Chris Barbini – DARLENE
For the most part, people know exactly what other people like. Everyone, in a sense, gets the same set of cards to play with. With this in mind, why doesn’t everyone cater to those tastes all the time? Wouldn’t it make everyone happy?
Great artists fear one thing more than failure, and that is predictability. Get an artist to follow a routine, and they’re likely to run away barefoot down the road screaming.
But the stats are in. And people like the talented Chris Barbini know how to read them. Since the dawn of time, the beauty of certain individuals has moved the fate of individuals and even helped speed up the destruction of empires. Since the dawn of time, great beauty and murder have been predictably interlinked.
Chris Barbini’s “DARLENE” sounds like a soundtrack for a modern internet sketch. Indeed, it’s a song that should do well on TikTok and the likes. It’s catchy. The vocal production, the ’50s doo-wop backing vocals and the bluesy harmonica are all tasty. But there’s also beauty, murder and tragedy added to the plot. Barbini avoids being too predictable, but offers the audience what they must know that they’ve always wanted.
Ella Ion – Blue Black Crows
You wake up in a room and somebody is whispering words that are both comforting and chilling about the weather, the state of the world and how it’s all meant to be. You find yourself in a town in the frozen North, and have nothing to go by except for the stranger’s mysterious chanting. You know that you should panic, but something inside that voice makes you want to learn more.
If life, or pop music, could serve you that kind of experience, people would accept unspeakable risks. It would certainly make life a little bit more interesting. It would make finding someone to chant truths to you a goal worth pursuing.
That’s what Ella Ion’s music does to you, and it stands in stark contrast with most modern music. Pop songs seem to happen to you, with all the information delivered all at once, whether you like to hear it or not. Pop songs sound like someone yelling at you in a supermarket aisle.
Ion’s music, on the other hand, wants to trick you long enough to where you forget where you are and why you care so much about what this artist has gone through. “Blue Black Crowes,” Ion’s single, feels like it could only exist inside one of those dreams. It feels like something programmed to make you forget who you are for a while. And how much would you be willing to pay for something like that?
