Pretty Baby – 8:25pm Greenwich Fucking Mean
The world doesn’t make much sense at the best of times. But, advertisements, movies and, especially, pop music always try to fix that problem for us. Characters in any of those productions always get a back story, some issue that they have to fix in order to improve the world, and the chance to do a good job as well.
It’s enough to make you think that this is how the world works. But, if we could only for a day listen to other people’s inner dialogue, not just our own, we’d realise that there’s no point in trying to make everything look neat and tidy. Pretty Baby makes the kind of music that fits reality best. It’s music that stops before it starts making sense.
“8:25pm Greenwich Fucking Mean” sounds like the kind of song that might be produced by connecting an angry morning commuter’s brain signals to a digital interpreter. It’s music and spoken words that keep you on edge the whole time. It’s a story that just repeats over and over again before it gets the chance to get an ending. It’s pretty honest work, if you ask me.
Armand Popa – Puma
Every teenager who’s scraped just enough to buy an electric guitar and an amp has a fantasy of himself. They see themselves through the eyes and ears of how they hope that the world will receive them. And, none of the kids buying electric guitars wants to be Josh Homme or Jimi Hendrix. Not really! Those are just people who play the guitar, after all.
Everyone wants to hit that E chord and feel like they’re Napoleon, Genghis Khan and the ancient prophets. Everyone wants to feel all-powerful, just like Homme or Hendrix must feel when they themselves strike that E chord and stop being just a couple of ordinary guys. All of this is possible, but you need to construct your own universe to give yourself the time to dream as Armand Popa has.
Sure, it’s alright if you listen to “Puma” and hear traces of desert-rock in the style of Queens of the Stone Age, or modern psychedelic sounds a la King Gizzard. Yes, those influences are undeniably there. What makes Popa’s performance transcend is a commitment to an illusion painted on a big canvas of colour and noise. Popa commits to the dream, and that’s why every single bit of guitar noise here feels special.
