Foreign Air – Save Us
The history of pop music is filled with beautiful, talented, attractive people signed to record labels and making music about sipping cocktails on the beach. That’s 99% of the music, and that’s 99% of the music that sucks. Sure, record labels can sell that. But not for long. Like a burger bought from a McDonald’s, its value decreases urgently as the temperature cools down.
Nah, the history of pop music is one of weirdos, misfits and people who somehow convince themselves that they can entertain a crowd of strangers. Typically, these artists get ridiculed, threatened and asked to never perform again. But they’re the ones who make the history books, the ones whose songs still get played years later.
Foreign Air sees commercial pop music as a threat that needs to be neutralised from the inside. Like a wolf dressing himself up in the cheapest of sheepskin tearaway, the dup has tried to fit in. It hasn’t exactly worked out. But I’m pleased to say that this is what makes the apocalyptic pop of “Save Us” such an interesting listen. You may hum and dance around to it if you want, but Foreign Air ain’t your typical pop duo. Oh, boy, no!
Sam Himself – Dance With Me
Have you recently been in a crowd trying to watch an entire concert? The performers have never had to work so hard. Unless the audience members have paid the kind of money for the tickets that would’ve bought them a trip to the Maldives, or unless the performer is famous and has promised that this is their farewell tour (usually a false claim), people can’t focus more than a verse and a chorus.
More than ever, attention is the currency of music-making. You can blame it on a few things. Sure, sure, we have messed up our ability to focus and anything longer than a TikTok video gives us a headache. And, yeah, with everyone now borrowing a music library in the form of Spotify and sticking it in their pocket, we’ve all heard more songs than most of the people before us. We just expect to be charmed.
Sam Himself, a singer of Swiss origin and American interests, tries to charm you into listening to his meditative song of love, loss and despair by dimming the lights really low and having you focus on his barrelling baritone vocals. It’s a good trick and one that helps every nuance of the singing and instrumentation on “Dance With Me” be thrown into the limelight for a second. The song moves as if trying to accompany a film noir scene shot in the rain, which could go on forever, and it’s a mighty clever approach to get us all to listen.
