If most bands build a reputation or long careers out of carving a musical niche, Brooklyn's Jupiter One is brave to follow the road less travelled. In fact, versatility is their guide to delivering an element of surprise on every track. Offering proof is the group's sophomore album, Sunshower, a veritable array of styles and influences. With soaring melodies, exuberant pop choruses, analog synth-tastic sounds and shocking stage bravado, Jupiter One breathes new life into the indie rock genre. ...show more

If most bands build a reputation or long careers out of carving a musical niche, Brooklyn's Jupiter One is brave to follow the road less travelled. In fact, versatility is their guide to delivering an element of surprise on every track. Offering proof is the group's sophomore album, Sunshower, a veritable array of styles and influences. With soaring melodies, exuberant pop choruses, analog synth-tastic sounds and shocking stage bravado, Jupiter One breathes new life into the indie rock genre.

The songs comprising Sunshower--produced by the band and noted engineer Chris Ribando (The Black Crowes, Priestbird, Mary J. Blige)--blend contemporary styles with a myriad of classic influences, from Dylan and The Beatles to Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac to The Police and Talking Heads. But you wouldn't immediately hear them. The band has a knack for combining all of those influences into something utterly vital and wholly their own, as they've done on first single "Flaming Arrow," a shimmering, ringing acoustic folk tune shot through with a bumping bassline and New Orleans inspired drum groove.

Sunshower dazzles on tracks like the dancefloor-friendly "Simple Stones," filled with handclaps and soulful economic riffing that boasts a bass line for the ages while blending '80s Stones and MGMT. The epic opener "Volcano" melds The Beach Boys with The Flaming Lips, while delivering one of the disc's best choruses. If Ishibashi conjures The Shins on "Find Me a Place," he drops vintage, finger-picking folk on disc-closer "People in the Mountain." As guitarist Zac Colwell puts it: "We can sound like Simon & Garfunkel, The Kooks, or even from a webisode of Yacht Rock." If they had their way, listeners would ingest each track on Sunshower as they would a new chapter in a never-boring book. Says singer/multi-instrumentalist K Ishibashi, "We approach every song like, 'Will people be able to listen to this over and over again?' " "Each song is like a little world," adds Colwell. ...show less