
Baula – mercury in retrograde
Genre: Indie Rock
Everyone likes to imagine that their life could be a movie. And plenty of people blame their bad decisions on it. After all, wagering $10.000 at the roulette table is more exciting than doing the dishes. Only one of those things can lead to losing or winning a bunch of money. But, of course, living life as if it were a movie means not taking too much time to consider the consequences.
Naturally, there are some things that can add to the effect. There are no exciting action movies made nowadays that do not feature some kind of heroic music. If chosen correctly, those sounds make it seem almost alright if the main protagonist fades in a blaze of glory. Play the right song in your apartment, and you, too, may feel like you are part of a movie production.
Baula’s “mercury in retrograde” is that rare and dangerous kind of sound. It feels as if it was written to soundtrack a Swedish remake of James Bond. Of course, in this version, the music is much catchier. And, since the Bond is Swedish here, he remains a misanthropic weirdo. But, back to the music for a second, this is incredibly danceable melancholy. It’s the rare tune that makes the inevitability of terrible things happening sound positively extraordinary.
The Stray Lions – Sober
Similar artists: Minus the Bear, Beck
Genre: Indie Rock
Things have a terrible tendency not to last forever. You spend all this time getting used to something, and then, one day, it’s gone. If you’re lucky, you get to start over. Worst of all, you can barely remember what it felt like to have the thing you lost. It’s enough to drive you crazy. And this is probably the one single reason why art continues to be made by people.
Better than shooting a home movie or adding reels to your Instagram page, art is the one thing that locks in emotion. The trick is locking it in such a way that the art also retains the intensity of that emotion. If you just rely on your brain to do it, you’ll just forget how good falling in love on a Summer evening felt like or how terrible it was to get your heart broken on a Winter afternoon. The right songs won’t let you forget.
Over a hazy, indie-rock tune featuring progressive leanings, The Stray Lions’ “Sober” works with pure emotion. This is not a love song but rather a document of what falling in love feels like. Their mission is to get you by the lake where it all happened, to have you smell the warm air and make you feel just like the protagonist – that anything is possible. That’s a mighty tall order. But with skills that are in no way less than those that a magician might possess, The Stray Lions pull it off.