Club 8 – Daylight
Genre: Shoegaze, Lo-fi Rock, Dream Pop
“How do you identify a great pop song?” That’s a reasonably fair question to ask, considering that it’s been on these compositions that great careers have been built. However, the most honest answer that even a musicologist would be able to offer is, “You’ll know it when you hear it!” In order words, you should stop looking for a formula on how to build one.
Or, at the very least, songwriters need to stop working with every element that books say should be integrated into a terrific pop song. Bands like Club 8 or The Jesus and Mary Chain prove this. Take the latter’s sensational early records as an example. I know that those are considered a kind of holy ground for alternative music, but what did they really sound like? Beach Boys songs are mangled up by an unholy amount of feedback and distortion.
Club 8’s “Daylight,” on first listen, sounds like a gloriously sunny pop song being ripped to shreds by the mix it has been dealt. This, however, is done by design. It acts as the soundtrack to leaving a dream world and entering the real one. It sounds like an illusion slowly disintegrating. And, just like the aforementioned 80s alternative bands, it has both a great pop song at the heart of it and great power.
MN – Nineteen
Similar artists: Frank Turner, Julien Baker, Brian Fallon, Aaron West and The Roaring Twenties, The Weakerthans
Genre: Indie Rock
If you’re lucky, life is going to smack you around some when you’re young and then forget about you later. If you’re lucky. And, if you’re smart, you’re going to remember how it made you feel. If you’re really smart, you’re going to write about it and even, perhaps, make the topic of a pop-rock song. That won’t only help you but has the potential to hit a chord with others as well.
But this is not for everyone. For one thing, people don’t much like being hurt or suffering. The majority of them also don’t enjoy slaving over writing a book or a song. Most certainly, almost none of them want to remember the bad times and how bad they made them feel. All of this is quite tragic in a way. The hurt you might have felt in your youth is pristine and unlikely to be felt the same way ever again.
With this in mind, listen, firstly, to MN’s “Nineteen” as a confession of young love about to go terribly wrong, and, if that’s not enough, hear it as an improbably well-written pop song. This flows out like something that a heartbroken 1980s Bruce Springsteen might have written or something that one of his followers, perhaps Brian Fallon, might have come up with. It’s a teenage working-class melodrama. And we’re glad for all the hurt the songwriter has managed to summon here.
