Pop has been getting up to some very interesting things of late. Yes, there is still the obvious, high gloss, production line, pop by numbers that feeds the needs of the music industry and the chart system, but there is also a growing alternative scene, one that mixes the best of the underground with the potential of the mainstream. Phoenix O’Neill fits very much into this new movement. For whilst the music she makes falls easily into the genre, it is what she blends it with that makes it a refreshing change.
As always the song that is possibly the least obvious of the four included here is the one that intrigues me the most and Alien is a deft blend of chilled late night vibes, shimmering electronic beats and orchestral sweeps, hazy sonic backdrops and gorgeous vocals. I’ve long been an advocate of modern pop becoming influenced by older and more alternative dream-pop forces. Keep the production values and infectiousness of the modern sound but soften its edges and haze things out a bit with some dreaming musical spires and ethereality that the likes of Kate Bush and a whole host of more underground eighties acts worked with so well. Do that and you have a sound which has the ability to be both commercial and cultish, cool enough for the discerning pop fan and addictive enough to pick up the commercial pop dollar. Do that and you have a great track but one that doesn’t play by the rules.
Cruel World is probably the more natural heart of the EP, a slow burning reflection on some previous tough times that the artist experienced, a masterful example of restraint and understatement, of how to build a song out of only what is really necessary, the voice and the heart, the memory and an intimate connection with the listener, revelling in space and atmosphere as much as sound and beat. I Need You and I Feel It are more obvious approaches to the task at hand, though they seem to exist at the opposite ends of the dance floor dynamic, one the party starter, the other the wind down to chill out mode.
Phoenix O’Neill hasn’t come to save pop music, she has come to destroy it and build something new from the rubble, or at least leave a musical diagram for others to follow. Out of The Ashes is a totally infectious collection, simple, beguiling, effortlessly cool but generally sitting in the shadowed corner of clubland rather than posing under the neon lights of the dance floor. It is a vision of what might come to pass, a thorn in the side of those still trying to force pop down the same pathways and it does all of this probably without even knowing that it is doing so. You can only be this cool when you aren’t even trying to be cool. How cool is that?
The worlds of pop and the strains of the classical world may seem worlds apart but on Honey Dear, Daniel Alejandro proves that the two can, not only co-exist, but do so to great effect. The focal point of the song is immediately Alejandro’s voice, one which seems more usually found in the world of stage, opera and musical theatre than the more cliched world of pop. But it is his sleek and heady tones which straight away sign post this as more than just another pop wannabe. No, this is something far cleverer than just a pop song. But it is also everything you expect a pop song to be, how clever is that?
Pop music may be a young persons scene but that doesn’t mean that the market will put up with a lower standard product than any other genre. Far from it, if you want to keep the pop dollar on side as the teen fan grows into a more discerning music fan then you need to deliver songs which offer both immediacy and sparkle but are well wrought and sophisticated. Throw away songs may be great for the quick buck but even the most cynical record label marketing department knows that there is no future in that route. The clue is after all in the name…throw away.
Final Warning is the perfect sound creation for the modern music fan, just the right blend of old school familiarity and new ideas and the result is a slick urban groove-laden, R&B infused track, one perfect for the clubland dance floor and pop picker alike. It speaks to the cutting edge rap scene, although it is individual enough to stand enough apart from that as well, but it also echoes with the slow sensuality of blues divas, jazz singers and soul acts of the past. This isn’t about re-inventing those past times but it is certainly the successor to much of it.
Music is a mirror to be held up to the world around it, to reflect one issue or another, to point at things, to raise questions. Television Personalities does just this, and okay it may not pose a direct question but it certainly points out the bizarre relationship we, as a modern society, has with celebrity status. And it is bizarre, we know it isn’t real, that theres is a fabricated world, one designed to make us feel better about ourselves, distract us from the grim realities of life and sell products, all of which is implied and examined through some wonderfully tongue in cheek lyrical rhetoric.
Hourglass is a song which says so much about the musical world we find ourselves in today. With the abandonment of the old tribal allegiances, the hard and fast rules which created rigid styles, musicians are freer to make music which wilfully fuses genres, cross-pollinates sounds and gene-splices musical DNA. Less and less are we presented with music which conforms strictly to one form or another, but which is instead free to pick and chose the sonic building blocks it uses from a wide and ever changing source.
There are times on We Are Fucked, gotta love an album title that honest, that it sounds as if someone has built a machine and programmed it with just the vaguest outline of how to make music and let it just work out the rest for itself. Whilst it follows the basic laws of melody and rhythm, of songwriting and musicality, the sounds it choses to work with owe more to the car plant than the music studio. Ever since that famous thought experiment where a violin was tied to a length of string and dragged down a gravel path, the argument about what music is, and more importantly what it can be, has been a heated place. Flesh Eating Foundation seem to prove that as long as you adhere to some of the most basic tenets, you can fill in the spaces between with anything you like. And if they chose to fill that space with fuzzed out guitars and glitchy electronica, crunching industrial noise and programmed beats, well, so much the better.
Music should cross boundaries, whether they are geographic, generic, cultural or whatever other restrictions we impose on our own creativity. And that is exactly what Anaweza does. Lady Jaydee is an artist from Tanzania, Luciano Messenjah hails from Jamaica, the song is sung both in Swahili and English and it exists in a place where past musical traditions merge with musics future potential, where African voices merge with Western pop. If that isn’t the sort of creativity we need in this day and age, then I don’t know what is.
As someone who has visited the country mainly through its music and media, She Can Flow sounds like nothing less than America’s beating heart. And to be fair it is probably an America that never existed outside its road movies, TV adverts, beat legacy, literature and other rose tinted nostalgia, but in my mind it is what America should sound like. There is something in the songs musical soul which makes it quintessentially of that place but when and where is something that is harder to but your finger on.
Covering iconic songs is a tricky thing especially songs as ingrained in the public consciousness as Wild Cherry’s Play That Funky Music (White Boy). Many have tired, Euro-poppers Roxette made it sound predictably…well, Europop, Tim Campbell delivered an over-produced, over-polished version, Extreme rocked it out, Prince made it sound like it was his own song and a host of TV music show wannabes have sucked the very soul out of it. The problem with attempting to cover a well-known song is that you have one of two options. Either you bring something new to the song which implies that you think that you can do better than the person who wrote it in the first place or you stay faithfully to it which begs the question why bother covering it at all? The answer, it would seem lies somewhere between the two approaches.
