TOLEDO – Sunday Funday
Songs about getting together with your friends, knocking a few backs, and causing havoc, are a dime a dozen. Practically, most of the most lucrative styles supported by the music industry are centred around these kinds of themes.
Yet, in a global pandemic, where social interactions have, in some cases, have become practically non-existent in recent months, these types of bangers don’t seem to represent the general majority in quite the same way anymore.
As per usual in popular music, in times of trouble and distress, there’s a need for someone masterful at their craft, yet socially apprehensive to provide some perspective. The gorgeous Sunday Funday by Toledo feels like the diary of someone forced to social distance long before 2020.
The music echoes that mood with its charming, fragile arrangement. The vocal melodies are especially beautiful, a kind of Brian Wilson composition transposed through bedroom-pop production. Sunday Funday is a free, loose composition about feeling locked in. It’s only appropriate.
Moontricks & Frase – Come As You Are (feat. Fawna)
The irony that a would-be visual artist armed with a terrific imagination, but not much guitar skill or drive to succeed, has become the most important figure in music, perhaps even popular culture, should not be lost on anyone. Saint Kurt would most likely chuckle at this.
The fact is that beyond Bohemian Rhapsody and Imagine, the songs from Nirvana’s Nevermind have done the most to carve their way into the public consciousness. The trend we’ve observed in recent years of covering rock songs at a slow, eerie pace, usually for movie soundtracks, was always going to carry on to the Cobain Canon.
Would he have liked this? Much like his demos, journals, and personal belongings being exhibited and sold in the public arena, he wouldn’t have much choice about it. It’s the curse of being talented and good-looking.
Moontricks & Frase’s cover of Come as you are, though, is a unique take on the song, not merely a cash grab. The tune is reorchestrated almost entirely, and an entirely new interpretation is given to the lyrics. Acoustic guitar passages, soulful grooves, and even some electronica flourish creep into what has been designed as some kind of modern-gospel number where everyone in attendance is expected to know the words being sung.
