Colorful from the moment we gaze upon its opening bars forward, Mike Montrey Band’s “I Can’t Wait Any Longer” is a song that puts instrumental wits on the same level as linguistic brilliance. There’s no debating whether or not this track has as much to tell us with the absence of words as it does their presence, and it’s in this instrumental introduction – no matter how fleeting it happens to be – that we get the foundation for everything Montrey is about to tell us at the microphone. Quite the talented singer, the namesake of this band isn’t about to come in quietly with his lyrics, but he’s also steering away from the bombastic performances a lot of his peers have been giving – to mass derision from critics, of course.
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They’re not playing at a particularly fast tempo or pace in “I Can’t Wait Any Longer,” and yet it feels like all of the players in Mike Montrey Band have something to prove to everyone else around them. This is a good thing, however, as it winds up producing some of the more exciting moments in the song, all of which have a symmetry that gives this single a lot more cohesion than I’ve been finding on the FM dial all summer long. There’s no spacing between the different instruments in this mix, either – we’re listening to a compressed version of this band’s live sound, which is stunningly seamless if I do say so myself. It’s obvious they share this medium with great pride, and that’s not as common as I’d like it to be these days.
An eroticized fever pitch in this track does a lot to bring us full circle before we’ve ever reached the finish line, and I think this was one of the more important aspects of the composing process for Montrey. He’s definitely putting a lot of stock into the moodiness of the rhythm, especially in terms of how he’s responding to it directly with his lyrics, and in a song where the mood is over two-thirds the communicative presence, there’s no undervaluing his attention to detail here. This might be a collective effort from MMB, but I think anyone who listens to “I Can’t Wait Any Longer” is going to agree with me when I say there can be – and is – only one star in this show, and his name is right in the moniker.
Euphoric sounds await those who are fans of gentle R&B-pop in the next few months, and this new single from Mike Montrey Band is leading the way fantastically and with much panache this August. “I Can’t Wait Any Longer” tells us its identity before we press the play button – just the titling of this song indicates an ambitiousness that can’t remain contained within any underground scene for very long, let alone one as increasingly constrictive as what has birthed MMB is. This is a crew determined to be heard by the masses, and in “I Can’t Wait Any Longer,” they give us plenty of reasons to be listening.
Trace Whittaker
