Othrship – Normalise
If you’re reading this on a phone/computer and if you live somewhere in the Western world or adjacent to it, chances are that fate has played you a few good crowds. Other than being a king who avoids regicide, you would likely have been much worse off in any other period in history and in any other place. There’s not much to complain about, logically. But people get bored of too much of a good thing.
Ah, too much of a good thing is a bunch of boring chores. You have to admire the people who listen to their favourite band every single day of their lives because there aren’t many of them. Even the most wonderful songs, even those that seem tailor-made for you and your life, will get dull. What we expect from pop-rock music are endless surprises.
Othrship’s mission is to be otherworldly. And that’s the way that the band sounds on “Normalise,” especially in their first few seconds of it. To this reviewer’s ears, this sounded like music meant to accompany a trip through some desert. To the band, this is a journey through uncharted places, an experiment of pushing themselves out of their regular world only to see where they’ll end up. The cosmic journey motif of the lyrics suits both those ideas well. “Normalise” is a head trip and where that will lead us, artists and listeners, is still up in the air.
Gitkin – The One
Contrary to what the mean old man working in the music store told you, yes, you can still change the world with your guitar. You just can’t do it by playing really fast guitar solos or playing Eddie van Halen or Tim Henson. Most listeners, apart from other would-ve virtuosos, are dead tired of hearing people show off on the guitar.
What you can do instead is use the guitar in the way that it was intended all along – as a tool for magic. Now, that goes above move guitar virtuosos heads who would gladly practice one scale for 100 hours but would never take the time to consider the use of the instrument in another way. But if you can make audiences get lost in a haze of beautiful sounds produced by your six-string, you’re off to change the world. Congrats!
One such guitarist is Kitkin by the sound of the brilliantly hypnotic “The One.” This music that does not feature vocals or any of the tropes of modern pop-rock has already earned a following, and frankly, I am not surprised. Inspired in equal measure by the retro hard-rock guitarists and by West African sounds, Kitkin creates songs to disappear into. The 3:20 runtime of the song is not the point at which the music ends. It keeps rattling and plugging away in your brain. And that’s the magic of good guitar music.