Rick Sparkes + The Enablers – hey, now
Your parents and those housewives who managed to get stickers on CDs may have been right. They always are. Music can influence you tremendously, and you might not have the strength to oppose it, regardless of how much you tell yourself otherwise.
It’s a kind of spell. It’s a sort of charm. Music functions in much the same way as hypnosis, something that, when first explained to you, must sound like a ridiculous thing. Imagine focusing on something with enough intensity for long enough, and getting your common sense robbed from you. Surely, that’s a fantasy?
But from Anton Mesmer using it to steal money off the Viennese of modern therapists relying on it to cure patients, hypnotism works. And it is still mighty efficient when applied to pop music, as Rick Sparkes + The Enablers know.
Why shift from one chord progression to another when you have a really strong one in the first place? “hey, now” relies on a mesmeric effect when it gets the sequence of chords and the beat to whip around your ears in circles until you are under the spell of the band. However, and fortunately, the musicians are careful with you once you’ve been captured. The singer delivers images that flash in and out of your mind like a series of dreams being played back in your mind at irregular speeds. By the time you’ve come, you feel like you’ve just gone through a tremendous experience, but can’t exactly explain what just happened.
Jon Hood – Loud and Clear
If you had somehow been unaware of pop music for the entirety of your life and were just now beginning to sample it in a bid to understand it, you’d surely come to the conclusion that it has an awful lot of rules and regulations.
Certainly, if you’d use as study material the radio or the most popular Spotify playlists, you’d notice that nearly all songs function using the same kind of formats. Logically, that’d make you believe that artists have an incentive not to ignore those patterns.
But, it’s just as likely that, once you did encounter modern music that didn’t abide by these rules, you’d be transfixed. Surely, this lack of limitations would be precisely the thing that would make you want to return to it, to play it back. In that kind of world, Jon Hood’s music would, no doubt, stand out.
Jon Hood’s “Loud and Clear” does everything wrong, and that makes all the difference in turning this into a memorable tune. There’s a Motorik beat, a dizzying psychedelic production, and everything seems to move in circles. And, at the forefront are Jane Brikin-like female vocals that are whispered and deliver mantras about love, lust and hope. “Loud and Clear” is a song that, first, stands out and then moves right under your skin.
