Joy and the Wildfire – Tears in Brooklyn
Forget about AI and start embracing your artists before it’s too late! Embrace your artists because they are the best of what any society has! Any society that goes without artists, without creativity, without people gifted with telling audiences about themselves is destined to disappear along with the empires throughout history that have been ground down to dust.
Imitation is the greatest form of flattery only when it is done by people who can’t move past it. For great future artists, imitation is simply the best way to study the masters, to get close, to steal their secrets. It is the first station on a road to wonderful things. It is the best way to understand what works, what doesn’t and what the world may expect of you.
Joy and the Wildfire are a possibly great pop-rock band who on the single “Tears in Brooklyn” are still caught in their phase of sounding like The Pretenders. But it’s a wonderful place to start, not least of all, because not many bands can manage to sound like them, and not many singers can master the Chrissie Hynde. “Tears in Brooklyn” is a pretty, slightly angry tune written against the kids pushed by old money, the kind dreaming of being in The New Strokes, presumably. But it’s only the start of a band well on their way to crafting their own identity.
Velvet Dos – Lonesome
Us music fans can be terribly selfish. We don’t want to share our musical heroes and unforgiving when their interest drifts to a musical style that is not the one we favour. We don’t want them to break up the band, stop touring and start a new career as a talk-show host. And most importantly, we mourn their loss when they live in this world as if something has been taken away from us.
That shows respect, perhaps. But it also shows a great tendency towards egotism. It seems to say that we offer our love to those artists, those performers, as long as they deliver the thing that we most need.
And, with similar selfishness, we are thankful when someone comes around and has the ability to replace what the classic musicians that we have lost are able to do. We may understand how Roy Orbison’s songs were written, and so may an AI, but that doesn’t mean we are able to recreate them.
Velvet Dos have a massive interest in the past, and it’s just a way to relive it or resurrect it. Velvet Dos use the gentle, subtle ballad-pop form of Roy Orbison’s music as the jumping point for their odes to heartache and solitude. Best of all, “Lonely,” is a wonderfully surprising song. It has that rare quality of being the kind of tune that resembles many that you’ve heard before, yet capable of lighting up something inside your imagination each time you hear it. I think that, in this time and age, that’s enough to classify it as alternative music and, more importantly, as a good song.
