Ears Wide Open: The Bad Years

Andrew Veeder on October 29th, 2014

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Sami Akbari and Aaron Mort had respective musical projects in Brooklyn and San Francisco before they teamed up for a new one in Los Angeles, called The Bad Years, which combines their diverse backgrounds in pop and rock into something that sounds both new and retro. They nailed it with “Common Mistake,” a catchy pop-rock break-up tune that’s both sunny and somber, as their guitar-and-synth melodies argue with respective electric solos and swells that swirl from dreamy to dark, and her sultry voice sings, “It’s a common mistake that I always make / Wait for the break to change both our ways,” before cooing, “I’ll take all the blame / If you take on the shame.” “Didn’t Need To Know,” described as a “middle-finger anthem to our naive attempts at coolness when we were young,” is a much grander, like INXS meets the Kills, and full of righteous guitar riffs and lyrics like, “To all the kids we knew / Back when we were cool / How have you f*cked up your life?” The two tracks form a double A-side single out on Nov. 4.

||| Stream: “Common Mistake” and “Didn’t Need to Know”