TRIPPING OVER AIR – A COLLECTION OF CIRCUMSTANCES EP REVIEW
Are you a music fan who has trouble doing your maths homework? Have no fear; help is here. And all thanks to the Rock Kent School of Trigonometry.
When I was slightly younger than I am now, the school’s head of games was, apparently, the natural choice to teach maths. What he didn’t know about the subject could have been written in in point 10 font on a rugby pitch. And so most maths lessons were spent with him darting next door to seek advice from a bone fide teacher of the subject, while we completed question 14 without him.
One thing, however, he did teach us about triangles (after much consultation with Mr. Swann) was that sine equals opposite over hypotenuse, cosine equals adjacent over hypotenuse and tangent equals opposite divided by adjacent. This can all be boiled down to the seemingly nonsensical phrase “soh cah toa”.
If you want an easier way to memorise your trigonometry trivia, try remembering the sine equation as being the folk duo Show of Hands, the cosine equation being the comic strip characters Calvin and Hobbes, and the tangent equation as Kent based pop-rock act Tripping Over Air.
There you go. Simple. Or did I just make things far more complicated?
Apart from being a convenient way to remember that the tangent equals the opposite side of the triangle divided by the adjacent side of it, Tripping Over Air can also knock out a decent tune. The five piece act from Littlestone near Romney Marsh have an EP available. It’s called “A Collection of Circumstances”, a three track potpourri of guitar based poppery.
Song number one is a break up song where, unusually, you get to hear both sides of the argument. He feels something’s gone wrong. She’s moved on to someone else and is trying to let him go. Imagine a duet between Damien Rice and The Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan and you’re most of the way there.
Everything’s in it’s right place: impassioned vocals, a sprawling guitar solo and a chorus repeated just the right number of times. You could call it radio friendly pop-rock by numbers.
Meanwhile the second track is a sexy little number, high on the raunch factor. “Screaming” is a swaggering tune full of temptation and promise of much naughtiness (“Oh boy, can you resist me tonight?/Are you scared in case I might bite?” sings Sarah Barker). Ooooh, I say. What a bunch of saucy minxes.
Here, the points of reference are more likely to be somewhere between Aerosmith and Goldfrapp. The bass line alone is enough to make you come over all peculiar. Meanwhile the vocals are pitch perfect for a set of lyrics possibly written by a banshee.
The final song, “Stuck in a Box”, takes things back down to the more meditative, miserable level found on “It’s Over”. Here, though, things are far from over. In fact they may not have even begun.
Stuck in a Box” is the kind of “please cheer up” songs you might expect to hear sound tracking a tear jerking scene on a US teen series. Probably involving a rainy, night scene just after everything’s gone horribly wrong for a the painfully good looking protagonists. It’s a delicate tune – with just a hint of James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful”.
Tripping Over Air are a talented band, just as adept at tackling slower paced sad songs as they are high octane party tracks. With a set of radio friendly songs to their name, don’t be surprised if you hear more from them.
Find out more about Tripping Over Air on their Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tripping-Over-Air/183652401650612