
Rachel Angel – Bottom Seas
Many crafty record producers earned a living by answering the phone at 2 a.m. and saying “yes” when record label people asked them to urgently fix up some things for them. Make sense of the jumbled recordings of a drunken, stoned group of musicians that made up a famous rock band and go collect your check. The sober producers were making a living off the scraps of the drunken lords.
But there are fewer and fewer jobs in the creative fields that require fixing up someone else’s mess. For the most part, computers take care of the errors that musicians can’t fix. If the songwriters are uninspired, a big-budget recording project will assemble a team of 8-10 songwriters to take care of business. And should the lead guitar player fall asleep on the sofa, there’ll be someone in the studio, probably the janitor, competent enough to replace them.
Rachel Angel doesn’t sound like the kind of vocalist that you become by taking singing lessons, nor does “Bottom Seas” feel like the kind of tune that you could learn to write after taking a course. Angel’s voice is genuinely tortured, filled with emotion and seemingly on the verge of breaking down. The lyrics are much in the same territory as they describe life as one brightly coloured torturer. This feels like the song one writes or listens to when trying to get over something that is impossible to get over. Most of us might be better off by hearing it.
Super Big – C’mon Diana
Most people don’t know how to be happy, and nearly everyone wants it. Of course, that’s the perfect problem for creating an entire industry around. Since the dawn of time, snake oil salesmen, gurus, and well-meaning hippies alike have suggested solutions, researched strategies and sold their products for a buck or two.
But none of these medicines last, and most of the people willing to pay for them, don’t know what to expect from it anyway. May I suggest one method that is guaranteed to work and is currently cheaper than most of the aforementioned methods? The genre of music, usually referred to as “power-pop,” has all the ingredients needed to be baked in. You merely need to know where to place your ear and listen.
Super Big are chasing the big, Summery power-pop sound, and if “C’mon Diana” is an indication, the group has it covered and surrounded. Take it seriously, only if you absolutely must. The truth is that Super Big has designed the song as an experience similar to being tickled with a feather while drinking a fizzy drink. You’re supposed to laugh, have a drink spilling out of your nose, and run about. Best of all, you can always have more when you run out. It’s the magic formula of power-pop.