Frankly, we’re concerned about the amount of indie rock coverage Wisconsin has been getting lately. The Skyline Network’s Most Extreme Supreme Editor in Party Call Me Chief adr spent some time there every summer growing up, and revers the place genuinely for its green fields, small towns and country roads dotted with churches and beer joints with a simple family name under an Olde Style or Pabst Blue Ribbon logo. It’s a great place, pristine and untouched by the trashing strokes of hipness or coastal metropolitan cool. When we hear Yankees or Dodgers talking about it being a flyover state, all we can think of is “Please, please continue to fly over it. Please do not land there and try to remake events like Breakfast on the Farm or Cheese Month in your own image”

So when the Bon Iver record came out earlier in the year, we were a little concerned that others might follow his example and lock themselves in a cabin somewhere in America’s Dairyland for a good winter of their own. Now we’re faced with News on the March telling someone they’ve “gone as far as Wisconsin just to escape all the lies you’ve been tossing at me.” The song is called “Wisconsin, Pt. 2″ no less, meaning they haven potentially mentioned the mean streets of Appleton more than once. So, granted, though the state’s tourism slogan is “Escape to Wisconsin,” please people: let’s leave the home of the Packers and the Brewers out of the limelight. Like San Antonio, we love that it’s lame.

Almost Songs is a satisfying if completely misleading introduction to one of the most buzz generating and buzz worthy acts in town right now, News on the March. We say satisfying because we have been bouncing around the office to it’s folksy boogie and barbershop harmonies for the better part of a week. We say misleading because it sounds almost nothing like the band does on stage. On this EP, the instrumentation is driven by an acoustic guitar, with the melodies carried largely by the three-part vocals along with some bass and electric guitar. There are other instruments sprinkled onto the ice cream, like banjo, violin, organ and kazoo - but it doesn’t have the full weight of them live, when their setup ditches the acoustic for a pair of electric guitars, bass, cello(!) and drums. The songs are there and they sound great (including one of our personal favorite “Moving Pictures”), but it has a completely different set of shoes on. What we’re hearing here sounds like a stripped down, on the bar-stool in-store performance.

But this EP actually has more nutrition than just a Snickers Bar worth of demos, keeping you satisfied until a ‘proper’ set of recordings comes out. For one, the engineering is great, so you don’t really have to do any of that mental transcription where one simultaneously listens to a song and imagines how it might sound with a bit more polish On top of that, we’re willing to bet that some of these compositions find themselves on a full-band release down the road, and then we’ll find ourselves in the enviable position of having two completely different approaches to the same set of material. It’s like a band covering itself, and you know how much we love covers. For all the bands out there recording and then re-recording songs to try and get more umpf in them the second time around, Almost Songs makes a compelling case for just for just doing some acoustic versions from the get-go and giving those away while you record to get folks stoked about whats coming soon to a shrink-wrapper near you.

Recommended, but only if you have also seen them play live to get the complete picture.