Minuit Phosphène – Triangle de feu
English has had its chance, and it blew it. Nowadays, if you hear someone singing about “love,” “freedom,” or “bravery”, you just assume that it’s some out-of-work former pop star trying to sell you a hamburger.
Yeah, the traditional language of the pop song has outworn its welcome. It has taken advantage of goodwill. And now, there’s no way that we can allow it back into our lives and trust it ever again.
French, on the other hand, regardless of its colossal influence on the fate of the world, has for a great long time sat on the sidelines. It’s remained untainted. And now, fresh and exotic and in the use of artists as optimistic and visionary as Minuit Phosphène, it’s here to create a new pop standard.
“Triangle de Feu” is a cleverly designed pop song that sounds like a spell told will inevitably, now that it’s been spoken, create a better tomorrow for those who hear it. Inspired by Paul Eluard’s poem “Liberté” about refusing to bend to destructive forces, and powered by some of the brightest, most luminous indie-pop sounds you’re likely to have heard in a while, Minuit Phosphène help to show that pop music is moving elsewhere to where it’s stayed for so long.
Kings of Fall – Vintergatan
Your modern pop stars are happy and well-adjusted. Isn’t that a nice thing to have? Doesn’t that make you feel better knowing that the people who sing the hits aren’t unhappy about their day-to-day lives and can go home content after performing to a room of thousands of people?
But, of course, they are. Their parents, almost without fault, are millionaires, or at least rich enough to afford music lessons. The pop stars employ professional songwriters, excellent backing bands and agencies to come up with the promotion strategy. Is this where great music is born? Hardly ever.
Kings of Fall’s “Vintergatan” is, underneath, the pleasing but bittersweet pop gloss, a tune that tackles two topics not often discussed in pop music. The first is the idea that most of this music that we love so much has resulted from suffering, hardship and was made by people who did not possess a safety net.
Secondly, this is a Nordic pop song, one that feels written during a dark winter night in one of the non-glamorous industrial cities that make a country like Sweden what it is.
The modern pop stars may be doing alright, but that’s not, really, doing their music any favours, is it?
