Bakakaï – Busy Girl
There’s not much of a point in following the rules anymore. You’re certainly setting yourself up for disappointment if you think that the old regulations will make your life as a musician any happier.
They used to evaluate a band’s musical success or failure based on how many records it sold. But few are buying records anymore. Those sales used to be directly influenced by how neat the chorus was and how fast the guitar solo was played. But everyone’s sick of choruses and guitar solos.
On the other hand, I’m happy to report seeing and hearing it every day, audiences are once again eager to witness wild creativity, strange eccentricities and art done for art’s sake. These are all qualities that the French group Bakakaï possesses.
“Busy Girl” may well be a song about a relationship that is difficult to nurture, but this is where the composition ends its resemblance to typical pop music. Instead, Bakakaï relies on an almost childlike innocence for creating dynamics and on essentially erasing the rules by glueing several songs together for “Busy Girl”, with each part revealing more about the emotions involved in this affair.
The Pearly Gates – Forest
It’s certainly not just children who need and, eventually, demand fairytales. The world might be a much better, safer place if all of the adults in it would use fantastic stories to try to explain what they want, what they need and how the Universe tries to help or restrict them. The only downside is that most people don’t exactly know what they need.
Instead, in the modern world, young adults are fed angsty news stories as quickly as they can learn to read or open a mobile phone. And, worse still, unless they do something about it themselves, this routine never stops. Does this avalanche of tense facts about reality ever really help? Not really? That’s why The Pearly Gates is taking a different route.
The French group sounds equally inspired by vintage psych-rock, by the magician’s production touch of the likes of Tame Impala and by old-fashioned fairy tales. “Forest” is music that invites you to pitch a dream-designed tent in it and to live here for a while. But it’s not all an illusion. Not really. It’s excellently crafted modern music meant to solve ancient problems.
