TWIN ENVY – Fever Dream
People are supposed to mess up. And, if they’re fortunate, they will get to do this often in life. In fact, it will be the quality of their mistakes that might well define who they are and how their life is going to be lived.
And while there ain’t no use to fret about making mistakes, folks ought to spend a good portion of their waking day figuring out ways to wiggle out of the noose that they’ve left for themselves. Each of us gets to be a Houdini. But only a select few, like TWIN ENVY, get to write songs about it.
With all these tools of image manipulation, all the social media apps and the online information about ourselves that we choose to share, it’s easy to want to place a filter over everything. It’s easy to want to just paint over the mistakes.
Leave mistakes in! Let those be part of life and part of the art that talks about it! That’s what TWIN ENVY have done for the gloriously warm psych-pop of “Fever Dream,” a song about love affairs destined for failure. In an era where everything is some lie about perfection, TWIN ENVY sound like regular folks trying to create something beautiful out of their music and with their lives.
Echo Kid – Camptown Boogie
It was incredibly naive, really. All of these people formed communities, forgot about their regular responsibilities, and made up stories. That seems to have been the basis of the 1960s counterculture. Those stories were written down, painted, and sung. All these people thought that they could improve the world by dreaming. How ridiculous! Now, can we have more of that, please?
Echo Kid tries to fly us back from Earth, and, if rumours are to be believed, there are others tempting us to drift off solid ground. Why? Because the 1960s musicians that this group and so many modern fans are so fond of were the pied pipers of the time, the designated representatives for a generation of people challenging the ideas and expectations of their parents, like nobody had ever done before.
Was 60s pop-rock music merely about falling in love, seeking freedom, and adhering to various spiritualities? Yes, much of it was. And how is that not revolutionary? Echo Kid’s “Camptown Boogie” is a colourful, easy-going psych-rock tune that tries to conjure up images of the past so that the group can try to predict the future. It’s a song about trying to be both in love and wise at the same time. Why shouldn’t the hippies of the future carry on their chanting on some spaceship while trying to colonise other planets with messages of love and hope?
