RED RED SUN – Paper Swan
Everything that you need at this very moment can be found in any big city. Don’t worry, they’ve all started to look alike anyway. Just flip through the digital address book, and you’ll be able to order a pizza, call a therapist and have a faith healer arrive at your doorstep all in the same night. The city offers quick solutions to simple problems.
What about big problems? What about life’s eternal questions? Ah, city life won’t help you very much there, but it will get you to forget to ask. What you’ll need is the great outdoors. Preferably, what you require is a place where you know nobody and where nobody will bother you. Ideally, you’ll find a place where nature can remind you how powerful and frightening it is.
On the surface, RED RED SUN’s “Paper Swan” is the sound of the ocean swelling up, and a perfectly sung note of much-needed loneliness. And while it was conceived off in the calm tranquillity of nature, this is just as much a song about old regrets, fears over the future, and the need to find something that’s real and dependable. It’s philosophical dream pop.
Wadaness – All That’s Sealed Within You
There’s a lot of music being released each day. Trust me, I should know. I choose to listen to a good deal of it, and you’ll forgive me for starting to believe that, perhaps, there’s a bit too much of it out there.
No, I don’t believe in inflation when it comes to truth and beauty. Yes, I can appreciate a good song regardless of genre or production values. It’s something else that’s bugging me.
It’s mostly the fact that music is very easy to make nowadays. Most songwriters treat it like a social media text message, a thing that you do in five minutes while getting assistance from ChatGPT.
Fortunately, you also got obsessive like Wadaness, people determined to be artists and desperate to see just how far they can stretch their creative abilities.
“All That’s Sealed Within You” is the kind of indie, DIY psych-rock song that could only be made by someone who has been living with all that music stuck inside their mind for a very long time. That’s one reason to keep listening and hoping.
