Zeus featured as The Guardian’s New Band of The Day TEST

And lo, it came to pass, we said, coming over all biblical with delight, within 12 hours an album fell into our laps verily like tricksy pop manna from heaven, entitled Busting Visions by a Canadian outfit called Zeus. And it’s fab, 70s vernacular intended. Zeus are the sometime backing band of Jason Collett of Broken Social Scene and they’re signed to Arts and Crafts, but really they’re not part of that Toronto scene as much as they are, ideologically and aesthetically, phantom peers of the aforementioned clever-clever British class of 1974-5. They had a previous song, Marching Through Your Head, and that’s what their music’s like: a series of hooks and choruses trampling across your auditory canal.

They’re steeped in the music of the 70s that wasn’t punk, disco, glam or prog: that vague, nameless genre that included Queen/Sparks/10cc but also ELO, Wings, Supertramp and Pilot. Groups that took the Beatles’ studio fixation and zany smartness to extremes, bearded musos who weren’t progressive or heavy as such but could knock out a dynamite riff or a sublime lick with the best of them, but seconds later would have moved on to something else. Zeus are longhairs, some with beards, they have lots of touring under their belts and they’re skilled musicians, and as such they have something of the grizzled road-horse quality of fellow countrymen the Band. But this is the Band jolted into art-pop/prog-pop life…

Click here to continue reading Paul Lester’s Guardian review >