Midnight Rodeo – Clean Shirt
Most modern things aren’t built so that they last. They’re made just good enough to arrest your attention once, and just badly enough so that you’ll have to be forced to change them once they break down, tear up, or fizzle away.
Popular culture and the majority of its trends work by the same principle. And since pop culture, nowadays, is delivered straight into your eyeballs through the power of a rectangular device that you hold in your pocket at all times, a sturdy minority of rebels is developing. Midnight Rodeo are part of that group.
They know that times are a’ changing fast. So, these rebels try to think up a period that everyone can remember. They’re dreaming up events that we can all agree must’ve happened and that most of us feel good about.
Midnight Rodeo’s “Clean Shirt” is a lovely, warm retro psych-pop sound created for maximum immersion. It’s a sound of ease for an era dominated by tension and by gurus advising you to push ahead of the queue, look out for number one, and transform into the best version of yourself. Midnight Rodeo find this ridiculous. And so do we. Join the rebels! Everything else is bound to disappear shortly.
Nagra – I See Colour
There’s hardly any other way to remember the dearly departed but in the best light possible. That doesn’t just happen when it comes to people that we knew personally, but especially for people that we wish we’d met.
We think of the great artists that we lost too soon, unbeatable, ever restless, always looking to create something beautiful. For example, it’s natural to assume that Jeff Buckley, had he been given the long life that he deserved, would have continued to honestly and innocently search for beauty and meaning.
We’ve no clue if that would’ve actually happened. Maybe Buckley would’ve just stopped playing music or searching altogether. Worse, maybe he would have opted for a career making pop-rap anthems about bling. But we should dream of what that might’ve sounded like.
Nagra’s “I See Colour” doesn’t just look to capture Jeff Buckley’s expressive, sensitive singing. The song tries to imagine what Buckley’s future music might’ve sounded like. The song’s charm doesn’t merely lie in the well-sung parts or the way that styles are naturally blended together. Nagra’s greatest gift to the world is that of perspective, an earnest attempt at seeing the world in a brand new light each time.
