Riley Pearce – Night.Love.Sleep
Real tenderness and intimacy is a horrendously scary thing. Sure, it’s what almost all of us desire. However, it is also something that more and more we forget how to do, with convenience spilling over in all aspects of modern living.
Generosity, especially when it comes to matters of the heart, is a difficult thing as indie-folk troubadour Riley Pearce seems to understand. There’s plenty of give and take, as well as many facets that are much less glamorous than romantic comedies might have us believe.
Writing a good love song is the hardest trick to pull off for a writer. Night.Love.Sleep succeeds, but it does so because of the personality of the singer-songwriter in question. The vocal delivery is honest, and so the storytelling is compelling—a sweet excursion into the realm of intimacy through the medium of indie-folk.
Grease Weasel – Am I Allowed To Be Sad?
How to tell the truth when making guitar music that contains vocals? Well, first of all, if you can avoid it, do it. Great careers have been created on the strength of misrepresentation and plain out lies. Remember, it’s not what’s true that’s important. It’s what the public believes to be true.
However, if you really want to get shocking in this day and age, you can try doing something that is guaranteed to be missing from the work of the great hitmakers of the day. You can try telling the truth. Hell, you can even go so far as to insult the person you’re speaking to and go on and break the carefully crafted lies that they’ve built around them to survive.
Grease Weasel’s chirpy folk-punk on downers of Am I Allowed To Be Sad? certainly aims to do this. There are no real friendships or depth to relationships left in the modern world. It’s all a whirlwind of consistent disappointments from here onwards. Personally, I’m not exactly convinced, but in a world where only good news seems to be able to sell anything, this feels like a welcomed change.
