Funny Feelings – Campaign
I’ll admit it! There’s something immensely satisfying about a corporation’s failure to create art on a conveyor belt and sell it for as much as they see fit. Perhaps I just like seeing people fail and waste money. Maybe I’m too much of a supporter of regular people being creative.
But, whether it’s been dozens of songwriters all shoved together in a room to write hits, statisticians taking surveys and crunching the numbers, or tech gurus pretending like the latest chatbots are going to create songs for us, the list of failures on the road to the industrialisation of art is endless.
Why? Aren’t songs, for example, just a bunch of frequencies that math formulas will help us to understand where they go? Just listen to Funny Feelings and tell me that you seriously believe that.
“Campaign,” the lo-fi dream pop, gothic-rock-tinged song by Funny Feelings, is only two minutes long and sounds like it was recorded in someone’s kitchen. But it’s a perfect, haunting, enigmatic pop song. You could get the experts to try to analyze it all day. And no matter how many treaties or videos they will create on the matter, they will not answer a simple question: How can one 2-minute lo-fi song feel so much greater than nearly everything that the pop professionals can do?
scarlet dahlias – rose-coloured reality
Thankfully, very little of it makes sense. Life, unlike what our teachers and parents tried to tell us, is not neatly organized, does not follow strict patterns, and, in most aspects of it, there’s no way of winning, no matter how hard you try or how many people you know.
The first time that you realize this, you’ll get anxious. However, if you learn to live with this discomfort, if you learn to embrace the strangeness of it all, you may find out that you like the unpredictability of the whole thing.
I liked some of David Lynch’s works because they felt as odd, and as likely to actually happen, as most days on this planet. scarlet dahlias loved Lynch for their own reasons, which include the mood in which the artist managed to place the musicians.
“rose-coloured reality” is a kind of tribute that scarlet dahlias put together in the wake of Lynch’s passing, and really just a way to dream yourself back into the filmmaker’s eerie dream sequences. It’s warm, lo-fi dreampop in which, like in a Lynch movie, beyond the beauty and comfort, there’s something strange and unsettling hiding.
Just as importantly, if David Lynch stood for anything, it was for the marriage of eccentricity and work ethic. Low-key, but not timid, scarlet dahlias have made it happen. The band has created the dream and has gifted it to you. Now, wouldn’t that be something that Mr. Lynch would have understood and appreciated?
