Kowloon – Fish The River Dry
Similar artists: The Undercover Dream Lovers, Devendra Banhart, Toro y Moi, Wild Nothing
Genre: Lo-fi Rock, Indie Pop
Of course, there are a lot of things wrong with the world. And the pop music landscape is guilty of its own unspeakable crimes. But let us rejoice in the fact that we’ve finally reached a point in which when one hears a pop song, one can no longer easily detect the era in which it was made or the place where it was recorded.
Lo-fi recording using expensive technology has made it so that pop music is no longer tied to a date and geographic location. Of course, this does not apply to most of the hit singles charting at the moment. But it is an effect that lo-fi, bedroom pop relies on. Plug yourself into a playlist of this music and combine it with unearthed retro pop treasures from around the world, and you’ll instantly be transported into a world that never actually existed yet has a valid soundtrack.
Kowloon’s “Fish The River Dry” is a great piece of lo-fi, computer psychedelic music. It’s a relaxing, hallucinatory sensorial experience that ought to accompany the viewing of random videos on the internet. It’s accompanied by interesting poetry, instrumentation that may or may not be produced by actual analogue instruments, and the sounds of a virtual hybrid-real world coming together and falling apart.
Bedroom Cop – 2 Hard 2 Xplain
Similar artists: The Apples In Stereo, Young Guv, The Beatles, of Montreal, The Shins
Genre: Jangle Pop, Indie Pop, Garage Rock
What would a great 1960s pop band, say The Beatles, think of modern pop music had they been transported by The Magical Mystery Tour all the way to the present time? Would they hate it like most of us do? Or, perhaps, without knowing the horrendous suffering it has inflicted on millions, they would look upon these sounds just as another opportunity to create sounds that could resonate with millions of people.
The fact is that pop music was never designed to be as evil as it ended up becoming. Sure, if you go by the books written about the time, there were crooked managers, many musicians didn’t actually play their instruments, and Chuck Berry used to smuggle teenage girls across the border. But, really, you gotta believe that those were more innocent times. If you can’t accept that, at least try and glance at the past through nostalgia-tinted glasses.
Bedroom Cop, on their single “2 Hard 2 Xplain,” makes pop music as if it was a jolly, wholly innocent musical style meant to thrill and make people smile. Yes, pop music can be much more evil than this, but not in this scenario. Bedroom Cop builds their songs on beautiful melodies and tuneful keyboard lines. This is an attempt to create a kind of alchemy of aural sweetness. We can never trust that things will be this innocent again, but we can pretend.
