New Indie Band Concept Album of the Year: Valley Maker

Austin Crane.  Not a name on the tip of everyone's tongue at the moment though I can say that after finding Valley Maker on bandcamp.com and falling in love (no overstatement) with their concept album I did personally advise him to not go to college and instead spend his time writing songs just as beautiful if not more so than those already written and recorded.  Luckily for me and unfortunately for most artists I find there, bandcamp let's you listen for free to the music artists upload - you can't download it without paying a mostly minimal cost but you can listen to it.  And heck, with the amount of free wifi out there you could probably jump from connection to connection on your way home from work and still retain an uninterrupted stream of tunes to serenade.  

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This just-surfacing band from Columbia, South Carolina has an interesting road ahead of them but the talent and ability to carve a story and release bits and pieces to the listener whose job it becomes to sort them through and arrive at a gorgeous yet roughly accurate snapshot of the human condition are there right now and at a young age.  I foresee this crew (at least Austin) to slowly grow into the indie scene over the next decade as long as some pretty girl groupies don't come around and distract the band in the near future.  

Being a concept album, you have to listen to the whole thing straight through to get the intended impression and the vibe of some of the songs is closely tied to others as is common in concept albums.  The observant listener will quickly notice the stories loosely follow the story of the first book of the Bible, Genesis and I would recommend the listener reads through the book after listening a few times through the album to fully illustrate the genius of both the book of the Bible and Valley Maker's interpretation and in-filling of the emotional details.

This is the kind of band that would hold your attention through an entire coffee shop session and have you buying t-shirts and bumper stickers before you thought about what happened to that skinny latte you were holding before the last song ended...and before you remembered you're 30+ years old and shouldn't even try to fit into a pair of skinny jeans no matter what your favorite drink is.