A Cappella—a title so simple would seem to tell volumes about the novel; that the story and its characters will have music at their core; that the book will embrace the inherent community furnished via music to its practitioners. While Jennings Keenan’s debut novel does encompass some elements of these motifs, the execution is pretty hit or miss.

Let’s be up front: despite the title, A Cappella is not really a book about a cappella or music in general. More on that to follow. At best, it’s a metaphor for young people learning to operate on their own, independent of the metaphorical instrumentation of their families and childish things, with only one another’s voices to rely upon. But that’s stretching it a bit.

A Cappella tells the story of the final months of high school for four major characters, each of whom gets chapters that are (mostly) from her point of view, in rotation. There’s Angelina, a fretful girl who faces a life-changing event early in the novel. There’s Blake, a good girl with a big future who’s not above being a bit boy crazy. Catherine’s life at the dawn of the book is consumed with grief for the loss of her mother. Renee is estranged from her old friends, living a reckless life of promiscuity. The thread to bind the four is their membership in an elite a cappella quartet at their school, under the direction of their mentor, Sister Camille.

In 2012, Out of the Blue, a co-ed group out of Yale, joined the collegiate a cappella elite, singing on the big stage at Town Hall in New York for the ICCA Finals. Four months later, they’re documenting one of the biggest year’s in group history with an EP of the three songs from their ICCA set. The group was kind of enough to give The A Cappella Blog the opportunity to listen to the EP before its release.

The most striking element of Brand New Walk is just how authentically a cappella it sounds. Nowadays, most groups that record professionally end up with such a heavily produced final product that it’s difficult to distinguish much in the way of individual efforts beyond the solo, the percussion, and a scant few pieces of the instrumentation. Collaborating with the folks at Sled Dog Studios, Out of the Blue finished with a final product that sounds professional and polished, but doesn’t lose any of the nuance of a cappella sound that makes the a cappella form itself, so nuanced, unique, and beautiful.

In the winter of 2010, a new generation of a cappella fans were introduced to Jerry Lawson—a legend in the form who has been making music without any instrumentation for over four decades. Lawson was best known as the front man for The Persuasions, but he had left the group years before, with intentions of pursuing a variety of personal goals that transcended a cappella music. Little did he know, Talk of the Town was waiting around the corner.