Oberwhatzit?

I very recently began listening to songs by a band that calls themselves Oberhofer.  Seemed like a weird enough name for a band....so I did a little digging.  Turns out "themselves" is actually only a "himself".  The band is one dude.....and according to the article I read was 19 years old eleven months ago (I'm guessing he's 20 now, but it's better not to make any assumptions).  Seriously.  When I was 19 I was likely trying my best to memorize every Dave Matthews lyric in existence.  This guy has a one-man band...and it's pretty good.

His name is Brad Oberhofer and he's originally from Tacoma, WA, which I find cool...especially considering he put a very Mt. Rainer-esque mountain on the cover of one his self-produced EPs (I could not, in fact, verify that it actually is Rainer....but I'm guessing it is).  If you haven't been to Seattle or Tacoma and seen Mt. Rainer off in the distance on one of the 15 sunny days of the year out there.....then I recommend you go.  It's pretty spectacular.

Back to Oberhofer.  He's released 4 EPs (or more likely 3 EPs and a single) to date.  I first got hooked on the song "I Could Go" though they're all pretty good.  Its kinda difficult to classify his musical style.  Some songs are 'garage-rocky' reminiscent of The Hives.  Some are much more experimental, a la Animal Collective.  In fact, he has a very Panda Bear (one of the members of Animal Collective) sounding voice.  It sounds so much like Panda Bear at times that I had double-check with the Google that Oberhofer wasn't some pseudonym for Panda Bear.  There's a fair amount of synthesizers and lots of jangly guitar chords to be found in these songs, and possibly maybe even a xylophone or two.  There's also lots of singing of the letter "O".  He even named a song "o0O0o0O0o".....which I'm pretty sure has zeroes in it and was solely named that way to piss off bloggers.

There's only 8 official songs out there so far and downloading all of them only cost me like $5.  So if you like what you hear I recommend you head over to Emusic and pick up the rest.   

Oberhofer - I Could Go (buy)

Oberhofer - Away Frm U (buy)

Enjoy and let me know what you think.

RR