A superb, balanced palette of drums, guitar and high crooning voices.  A completely satisfying album with no real start or endpoint to it, nor concept.     File it next to Velvet Underground's "Loaded" for sheer pop loveliness from your curators, Mark and Andrea.  Singles include "I Hate My Job" (a rousing rant against the corporates), "Damion Day" (the requisite piano-guitar rave up, a crowd favorite). It's hard not to like the strong piano sound from Mark on "All I Know".    "Honey Colored Time" has the most crossover potential...a song against the man.....but under what flag? Shimmer, slowness, even salaciousiness, so much to love about this rock quartet.
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New York's Makar finds a delicate way to mix their influences into something all their own defying comparison to anyone. Maybe it's the shared vocals of Andrea DeAngelis and Mark Purnell that stand out inside of each song. Maybe it's the small things that really start standing out the more I listen to the disc… the piano lightly chugging like it were in a Mississippi juke joint? Is it the guitars resembling the psychedelic sixties or the post punk clang heard in the eighties? Whatever it is that I'm hearing, makes Makar a musical genius worth telling people about. So pile into the van, make it fast and throw on this disc!

Monk's Picks - I Hate My Job, Show Me the Real World, Honey-Colored Time
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This album is truly a find! All 18 songs are very listennable and well crafted. Today they turn out albums with one good song if your lucky and the rest is album filler. You get the sense that every song counts here. Well done!
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Makar's music is a quintessentially American sound, evoking the particular blend of optimism and melancholy that is an authentic response to living, creating, and playing in the fractured cultural and musical milieu that yields a New Jersey/New York band in the early millenium.  This is apparently their first album, recorded as studio opportunities became available, and the result is a fine, fine listen, a thoroughly charming collection of songs that will indeed grow on you.

That this is a debut effort and home-recorded should not dissuade anyone from checking it out -- the material is varied and developed, and the recording is warm and rich.  There is a simplicity to the arrangements but a deceptive simplicity to the music -- many times Makar's songs build upon basic chord patterns and extend melodic ideas in unexpected directions.  In some of the standout tracks -- "Another Day", "All I Know", "After Autumn", "Erase Face" -- one can hear a sophisticated band that has digested the pop music of earlier eras and produced their own unique synthesis of melody, urbanity, and pastoralism.  

The music is not without its precursors and sonic touchstones, and this leads me to an interesting (well, to me, anyway) sociological observation.  There is a married couple at the core of this band, a couple who are comfortable enough with each other to subject their relationship to the additional dynamic of playing in a band together.  Thinking on other pop/rock bands where this is also the case, there is some definite musical affinity with other groups that incorporate couples, a lived-in seemingly imperturbable warmth.  Fans of Ida, Low, Yo La Tengo, and X may very well hear what I mean, and, by extension, I believe would like this record.  I certainly do, and I recommend it heartily.
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