Upstate
Missing: The Official Soundtrack (Friendly Psychics)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Winter 2005

A preliminary Google search didn’t turn up a whole lot, so though it appears that there is indeed a film (a short, one presumes) called Missing by a director named Joe Bargdill, I’m still not 100% sure. Upstate certainly wouldn’t be the first band to try to pass off an album as the soundtrack to an imaginary movie (Johnny Socko’s Full Trucker Effect comes to mind), but either way, the five songs on Missing: The Official Soundtrack generate a sustained atmosphere and tone that would serve a soundtrack well. Opener “Falling Missiles” kicks things off with a doubled lead vocal line that sounds like the Byrds if they had gone through a heavily druggy minor-key phase, and it sets up the formula for the rest of the CD, which has the mildly unsettling late-night tone of the bands associated with New Zealand’s Arc Café. At times, it seems like Upstate becomes a bit too beholden to the idea of the movie itself, spending perhaps a bit too much time generating a mood in a background-underscore sort of way rather than crafting memorable songs that might accidentally propel themselves to the foreground of a scene. The effect is cinematic enough, however, and even though I can’t particularly tell one song from the next, Missing sounds fine when it’s playing. That movie sounds like it’ll be pretty creepy, though.

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