
Dear Providence – Like a Saint
Musicians who can craft really beautiful melodies are a bit like international fashion models—the world will listen to just about anything they have to say. With the floor all theirs, they may choose to talk about the poems of Constantine Covafy, nuclear fission, or about picking your nose in a public space. It won’t really matter. Most of those in attendance will continue to stare in disbelief.
And, indeed, those who possess either beauty or command over beautiful music won’t be able to help themselves. They’ll feel urged to try and push their admirers’ patience to its outer limits. They’ll try to test the support of their devotees. And ultimately, they’ll acquire the reputation of being eccentrics while retaining their general popularity.
The songwriter(s) behind Dear Providence could’ve been working in an outfit, rubberstamping the lyrics for gigantic pop hits. Instead, a compulsion to write about organised religion, perceived hypocrisy and crack dark, filthy jokes has made Dear Providence write “Like a Saint” instead. Indeed, the song contains beautiful melodies. The subject of organised religion isn’t quite as novel to pop songs; if anything, it’s been done to death. And given the ever-shrinking number of converts in Western countries, it may soon become as exotic as writing about a sewing machine. But, gee, those Beatlesque melodies make us look out in awe.
Andreya Casablanca – Trapped In Space
There are people, and the vast majority of them don’t go out much and wear funny clothes, who think that pop music, and rock especially, have meant a dramatic step back from music. In their view, music, now classified as classical, spent centuries developing and adding new layers of complexity before these pop-rock hoodlums came along.
These people, who usually have no friends, believe that pop music is too facile, lacks the complexity of musically and in terms of subject matter and, generally, can be played by a drunk donkey. They’re wrong on all counts, of course. And, their discourse is meant to steal your attention away from all of the things that classical music cannot do.
Classical music and art of great, needless complexity can very rarely express raw emotion convincingly. It can dance around the topic, it can describe what it might be like, but it can’t talk about it or make you feel that. Andreya Casablanca’s instinct is to play direct garage rock that gets to the core of how someone under pressure must be feeling.
“Trapped In Space” sounds like garage rock where guitars have been substituted for synths and where the instruments, instead of blasting into each other, create space. It sounds angry, raw, and delivers the story in about 2-minutes. This just goes to say that pop-rock is the progressive art form after all.