Loose Buttons – Just A Boy In A Band
Peter Pan joined a rock band, played Las Vegas for decades, and in this way tricked nature into never having to grow up. Funnily enough, many of those staring up at him and at those big lights thought that perpetual adolescence was something that they could go for themselves. Teachers and parents scoffed, but it wasn’t their life to lead.
Playing music for strangers each night is only partly about sharing your inner visions with the world. As the members of Loose Buttons clearly now, being a working musician is in no small part powered by the desire to avoid harsh realities. It’s created out of the hope that you’re never going to have to say: “Well, that’s terrible and I just don’t know what to do.”
“Just A Boy In A Band” is a relaxed indie-pop ode to finding fulfilment in being yourself, staying small and living for the things that make you happy. Loose Buttons seems to understand that this is not the kind of activity that will ever earn you nominations for Nobel Prizes. But, so what? At a time when everything feels tense and senseless, finding meaning in joy feels like an act of rebellion.
Cars and Girls – Jackie
We’re overstimulated, unrested, and nobody can tell us what to do. We each own a free subscription to a website belonging to some organisation that wants to save the wildlife out in the Carpathian mountains. And, each and every one of us can vlog for ours about all of the things that we own and all of the things that we’d change about the world if we got the chance. And, nobody dares to tell us what to do!
Cars and Girls is a brave band, and one of the few artists getting in front of a not very agile, but still dangerous, tiger of a modern world. This world is constructed out of a million cheap thrills, each distributed quickly through the aid of sites, and apps that are all available at all times. And it’s a world that can’t handle criticism, or the idea that it might just be strolling through the same mistakes as the ones who occupied the same seats before.
“Jackie” is a bittersweet comedy in song form. Cars and Girls take aim at a modern hipster too self-obsessed to actually take a good, hard look in the mirror. It’s a world where addiction and self-improvement are forced to co-exist. Musically, Cars and Girls draw from the same jangly, laidback indie-rock sound of the likes of Father John Misty and maintain a similarly detached, cynical view of the world. What’s this world coming to? Nothing special or which you haven’t seen before.
