I hate when life gets in the way of a good night of music. Sometimes, you’re looking forward to a show you’ve been planning to go to — say, in Seattle, maybe — by a group you’ve recently heard about and think sounds pretty interesting — like Snowden, for instance — and then things come up during the week before the show — which was maybe supposed to happen, oh, last Thursday — and suddenly you can’t go. It’s worse of course if you’ve already purchased tickets (I hadn’t yet), but nonetheless, you just know it’s going to be months, at least, before the next opportunity to see that band live.

And such was the case last week for me. But on the bright side, I’ve had the good fortune of being able to hear an advance copy of Snowden’s second full-length album, No One in Control, which is scheduled to be released in its entirety this May. And it’s a good one, worthy of a New Music Monday feature. Coming 6 years after Snowden’s debut album, Anti-Anti, it won’t completely escape previous comparisons to Interpol (admittedly, I wasn’t aware of Snowden for the first album, but I can see the similarity). However, if there’s one band that I hear threaded throughout many of the songs on No One in Control, it’s Pink Floyd. Occasionally it’s early Syd Barrett-era Floyd, but at others it’s Dark Side of the Moon, probably because Snowden’s Jordan Jeffares (who, as far as I can tell, pretty much is Snowden) is often a vocal dead ringer for David Gilmour. Snowden could do a killer cover of “Breathe,” to be very specific about it.

A couple of the songs have made their way out ahead of the album, and “The Beat Comes” is the one that has really caught my attention. To continue my Pink Floyd comparison, “The Beat Comes” is more of the Syd Barrett variety, but that’s not to say that Jeffares is trying to sound like that — you may not even hear the Pink Floydness at all. It’s more like he’s simply listened to a lot of Floyd and elements of that have subconsciously made their way onto the album, in a much more upbeat form. Purely on his own merits, Snowden gives all indications of being an energized and exciting artist/band (he may have formed a true band around the name at this point) that you may be hearing a lot more of after the album’s official release in May.