Remember what it felt like sitting for hours in your bedroom, listening to your favorite tracks, wishing you were cool and popular and all that smack that you later learned don’t mean a thing?
I do. And so do Joe Lemieux and Rex Thrustan, the two guys behind the alternative music project Litvar.
Litvar, a combination of the words ‘light’ and ‘variation’ is not like any other musical group you’ve heard in the past ten or so years. Trust me. What does that mean? That means that they don’t resemble anything you expect to hear on the music scene these days. Their sound is so wacky and real to life. It hasn’t been auto-tuned to death and it’s imbibed with such an obvious love of music. It’s the sort of songs people made before the music scene turned lame, when it was about passion and sound rather than breasts and sexuality.
Boy, weren’t those the days…
Litvar sounds like a blast from the past, yet their debut album, “The Greatest Movie of All Time”, only came out a few months ago, at the beginning of 2020. And what immediately struck me is how someone can still write such cool, honest tunes in such a fake world.
“Hi, I’m Andy” is this brilliant track basically about being socially inept and struggling to make a real connection with someone. It’s a coming-of-age song on a coming-of-age album that approaches all sorts of subjects that people in their late teens and early 20s are bound to recognize, like friendship and making sense of the bonkers news you see.
The song even touches upon the current Covid-19 pandemic, which I’d say is pretty cool. ‘Cause after all, when people look back in 50 years time on today’s music, they should be able to see what was going on in the world at this moment, right?
Anyway, Litvar’s “Hi, I’m Andy” captures how crazy the situation is and basically how weird it is being young in these mad times. It’s a very relatable song, I feel, and you don’t necessarily have to be 20 to appreciate it (though it helps). Thing is, everyone’s been here at some point, trying to make sense of things, trying to figure out who they are and how they fit into this world. And that’s what’s so appealing about “Hi, I’m Andy”. We’ve all been Andy at some point.
The sound, again, is something that really speaks to me because it’s so raw and true. It’s obviously inspired by a great love for music these guys have and done through a very minimalist, very raw approach.
To be perfectly honest, seems to me that “Hi, I’m Andy” is exactly the song you needed right now and it’d be a mistake not to go listen it. Just sayin’.