Pom Poms – Desperate Love
Genre: Surf Rock, Garage Rock, Dream Pop
Similar artists: Lana Del Rey, Kate Clover, The Unloved, Nancy Sinatra
The past always seemed to look better from the rearview mirror. Similarly, the improbably future holds a certain fascination. It’s only the future that, often, feels like a summation of all possible problems.
With that in mind, alternative music has got very good at quoting both of these. Pom Poms quote from the futuristic song of the 1960s, from a speculation that never came to be. No, the imagined future ended up being much grandiose, and much less interesting than predicted.
The retro-future pop of Desperate Love is slow, cinematic, yet announcing something much more sinister on the horizon. It’s the music that could accompany a beach party scene in a Tim Burton movie about the end of days. Pom Poms create an alternative disaster movie soundtrack. If disasters were only these inviting.
Cosmic Crooner – Reflexopolis
Genre: Psychedelic Rock, Indie Pop, Alternative Rock
Similar artists: Arctic Monkeys, David Bowie, The Beatles, The Last Shadow Puppets, The Lemon Twigs, George Harrison
Everyone is allowed to live out their our fantasies. In most places, at least. For would-be pop stars, the past is there to be petted and walked around according to their whims. Pop music’s past, after all, contains a number of possible scenarios for our present time that somehow never came to be.
Take, for example, most guitar-heavy rock groups. Almost all of them quote from the 70s hard-rock vocabulary almost as if nothing else has happened in music since then. There are also hippies who believe the 1960s should have never ended, and 90s grunge revivalists who treat flannel as a veritable coat of arms.
Cosmic Crooner unashamedly lives out the life of 70s pop star royalty. On Reflexopolis the singer is able to indulge in the expansive, gently psychedelic visions of the era. But, presentation is everything. And, Cosmic Crooner appears as a man who sleeps in designer suits, and who has inherited George Harrison’s country mansion. The world needs a bit of class and, maybe, the early 70s did have more to offer the world.
