Fuzzysurf – Never Fell In Love
Where do all these people in the bands who write songs about sleeping upside down and never seeing the sunlight actually live? Even if they’ve had the dough to move out to a now overly priced Berlin, it’s not beers on the sidewalk in the morning and Berghain every night. Most of the time is spent trying to get a parking space and developing a seasonal depression.
Nah, most of those people are lying, just trying to appear more interesting than they actually are. The world of true-blue misanthropes is a small one, and ever shrinking. In this world there’s nobody to date, no nice restaurants to go to, and the coffee’s always two-days old. What about the artists who have decided to live in the real world, and who’ve managed to put a positive spin on things?
The musicians of Fuzzysurf aren’t above the odd dating app, or the reality that one’s heart can crack in the digital world as well as out in the real one. “Never Fell In Love” is gorgeously bittersweet, well-played and heavy on the melodies. But there’s a real sparkle about it all. This isn’t music made by people who’ve retreated to a dark cave. It’s a song made with some humour, a bit of hope and an unwillingness to let all these silly things get you down for too long.
L’île Volante – Sweet Slowmotion
You do have to miss the uncertainty of a radio DJ playing the wrong song by mistake or, heaven forbid, dropping a cuss word in between providing the weather and the traffic updates.
In fact, the more as time goes by, and the more modern entertainment we consume, we tend to give up any hope of something unexpected happening. There are executives, rules, and algorithms put in place meant to stop shocks of any kind.
So, what’s left? The algos deliver to you songs, movies and news in just the way and the order that you’ve gotten used to. Wouldn’t you like somebody to slice things up at random once in a while just for the sake of shaking things up?
In many ways, L’île Volante’s “Sweet Slowmotion” is, precisely, a pop cut-up. This is a love song whose eccentricities are amplified Björn Synneby opting to glue together musical elements that no robot would dare make fit. But beyond the celestial vocal harmonies and twitchy drums, “Sweet Slowmotion” is a song of affection and longing. It’s just that enough strange, unexpected choices needed to be made to get to this result.
