Tralala – Like You
Genre: Post-Punk, Indie Rock, Dream Pop
Punks require love songs just as much as anybody else. Sure, it’s fun to jump around and highly necessary to get angry at the injustices of the world. But, once the energy and booze wear off, you are left with some feelings that need to be analyzed, and properly soundtracked. I, for one, will admit it, need songs of doubt and of love.
Post-punk was the cleverer and more hard-working cousin of punk. Here, musical textures were given their proper. Also here, musicians had the habit of going deep down rabbit holes of exotic, well-constructed music genres. As a consequence, many of the artists that belonged to this scene could really play, had a great interest in arrangements, and worked hard to forge their songwriting skills.
Tralala’s Like You is an example of that. The San Franciscan duo creates a four-minute song as if they were arranging a junkyard symphony. There are glimpses of 50s doo-wop here, but also a punkish tension. Like you features beautiful vocals, and soaring guitar lines, but also a melancholy that lingers throughout. It’s an example of why there’s a love song out there for everyone.
Forever Son – Bone Sugar
Genre: Garage Rock
When The Beatles made their way to Rishikesh, India they didn’t just legitimize spiritual seeking among pop stars, or help make the sitar an accepted pop-music instrument. The decision to go out to the woods and meditate with an Indian guru showed that even the most revolutionary band of its time had begun searching for radical ideas inward.
Consequently, the rest of the music that the Liverpool quartet made for the two years before their expiration was concerned much more with colourful fancies of the mind, and only occasional social observations. As all artists need to look backwards in order to move forward, it only makes sense that modern musicians would take a similar route.
Forever Son’s Bone Sugar feels like the work of someone that, as much as possible, has renounced reality for something that although may not exist in the physical world,l must be a lot more satisfying. Bone Sugar is psychedelic-garage-rock created in order to be listened to by people in multicoloured painted rooms while they practice complex exercises of visualization.
