Ink Project – The End feat. Fifi Rong
The silver screen, and, later, the tiny black screens, promised to bring all the drama and epic adventure previously restricted to books and our imagination, or to the theatre, opera and the likes, straight to you in a highly convenient manner.
The plan worked so well. In fact, that bar the recent pandemic that has shaken up the movie industry, it has continued to thrive where other entertainment branches have gone into sharp decline. It only makes sense that music too would look towards some of the lessons it could supply.
Ink Project’s The End, featuring the vocal talents of Fifi Rong, is a song and video created on the kind of epic scale usually reserved for cinematic productions. It’s an engulfing audio-visual experience that can be enjoyed from the comfort of your living room. It’s trip-hop and goth-rock modernized and prepared for great masses of people. It’s the nudge, nudge “have you seen this thing yet?”
Dream People – Suburban Lifestyle Dream
Modern rock music has repurposed the role of the misanthrope and the hermit. While in years past these two would cut lonely figures and would strive to remove themselves, as best they could from society, post-punk revival bands have made these characters stylish.
Bands like Joy Division, and, especially, their modern adherents, Interpol and Kasabian, are cynical hustlers decked out in dapper apparel. Their music reflects this. There’s a sense of drama to everything they do. But, they keep themselves removed, like someone filming a car crash from a great distance.
Portuguese indie-rockers Dream People are just as stylish and laddish about their post-punk. Suburban Lifestyle Dream showcases a band confident of their abilities, spiteful of the world, yet with Oasis-sized ambitions. The single is a tense, yet poppy affair. It’s rock music for those that wear shades at night, yet are still not ashamed of turning on their radio once in a while.
