En-Vitro – Bury Me
Listening to highly complex, proficiently put-together music is bound to rot your brain. You may end up being one of those people talking endlessly about how much of Bach’s music they’ve been able to listen to so far. Or worse, you may end up dedicating your life to playing jazz and keep asking everything you know to attend your recitals.
The fact is that highly complex music doesn’t have many great thinkers. There just ain’t enough time for that, what with all the drill camps meant to sharpen your playing ability to the standard of a G.I. Joe equipped with a guitar. On the other hand, the people who start out with great ideas and figure out the basic minimum of what they can get out of an instrument are often fascinating.
En-Vitro’s “Bury Me” is a beautiful indie-rock lament. It sounds like the work of someone who has quit the rat race, moved to Italy, washed dishes, writes short stories and has begun learning very basic chords on a guitar. It’s just the level of musicianship required to make rock music and just the kinds of ideas required to make that rock music interesting. Get a jazz combo to play on this, and you’d be boring everyone to tears.
Mister Sunshine – Always Look Your Best
The Devil is making quite a comeback nowadays. Like an aged dictator whose ast on the sidelines, in exile for a while, but managed to maintain an air of dignity, a good haircut and an excellent wardrobe, his time has come again.
How could it not? We need him for something else nowadays. In our collective imagination The Devil is no longer the symbol of pure evil. Nah, nah, we have people running governemnts, the industrial military complex and big tech companies doing all of that.
We need The Devil to simply be a symbol of detached chic, of sophisticated perversion. He’s egotistic but not uncaring. He is cruel but not a savage. And he always dresses well. He’s a dictator, and most of us love ourselves a good dictator. Just take a look at the polls.
Mister Sunshine’s “Always Look Your Best” is a quirky indie-rock tune that arrives just in time for Halloween. It depicts The Devil as a man of wealth and taste, not unlike Bulgakov’s Moscovite traveller from “The Master and Margarita.” But Mister Sunshine does more than play with the myth of The Dark Lord. The lyrics are well-written, the song structure plays with repetition very well, and the unusual production and orchestration choices help this stand out. Would The Devil be proud? Possibly nod politely.
