Intolerable Life – River of Silver
There’s never been a greater interest in so-called “World Music.” Much of this is due, of course, to the internet’s potential to serve as a digital, global record collection. If you’ve any interest in music, you can listen to tunes from across the planet at just the click of a button.
But the fascination with folklore, sounds that are part of a nation’s fabric, has, for now, died down. There are no Serbian or Scandinavian folk songs inexplicably hitting the charts any more, and we may need to wait for a while for that interest to exist once more.
What the world is interested in, on the other hand, are artists like Intolerable Life. While this is a modern rock group formed in the U.S., they represent a new fascination – retro Westernised pop from places that you didn’t know had them. Specifically, there’s a growing interest in futuristic synth-pop music made in the 1980s in exotic lands.
Intolerable Life’s “River of Silver,” a goth-tinged synth-pop song inspired by the Uruguayan natural landscape, feels like the sort of song that might’ve been recorded four decades in the past and by people approximating and reinterpreting what pop music could be. It’s stylish, memorable, and unusual enough to provide thrills for those who’ve had enough of Anglo-Americans’ hold on these things.
Dario Emu – Stand!
The future promised a lot, but it’s all in the past now. Sure, everyone tried to approximate its coordinates. And, yes, maybe it was the forward-thinking musicians who got closest to it. But none of what they dreamed up quite came to be.
Those expecting terrifying disasters and writing dance songs that could soundtrack those didn’t get what they wanted. Neither did the hippies hold hands and talk about universal understanding between people. Dario Emu’s back to investigating those dreams.
Great 80s musicians who used the synthesiser as a symbol for the evolution of pop music resemble Sci-Fi writers. None exactly got it right on their prediction. But all of them created cities of the future that are free to inhabit.
Dario Emu takes up residence in one of those old visions of the future with the single “Stand!” A tale of resistance against oppression, soundtracked by the synths spurting out robotic dance beats, Emu’s music feels like the rebel call against the first and last dictatorship of the digital age. We’ve arguably crossed that line long ago. But there’s romance in that image of a future that never quite happened the way that we expected.
