Needers & Givers is a band of three brothers, but not The Bee Gees. Which is not to say these Hoffman siblings - Ian, Christopher, and Dylan -- haven’t learned a thing or two from The Brothers Gibb. After all, The Other includes many of the same British touches that initially influenced pre-disco Bee Gees recordings. “Out of Here,” for example, could easily pass for an early Beatles ballad, while “The Last Time I Saw You” brings Small Faces to mind. “Digging” is something altogether different, as it alternates between loud, guitar rock, and folk piano and strings. This same noisy-to-quiet effect is also successfully applied to “Teams & Colors,” only this time the electric guitars crank up with powerful feedback waves. These boys have often drawn comparisons to psychedelic music’s past; and when Ian Hoffman sings “I was sittin'/In the corner of your mind/and I’m tryin'/To find someplace I can hide” it’s awfully easy to see why. Whenever such words are combined with spacey music, Needers & Givers fully earn the trippy label. Yet like the best psychedelic music, The Other is both experimental and melodic at the same time, which is a winning combination that gives music fans exactly what they need, every time.
-- Dan MacIntosh [April 28, 2008]
