Amelia Coburn – See Saw
Similar artists: Édith Piaf, Serge Gainsbourg, Scott Walker, Rufus Wainwright, Bill Ryder-Jones
Genre: Indie Folk
The great rockstars, presumably, made their greatest dreams come true. But there’s hardly one of them who wouldn’t trade it all to be a child once more, is there? You can read it in their interviews and hear it in their songs. From John Lennon to Noel Gallagher, the magic of childhood plays a big role in how they take on the boring, ordinary days as an adult.
And, so, childhood visions play a role in a good deal of the world’s most important pop music. It certainly weighed heavily on the minds of the songwriters who did their greatest work back in the 1960s. It wasn’t just the playful musical arrangements or the beautifully naive lyrics that suggested this. It was an entirely new-born way of viewing the world.
Amelia Coburn’s “See Saw” sounds like a child writing a fairytale story. There’s humour and joy here, as well as an interest in the occult and the macabre. Musically, the gentle vocals recall the folk-rock songs of the 1960s and the terrific melodies of retro U.K. pop. There’s a mystery to the song and somewhere in Coburn’s gently sung melodies, also a key to what it all must mean.
dogpatch – Buzzin’
Similar artists: Alice Phoebe Lou, Faye Webster
Genre: Indie Folk, Lo-fi Rock, Dream Pop
We hold our most treasured artists to impossible expectations. We want them to always be inspired, to look cool and to say things that are full of universal truth. But the least that they can do is provide a bit of magic. We want this because we are not always able to create the same for ourselves. dogpatch go searching for that old magic on the dreamy “Buzzin’.”
Maybe the old gurus were right. Life might just be a dress rehearsal for other, more important things. Perhaps it’s when we close off the murmur of our brains when we dream or slip into a state of meditation that we move closest to the state in which we naturally ought to be at all times. It is, at least, something to strive for, a promise for arduous students.
All of these spiritual quests can’t be done without a soundtrack. dogpatch’s “Buzzin’” is a piece of dreamy, colourful indie folk that unassumingly moves to the world searching for holy things that have been painted over. Like Marc Chagall’s the colours bleed out of every inch of this musical painting, and familiar artistic formulas are used mainly as a jumping-off point for something daring and surprising. As the artists claim, there’s magic in all of us. And we are inclined to believe them.
