just a slight “honkiness” in the overall sound. A wide boost at the top, centred around 9kHz will add a bit of extra life and brightness to the overall sound.
We love this slightly cinematic indie pop rock track from Excuse Me. It has a great feel to it and gave us all a real boost today here at Send Me Your Ears. Definitely music with a real groove to it. We’re excited to hear what this talented Guelph five piece come up with next!