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Take It Easy Hospital

The songs of Take It Easy Hospital remind me of stargazing past the city limits of Los Angeles, where I’m reminded of how deep and luminous the night sky really is. Much of their music is comprised of incandescent melodies surrounded by a frail ambience that is, at times, punctuated by an electric beat.

The duo that is Take It Easy Hospital is made up of two Iranian natives, born and raised in Tehran. Both Negar Shaghaghi and Ash Koshanejad were featured in the 2010 film, “No One Knows About Persian Cats,” a great docu-drama about the underground youth music scene in Iran. The film includes the duo, detailing many of their profound struggles as artists in their homeland. However, the two feel no compelling desire to write overtly political songs. According to an interview done with The Guardian last year, they both insist that art trumps politics in the grand scheme of things.

Much of Take It Easy Hospital’s songwriting and arrangements seem influenced by elements of Post-Punk. Their use of empty space in the sonic structure of their songs brings to mind such bands as Joy Division or Gang of Four, though if I were forced to more directly associate their sound with other bands, I’d say they echo The Bird and The Bee with a little dash of Belle and Sebastian, or maybe even a more electronic Nico from The Velvet Underground. With such disparate bands, I think it’s fair to say that Take it Easy Hospital is still searching for their own defining sound -- though the search is well-worth listening to.

A certain lo-Fi aesthetic pervades this band’s menagerie of sounds and textures. One can easily imagine many of their songs being conjured in a small bedroom flat in Tehran or London, where they now currently reside. Their songs are raw and vibrant, yet are also infused with a great deal of intimacy; no easy feat in any creative endeavor.

Though a song like Human Jungle really shines as an iridescent pop song, I’m really drawn to the fragility of a song like My Sleepy Fall. The great American folk artist Pete Seeger once said that the simple songs are the hardest to write. My Sleep Fall is a great example of this. The song is deceptively simple. It’s as though Negar and Ash didn’t actually write the song, but, instead, conjured it with a bit of guided luck and magic. There is such a wonderful space created between each gentle strum and Negar’s delicate voice. The song drifts along a wistful, lyrical path that draws one into its sorrowful lament. It’s as though we’re listening in on a neighbor or friend who is unaware of the world around them.

Currently, Take It Easy Hospital has no tour dates, but hopefully that will change. They deserve a wider audience. Check them out. They are well worth a listen.

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By Kashif Ghazanfar, Aslan Media Music Editor

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