Ylva-li – Shoot Straight
It doesn’t matter what kind of musical styles you usually favour. It’s very likely that this week alone, while waiting around, doing your chores, you heard this one tune that’s stayed in your head ever since, despite repeated efforts to free yourself of it.
Don’t worry! Earworms are nothing to get embarrassed about. Unless you make a strong pact with yourself, or some religious organisation, to swear off modern Western entertainment for the rest of your life, those will get you from time to time.
They’re designed to do that. And, the people working the buttons have been optimising the recipes for decades upon decades. Pop music, at its most effective, works precisely like a spell, something that Norwegian pop singer Ylva-li has taken to heart.
And, while “Shoot Straight” is a mysterious love song about losing your power to make responsible decisions because of the strange allure of love, what is really striking about the song is the way in which it creates an atmosphere that resembles being dropped into a dream where the world’s best actors are starring. There’s no way to turn away! Ylva-li’s music is very well designed and produced.
Martin Carrillo – Una Excusa Más
As it turns out, we, as humans, adapt to harmony very easily and are thrown off by all of the things that lead us away from it. No kid needs a music class to naturally understand why certain notes go together.
Sure, musicians spend hours upon hours practising scales and learning their configurations as a way to use them as a tool. However, just start playing even just a famous guitar riff to a young child, put a wrong note in there on purpose, nd they’ll know it.
That’s why, without question, when it comes to power-pop music, the style that relies most heavily on perfect melodies, beautiful harmonies and chord sequences that blend together seamlessly, you would notice something wrong. Martin Carillo’s music is designed to eliminate any such issues.
A great guitar pop song can be recognised immediately by anyone, regardless of the language that they speak or their experience with music. “Una Excusa Más” is a tender pop track by Argentine singer-songwriter Martin Carillo about all of the things that we use to run away from love. But it’s just the way that the vocal melodies float over that perfect, simple chord progression that really sells the song.
