CASILIAN – Haine de mon ADN
You don’t just get people to listen to your message regardless of how important it may be. Just try and find esteemed college professors and try to post their classes on YouTube. Most often, you’ll notice that they have tens of views, and the majority of those are made by themselves. People don’t just listen to something because it’s good for them or because it is good for someone else.
That’s what storytellers got from the very start of time. The religious texts that are still being used are massive epics with heroes and villains. That’s what the musicians and the poets understood early as well. Make people want to dance or bob their heads along with the rhythm, and you have them under your spell for a while. It’s only then that you can lay some truth on them.
CASILIAN is a Franco-Norwegian that, thankfully for music, leans more heavily on the Latin influences than the Scandinavian ones. It’s a great, novel, catchy way of making pop music. The French rapping over the aggressive electro beat is irresistible. It subtly calls to 90s pop music, but it’s a hook that, today, sounds excellent. It’s good enough to make listeners want to plug into a translation app and figure out that this is a song about hatred and confusion, about times we all hope we will pass through like an express train speeding out of a station in the night.
The Shape of Sanctum – Ghost Pipe
There’s a certain warmth that bands made up of musicians who play together in a small room manage to achieve. In fact, they have to try really hard to avoid it. Actually, they’d need to ask, at least, a couple of musicians to go out for coffee if there’s any chance to get something with less warmth on tape. And, in truth, that’s what the singer eventually ends up doing the moment he announced to the other that they’ll pursue a solo career.
Analogue instruments and playing with other people are wonderful for certain genres of music. It can’t handle the kind of music that needs to reflect loneliness and absence. Musicians who play analogue instruments have something wired in their brains to help them avoid this. Electronic instruments, when programmed, have nothing stopping them from welcoming the gloom.
The gloom and distance are precisely the things with which The Shape of Sanctum works so well on “Ghost Pipe.” It’s music created out of electronic loops and sound textures. Maddening repetition and the absence of harmony are what define this. Indeed, these are the best choices for music that ought to sound haunting, music that ought to represent places where light doesn’t sneak in often. The Shape of Sanctum isn’t, really, pop music. It’s something much more interesting.
