REVIEWS OF CYPRESS (1984)

Rolling Stone
By Joyce Millman
On Let's Active's winsome debut EP, Afoot, Mitch Easter came across like a wispy-voiced Charlie Brown bewildered by the war between boys and girls. That Easter, the band's lead singer, guitarist, songwriter and producer, was literally surrounded by females (bassist and singing foil Faye Hunter and drummer Sara Romweber) gave the record's springy pop its playful tension.

With Cypress, the North Carolina trio has turned its inquisitive gaze from each other to the world around them, from microscope to telescope. This is an enigmatic yet irrtsistible album, reminiscent of R.E.M.'s Murmur and Reckoning (which Easter produced). It's a swirl of moods and haunting, shadowy phrases images of destruction ("Stepping on grapes to distill out the shape"), spiritual anxiety ("Faith is a rope/Climbed, it broke") and tenderness ("The waters part when our eyes see together").

Although Easter has fattened up the trio's sound with layers of ringing electric guitars and crystalline acoustic ones, Let's Active hasn't lost its kids-next-door ingenuousness. Easter's melodies are as vivacious as ever, and the band's experimentations—the countrified twang of "Flags for Everything," the arty-folkie waltz tempo of "Crows on a Phone Line," the psychedelic vocal distortion of "Ring True"—have a stumbled-into radiance, as if Easter, Hunter and Romweber were naifs crashing a recording studio. Cypress, however, is too piquant to have been an accident. As "Waters Part" says, "To tie it all together is the work of alchemists." (Four stars)

Los Angeles Times
November 4, 1984
By Michael London
Let's Active leader Mitch Easter is known for producing R.E.M., one of several Southeastern-bred bands that have trekked to Easter's "drive-in" studio—the garage of his parents' North Carolina home—in search of pop apotheosis. Let's Active echoes R.E.M.'s blend of '60s pop, folk and psychedelia, minus the doomy undertow and plus a playful, Monkees-style innocence. The melodies on this debut album aren't as billowy as the band's Afoot EP, and Easter's boyish vocals are often teasingly submerged in sound. But what sound it is: surging choruses, atmospheric echoes, and layers and layers of wistfully jangling guitars. This is dreamy, pastoral music with an indefinably Southern appeal. Lynyrd Skynyrd, goodbye.

Trouser Press Guide
By Elizabeth Phillips
North Carolina's Let's Active was probably the most misunderstood of the South's '80s new-pop bands. Though dogged by a rosy-cheeked nicest-guys-of-wimp-pop image, they could be downright moody. Producer/multi-instrumentalist Mitch Easter assembled the trio in 1981, but it only emerged nationally in the wake of R.E.M., whose first two discs Easter co-produced at his Drive-In garage studio outside of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Joining that band's label, Let's Active released a six-song EP, Afoot, bringing new meaning to such overused pop adjectives as crisp, bright and ringing. All the songs, even those with melancholy lyrics, are hook-filled, boppy and ultra-hummable. Pick to click: "Every Word Means No."

But things were not as they seemed. Although perceived as the engineer of the now-sound-of-today in American guitar pop, Easter's own tastes were running towards the electronic gadgetry of techno-rock. (His career as a producer was also taking off.) Also, his two original partners—bassist Faye Hunter and drummer Sara Romweber (sister of Flat Duo Jets' Dexter Romweber)—were viewed as sidepeople, despite Easter's egalitarian efforts to the contrary. In real life, the trio were not just simple, cheerful popsters. Both Easter's love of "sounds" and the band's inner conflicts were explored on Cypress, a record that is deeper and more enduring, though not as immediately winning, as Afoot. Denser, rambling textural pieces—some wistful, even angry—came to the fore. Few records sound so multi-dimensional, and Let's Active has, for that reason, been tagged psychedelic—they make sounds you can almost touch.

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