LOLA – I hope the Sky is grey when I wake Up
Great artists, you’d expect, would be a bunch of fickle hard-liners mostly disinterested in pleasing others. Consequently, this is one of the reasons why really great artists are usually left out of the history books. Why, in Russia, a few hundred years had to have passed before Tolstoy or Mussorgsky, cantankerous characters with the capacity to describe the sublime, ended up in the art books.
Great artists are in love with a lot of things. Oftentimes, there’s nothing that pleases them more than sadness, melancholy, or nostalgia. Those are the kinds of topics that most people would leave out of polite conversations out of fear of not driving friends and relations away. But if you’re that concerned with others, you’re not concerned enough with yourself.
LOLA’s “I hope the Sky is grey when I wake Up” is a remarkably morose piece of songwriting that feels made like a postscript to great indie-rock albums made by all too cool groups like The Velvet Underground. This here’s angry melancholy, dreaming with a baseball bat beside the bed. LOLA sounds like she wants to make friends just as much as to chase the existing ones away. It’s all very charming, the kind of energy we need in this pop music that is so obsessed with pleasing everybody.
Hello Echo – Pop Death
You’ve probably gotten bored of living in the proverbial interesting times just as much as you’re bored of hearing that terrible times and horrible political leaders tend to create great protest music. The theory is that musicians, especially those fighting in the punk-rock trenches, will feel a sense of duty to use their music to critique the state of the world, the morality of the president, and the ever-increasing price of soft drinks.
But that’s not true. You just need to look back at the miserable eight years we’ve had. Politically, things have not been pretty much as expected – terrible leaders have served their bosses, and people have died. But the music written about it has either been terrible or completely absent. Sure, Green Day writes fart joke songs and tunes about Donald Trump. But that’s low-hanging fruit.
Hello Echo might have just come up with one of the better protest songs of the time. “Pop Death” is a tune about worthless political leaders driving us to hate one another because of our differences and profiting from it. The music, reminiscent of the indie-rock of bands like The La’s is impressive. But it’s even more impressive that a band from the U.S. would be able to pinpoint these problems. History won’t have many great songs about present times, and Hello Echo may just be one of the exceptions.
