Hospital – Simple Pleasure
Pop music is the great wallpaper across reality. Some people need it more than others and are willing to make a greater effort to access it. That’s not to say that pop music is merely an illusion. No, at its best, it is a description of a real place that is far better than the one that the listener has in front of their eyes. It’s such a detailed picture that it can replace the one that reality has stubbornly got us stuck with.
You can easily notice it. Few people listen to music in their headphones when walking along a tropical resort. Music there is usually blasted through the speakers of restaurants and night clubs. And people are happy this way.
How many people listen to music while making their commute from work in a large, gray city? Nearly everyone. People close their eyes from time to time and imagine that they’re not there. People keep their eyes glued shot and promise themselves that they’ll make life better for themselves.
There’s a dash of colorful glitter splattered throughout Hospital’s “Simple Pleasure.” There’s a sound here that suggests some kind of tropical paradise, a place where Earthly worries have no reason to enter. But the music was made somewhere along the busy, anxious-filled streets of Eastern Europe. Hospital understands that there’s no place that needs sounds like this more than the one in which they find themselves.
Tape House – Jane I’m Drunk
The greatest love affairs are often embarrassing, lack balance, and are doomed to fail. They hardly ever resemble the kinds of romance movies that television stations play around Christmas. If true passion is involved, certainly, nobody involved in the affair can afford to remain truly dignified. Nobody involved considers the future. And the romantic partners, as well as all those around them, are put at great risk.
Writing about this kind of heady affair is no different from someone just descending into alcoholism and penning a love letter to their beer can or a drug addict writing about their crack pipe. All of these things are dangerous, alluring, and, in the very beginning, seem like good ideas. Most of what we can hope for is that the writer who has fallen under this spell will be honest about what they’ve found.
Tape House’s “Jane I’m Drunk” is a sophisticated indie-rock song about falling in love and getting addicted, or the other way around. It hardly matters. The result is the same. The music is never as brash as the topic, though. It’s assembled carefully the way that studio hermits making soft-rock in the 1970s would have done. The playing is subtly great, the arrangement is nicely put together, the singing is smooth and there’s a jazzy guitar theme here you may end up whistling once the track is over.
