
Bon Enfant – Trompe L’oeil
There’s a reason compilations are packaged as “Big Hits of the 80s” or “The Definitive Sounds of the 2000s.” The songs picked up for those fit well together, and the people assembling the collections rarely have to search too far. Songs made around the same time, around the same place, in one particular music genre tend to sound alike.
It’s not even, as some might think, that producers or label execs actively suggest that their artists do this. It happens organically. It happens because artists tend to want to follow trends in a desperate attempt to get hits.
Looking back at musical eras, it is and will be, more interesting to witness the outliers. It’s fascinating to see the artists who created their own language by ignoring many of the so-called rules of the reigning pop music kings and queens.
Bon Enfant’s “Trompe L’oeil” is a great indie-pop song that sounds both innocent and broken down, mirage-like and all too real. Just the same, “Trompe L’oeil” sounds like it belongs to the modern era of indie-pop, but it ignores many of its tired tropes. And it’s not just because this is sung in French, while most pop hits feature English lyrics. It’s simply because Bon Enfant have positioned themselves, through what I can only assume is a great effort, to see things from a different light. And, most of the time, that’s all pop audiences really need.
The Cle Elum – Goodbye Night Sky (feat. Josh Caterer)
Great punk-rock energy is wasted on people who do not have a lot of ideas on how to use it. But that’s just how life works. If you love punk energy, you take what you take and what you can get, and don’t grumble too much when the guitars aren’t in tune or when the songs start to blend into each other. The solution to those kinds of problems is supposed to arrive with time and experience, and there is no way to buy a shortcut.
And, I suppose there are other things that are more important than punk rock. Not many, of course. And they are all influenced by your experience. A songwriter solves the problem of putting the right words to the appropriate chord change faster if they’ve done this thing a lot. And, a regular person might find better solutions to problems and a better appreciation of life being boring and predictable, the more that they hang around.
The Cle Elum’s “Goodbye Night Sky,” a song featuring Smoking Popes’ excellent Josh Caterer, is as old-fashioned as your granny telling you how everything is bound to turn out OK and just as comforting. It sounds like a bullfaced lie the first time you hear it, but if you’re lucky, it ends up being the kind of advice that you yourself will one day give others. It’s no surprise that Caterer would be involved with such a song, considering his own band’s knack for marrying old wisdom with energy.